"Still Misunderstood and Ain't Spoke One Sentence": Listening to Black Students' Artistic and Cultural Expressions

• In Event: 67.067 - MTCC Roundtable Session 31
  In Roundtable Session: 67.067-13 - "Because They Said So...": Challenging Singular Narratives by Centering Truths From Black Youth in Context

Abstract

One of the puzzles inherent in the critical need for teachers to enact culturally responsive or sustaining practices is that a significant aspect of the problem (the disproportionate Whiteness of the teaching corps) stymies the solution. How can a teacher be culturally responsive to their students’ cultures and/or identities if they only have, at best, a superficial knowledge of those cultures/identities? In this paper, I offer students’ artistic expressions as an important source of data for teachers (and school leaders, researchers, policymakers, etc.) who wish to gain insight into the rich and complicated inner lives of their students. As unprompted, internally-commissioned creations with a great deal of room for abstract expression, student artwork can provide a unique window into the hearts and minds of young people.
Specifically, I analyze a small sample of poems (n=60) written by six Black 10th grade students who participated in a poetry mentorship program. I counterbalance my interpretations of the poems with semi-structured interviews with the poets. The majority of these students did not identify as “writers” when they entered the program; some had never written a poem before. Yet their poems represent highly literate acts of self-construction and self-determination, layered with linguistic and emotional complexity. I use Paris’ (2010) concept of “identity texts” to categorize these poetic expressions. In these poems, the students explore a far-reaching range of topics, including race, sexuality, trauma, and the intersections therein. Though these poems often look inward, they also look outward to the structures and institutions that give shape to the poets’ lives. They tell deeply personal and sometimes contradictory stories of young people confronting the worlds they find themselves in. These are stories of resistance, but also, sometimes, of despair. With Gordon’s (1997) articulation of “complex personhood” in mind, I attempt to portray these young people in their fullness, to present them in their multitudes.
At the heart of this paper is a reframing of the role of teacher to emphasize the importance of listening to students, even when what students have to say is difficult to hear or comes packaged in ways that are inaccessible to the teacher. This kind of listening does not come without its challenges. To listen to students' artistic expressions, we (as teachers, researchers, policymakers) must encounter that expression on its own terms; otherwise, we stand to miss and/or misinterpret a great deal of the expression's meaning and complexity. This is not easy work, as we must be prepared for students’ truths to challenge our own, and, on occasion, to deal in subject matter that is sometimes considered “off-limits” at school. If a teacher is going to listen to identity texts, he/she cannot listen only to school-sanctioned identity texts. Ultimately, I argue that this kind of listening matters because it is an important step on the way to creating structures and institutions that liberate young people rather than contain them, and to making the kinds of locally-meaningful changes that reflect students’ lived realities in their own words.

Author

• Alistair Bomphray, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor