Cross-Currents: Supporting Youth Spoken Word, Honoring Indigenous Ontologies, and Becoming Co-Conspirators for Justice

• In Event: Your Liberation Bound Up With Mine: Defining the Public Good Together in Critical Research-Practice Partnerships

Abstract

What does it mean to teach in communities we are not from? How do we become co-conspirators for justice in communities we have found ourselves in? How can Youth Spoken Word (YSW) offer space for us to develop as teachers and researchers as we figure out how to best engage with these complex relationships?

These are some of the questions the two authors of this paper grappled with as they reflected on their journey supporting YSW through a professional development program for teachers in Maui, Hawaiʻi in 2019. This paper posits that YSW, grounded in Hip Hop Based Education (HHBE) (Hill & Petchauer, 2013), is a participatory, justice-oriented pedagogy that offers space for those from all identities to interrogate the places they occupy and the ways they choose to engage their work, especially practitioners who embody roles in both academic and community spaces.

The authors, who identify as poet-scholars with feet in both the academy and in arts communities, are from the continental United States and offer descriptions of their approaches to their work in Hawaiʻi, taking into consideration the complex histories of colonization and fights for sovereignty that deeply influence educational practice (Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Hussey, & Wright, 2014). The authors interrogate that, despite their best efforts in becoming co-conspirators for justice (Love, 2019) and offering professional development work focused on 1) best practices of YSW and 2) culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2017) , there were times when participants remained focused on the poetry “product” that would come out of such practices while ignoring the processes or ideologies being explored. Although the authors intended to offer experiences grounded in praxis (Freire, 1970) that supported practitioners to engage with their own dual oppressive/liberatory roles in schools, there were multiple times when participants expressed views that echoed settler colonial ideologies (Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, et. al. 2014). At the same time, the instructor/authors were called to critically interrogate not only what these experiences meant, but also their own positions and different racialized experiences (as Irish-American and African-American), as well as their poet/researcher identities in concert.

This inquiry is grounded with critical sociocultural theories of education (Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007), explored through narrative (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Johnson-Bailey, 2003) and autoethnographic methods (Boylorn & Orbe, 2014), and utilizes the experiences of the three-day professional development institute on YSW with public school teachers that was analyzed through participant surveys, document analysis, participant observation journals, daily reflections and multiple reflective discussions among the practitioners. The practitioners jointly have over 30 years of expertise as YSW poets, educators and scholars and ground their scholarship and practice in the ways YSW offers opportunity for participatory, student-centered dialogue, psycho-spiritual development and community building that leads students to a more thorough engagement with a democratic society.

In the spirit of poetry, the authors offer this paper using metaphors of the ocean, travel and movement to demonstrate how YSW and HHBE pedagogies are leading practitioners to carve out spaces in both academies and communities where hybrid identities and practices can lead - and become centered.

Authors

• Moira E Pirsch

• Camea Davis, Georgia State University