Liberation Literacies: Multiple Literacies as Spaces of Equity and Refuge

• In Event: The Literate Lives of Youth of Color: Examining Race, Home, and Displacement

Abstract

Within our present political climate, we are forced to contend with what it means to prepare educators to sustain the kinds of engaged literacy practices that foster critical consciousness, critical hope, agency, and powerful learning in diverse sociocultural contexts. For the secondary literacy educator committed to equity in education such a mission necessitates the disruption of monolithic pedagogical approaches in favor of critically engaging the voices of students and their communities as central to teaching and learning (Kinloch, 2010; Kirkland, 2013; Wissman, 2011). Through this lens—one that views the possibilities of literacy, authority, and authorship, as central to the agency of historically marginalized communities—I explore the fugitive linguistic and cultural identities of 21st century Black youth against a backdrop of systemic racial violences. This paper traces the literacy practices and activism of these youth within Cyphers For Justice (CFJ), a community of critical youth researchers whose multiple literacies are engaged and cultivated as they become equipped with tools to analyze, craft, and advocate for social change across their city (Akom, Cammarota, Ginwright, 2008). Founded within the traditions of Youth Participatory Action Research and hip-hop culture, CFJ apprentices urban youth of color as critical social researchers alongside the cultivation of hip-hop literacies, Critical Media Literacy, spoken word poetry, and academic literacies. This critical ethnography utilizes Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Paris, 2012), New Literacies Studies (New London Group, 1996; Street, 2001), and Youth Participatory Action Research (Mirra et al, 2016) to examine the questions: How do youth participants navigate and negotiate their literate identities across social spaces? How do youth researchers utilize their literacy repertoires for critical social inquiry and fugitivity? Viewing the seminar as a social space of practice (Gutierrez, 2008) that informs and engages the students’ literate and racial identities, I utilized Critical Ethnographic methods and Critical Discourse Analysis to examine salient literacy events (Brice Heath, 1983) that occurred throughout the seminar. Data sources include audio session recordings, interviews, field notes, and student artifacts. The implications of this paper assert a need for the critical cultivation of multiple literacy practices as sites of possibility for disrupting dominant ideologies within and beyond Secondary classrooms. I argue for the capacity for multiple literacies to contribute to educational equity by 1) challenging the ethos of traditional classroom environments, 2) shaping disciplinary knowledge, and 3) reimagining teaching and learning. Such work rests on the conviction that intellectual and rhetorical rigor exist robustly in the everyday linguistic and cultural repertoires of youth, yet remain largely ignored in the classroom.

Author

• Jamila Lyiscott, University of Massachusetts – Amherst