Cyphers For Justice: The Power of Culturally Sustaining Literacies in Youth Participatory Action Research

• In Event: Stronger Classrooms, Stronger Communities: Developing Revolutionary Educational Practices to Transform Teaching and Learning

Abstract

The recurring articulation that “Black Lives Matter” throughout the 2014 social upheaval sparked by the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO is an indictment on the United States of America at large. The urgency of chanting, screaming, branding, and making viral this fundamental truth means simply that as a nation we have lived beneath the standard of this truth in policy, practice, procedure, and in everyday human interaction across disciplines. When juxtaposed with the reality of a predominantly white and monolingual teaching force (Zumwalt & Craig, 2008), and an increasing racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse student population (Aud et al., 2012; Kinloch, 2012; Paris, 2009), we are forced to address the ways in which these social realities both produce and are produced by our systems of education. Freire and Macedo’s (1987) assertion that reading and writing the word is preceded by reading and writing the world invites those of us concerned with the field of Literacy Education to interrogate the iterative relationship between the happenings of our world and the engagement of the word within the English classroom. Similarly, when Toni Morrison stated, “National literature reflects what’s on the national mind,” she also invited us to acknowledge the enmeshed relationship between world and word.
This study examined the engagement of critical social issues by Black youth within an afterschool workshop. Privileging the Social Dimension of literacy and emphasizing the crucial nature of participatory pedagogy, both culturally sustaining literacies (Paris, 2012) and academic literacies were cultivated through hip hop, spoken word, and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR). With the understanding that, “language is a site of cultural struggle” (Alim & Smitherman 2012), I used Critical Ethnographic methods to explore this third space that engages youth in New Literacies and academic research for social action. I utilize Sociocultural theories, Black Linguistics and Critical Theory perspectives to provide theoretical grounding for Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) as a site of possibility for 1) maximizing the potential of Black literacies as social practice; 2) the development of critical consciousness in students as co-constructers of knowledge. Research questions include: “How are students who identify as Black negotiating their racial identities through the prism of literacy within a Youth Participatory Action Research space?” and "How are Black literacies leveraged to broaden critical meta-awareness and social consciousness within an out-of-school Youth Participatory Action Research space?"

Author

• Jamila Lyiscott