Crossing Spatial and Textual Boundaries: The Writing Club as Culturally Sustaining Practice

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 25
  In Roundtable Session: Interrogating Literacy Curriculum and Instruction: The Role of Counter-Storytelling

Abstract

This longitudinal qualitative study centers on the experiences of four adolescents of color who participated in a high school writing club. Grounded in culturally sustaining pedagogies and spatial literacy theories, the research practitioner collected six years of data including field notes, participant observations, interview and focus group transcriptions spanning secondary and post-secondary schooling experiences, writing club discussion transcriptions, and student writing samples to document how boundaries across genres and spaces are crossed and to examine the writing club as an alternative, culturally sustaining and transformative forum. The analysis provides an overview of the kinds of facilitative processes that allowed for culturally sustaining practices and the ways in which the writing club contributed to students’ social-emotional and literacy development.

Author

• Jody N. Polleck, Hunter College - CUNY