"We Have So Much Power in the World": A Pedagogy of Critical Celebration for Girls of Color

• In Event: 35.075 - Writing Our Truths: Culturally Sustaining Writing as Disruptive Intervention in a Post-Truth Era

Abstract

The practitioner research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) study explores how a multiracial group of middle school girls of color, specifically Black and Asian girls, mobilized their literacies in service of building solidarity with one another across nondominant differences (Lorde, 2007). This work serves as a reimagination of writing curriculum, which, in too many schools has for too long marginalized and dehumanized girls of color because efforts have not, in large, been made amongst English educators to understand the racialized and gendered experiences of girls of color (Sealey-Ruiz, 2016). Informed by feminist of color epistemologies (Anzaldúa, 1983; Collins, 2000; Lorde, 2007), postpositive realist perspectives (Campano, 2007; Mohanty, 2000; Moya, 2000), sociocultural perspectives of literacy (e.g. Street, 2005), and culturally sustaining literacy pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017), this presentation will trace the ways that the girls were invited to a space of critical celebration that was in contrast to their dehumanizing experiences in their mainstream classrooms.
By taking a close look at empirical data, including fieldnotes, transcripts, written artifacts, and lesson plans procured over the course of a year, this presentation will unpack the notion of critical celebration as pedagogically and methodologically important. Through a process of thematic and in Vivo coding of data, patterns emerged to indicate the importance of critical celebration in this work. Celebration, as has been discussed by Ruth Nicole Brown (2009), can be a necessary intervention to dehumanizing schools and other institutions that erase, diminish, pathologize, and inflict violence upon girls of color. In the space of the [program name], celebration not only offered the opportunity for girls to center their joy, intellect, and beauty, it also opened pathways toward critical and intellectual work. As the curriculum inherently valued their humanity, they began to seek pathways towards critiquing and reimagining the world. Importantly, critical celebration gave room for the girls to resist dehumanization by inviting them to write more accurate and complex narratives about girls of color, narratives made more accurate precisely because they were rooted in their own experiences, emotions, and cultures (Anzaldua, 1983; Collins, 2000).
This presentation will elaborate on the ways the girls and I co-created a space of critical celebration. It will trace the ways this pedagogy came into being, including the ways girls’ artistic, activist, and intellectual foremothers’ voices were brought into the curriculum through texts and conversations; the ways the space intentionally challenged traditional notions of what writing classrooms looks like in order to center girls’ intersecting cultural, racialized and gendered knowledge and experiences; and the ways solidarity across difference was facilitated. This work provides a critical intervention to the field of literacy by contributing a intersectional approach to writing pedagogies that honor the literacies of multiracial groups of girls of color, an increasingly prevalent, yet understudied and undertheorized context.

Author

• Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut - Storrs