Writing Her Truths: Demarginalizing Black Girlhood in Emancipatory Literacy Classrooms

• In Event: 61.071 - Sheraton Roundtable Session 10 - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 61.071-12 - The Potentials of Critical Representation: Emancipatory Practices, Texts, and Contexts

Abstract

What happens when we create literacy classrooms that center the lives and literacy practices of Black girls? The urgency in this question is emphasized by gendered marginalizing schooling practices such as standards-based curriculum and testing, racism, xenophobia, sexism, violence, and erasure which intersect to decenter young Black girls in literacy classrooms. This study investigates an out-of-school literacy classroom in Miami, Florida and the autobiographical journal writing of five middle school Haitian and Haitian American girls. Using a Critical Race/Critical Discourse Analysis, the author focuses on the ways in which the girls story their intersected identities, place, and girlhood in writing, and calls on literacy instructors to take on intersectional feminist pedagogies when facilitating literacy instruction.

Author

• Wideline Seraphin, The Pennsylvania State University