"Air I Breathe": Songwriting as Literacy Practices of Remembrance

• In Event: 61.066 - Multimodal Narratives of Literacies for Equity: Possibilities and Limits for Democratizing Evidence

Abstract

Youth with whom we teach and learn increasingly navigate grief and loss as daily lived experience. Across popularized media narratives, online, in print, and televised, youth navigate gun violence in the context of school shootings, racialized violence and police brutality, suicide, and the separation of families as enactments of immigration policy. Literacy scholars increasingly call for nuanced examinations of trauma across educational experiences (Garcia & Dutro, 2018; Kirkland, 2017), yet educators express hesitancy discussing such topics with youth (Lawhon, 2004).

We thus extend an analysis of multiliteracy practices of Noriah Rose and Koral, Black youth participating in a literacy-and-songwriting initiative, writing, producing, and sharing compositions as reflective moments of grief and loss, the passing of loved ones as broadened stories intimately told. We ask how, across multimodal practices of songwriting, do youth grapple with complicated notions of loss? We tussle, too, with what it may mean to analyze and share youths’ stories about personal loss in a proposal responding to a conference call asking educational researchers to render public, complicated meanings of what may be contextualized as emotion, or belief, across varied modalities.

We therefore frame our inquiry as “mov[ing] purposefully from Eurocentric paradigms” (Flowers, 2003, p. 40), an envisioning and drawing-upon “already-present” lived experiences and literacy practices of youth of color (Author, 2018). We extend Holloway’s (2002) conceptualizing of mourning as evoking social practices in African American communities across which “singular stories and memories drift toward, are shared, and are finally echoed within community narratives” (p. 3), and extend social and cultural perspectives of “Black girls’ literacies,” in theorizing Noriah Rose and Koral’s multiliteracy writing activities as “new media platforms for Black girls and women in which they enact and document self-definitions” (Muhammad & Haddix, 2016, p. 305). We conceptualize Noriah Rose and Koral, enacting public pedagogies of multimodal compositions about grief and loss, as demonstrating literacy practices of remembrance.

We examined songwriting practices, in our ongoing, critical ethnography, across youths’ journal writing, artifacts including multimodal song lyrics and studio-recorded songs posted to Soundcloud.com, and video-recorded performances. We understand Noriah Rose and Koral’s multimodal compositions as allowing a moving toward healing as processing the loss of loved ones. Moreover youth discussed how diverse practices of writing, producing, and sharing multimodal compositions “helped me give life back” and “turn my tragedies into art.” That is, youth gave voice to hurt, expressing pain of loss while honoring and remembering family members, amplified as public rendering of words and music underscored in youth’s sonic choices. Noriah Rose, for example, recorded her song three separate times, allowing for shifting and simultaneous sonic echoing of lament, and response. Nuanced expression of mourning as celebration further spurred Noriah, self-harmonizing, to evoke wistful conversation between she and passed loved ones, mother to daughter to sister.

We extend understandings of how youth engage and extend songwriting processes as multimodal textual resources in/as processing loss, building upon topics meaningful to youth yet less often taken up across school settings, leading us to consider what may be expressed.

Authors

• Matthew R Deroo, University of Miami

• Vaughn W.M. Watson, Michigan State University