Black History, Culture, and Identity Frames in the Black Church Bulletin

• In Event: Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: Race, Identity, and Social Resiliency in the Context of Cultural Practice

Abstract

Objectives
Studies have explored how discontinuities among home, school, and community teaching and learning practices affect the school experiences of African-American youth (Dyson, 2003; Low, 2011). Less explored are texts produced in cultural contexts and the ways these texts influence, reproduce, and stabilize how African-American youth think about themselves and others as learners. The church bulletin—more than a printed outline of the worship service and running record of announcements and events—is an institutional text crafted by and for the church members and thus an agent of language socialization and identity formation in this context.

Methodology
This paper examines printed bulletins collected during a larger ethnographic study of a Black Baptist church in northern California. Drawing on tools from the ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1972; Saville-Troike, 2003) and discourse analysis (Gee, 2005; Schiffrin, Tannen, & Hamilton, 2003), the author analyzes the bulletin to explore what children were expected to know and learn from them, particularly the sort of messages the indexed and conveyed to youth about their Black history, culture, and identity as members of this church community and as Black youth in society. In this sense, the author considers the important potential of the bulletin (and other texts in the Black church) as a richly complex intertextual resource on which schools and teachers can build.

Data Analysis
The author coded and analyzed the printed bulletins using an intertextual approach. Specifically, she paid particular attention to the key parts of the texts and marked linguistic features such as recurring words and images and general information featured in the text. Coding focused namely on the ways in which featured Discourses related to other Discourses internal and external to the church context. In this way, intertextuality was a useful analytical tool not only to examine the significance of embedded texts, but also to explore how knowledge relationships served to position and reposition the youth as racially, academically, and socially resilient.
Findings show how the bulletin, which routinely featured images of youth as valued members of the community, referenced particular knowledge bases – poetry, newspaper clippings, and songs. Behavioral directives were also prominent as were symbolic images of resilience, perseverance, and self-actualization. Knowledge served to evoke feelings of connectedness across three domains, individual, family, and community. As such, the bulletins functioned in support of socializing youth to membership identities (Author, 2011) and introducing a broad intertextual reach to other knowledge. The findings illuminate the important potential of texts made available to African-American learners in the Black church. Church bulletins provided a platform through which members managed social, historical, and contemporary knowledge deemed meaningful to the aims and goals of the community.

Scholarly Significance
Given the central role of the Black church in socializing African-American youth, a closer look at the bulletins adds insight into the range of information provided to youth in cultural contexts; and a careful analysis of it furthers understandings of how youth make sense of their realities and acquire knowledge about themselves and community.

Author

• Tryphenia B. Peele-Eady, University of New Mexico