#Squadgoals: Building Woman and Girl of Color Learning Communities

• In Event: Cultivating Homeplace: Centering Feminized Knowledge in Educational Spaces With Girls of Color

Abstract

This paper will focus on the collective learning and teaching that happened in an afterschool writing collective of eight Black and Asian middle school girls at the center of a practitioner research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) study. This group, facilitated by an Asian American woman teacher-researcher, sought to explore through collective and individual writing the identities, relationships, needs, and desires of girls of color. This paper will focus on the ways that curriculum was constructed in order to respond to the iteratively emerging desires of the club members and how the facilitator drew interdependent learning that was rooted in traditions of women and girls of color.

This work intentionally built on traditions of collective writing, learning, and activist projects like the Combahee River Collective; the creation of collections like This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (2015); and Black women’s literary societies (Muhammad, 2015; Royster, 2000). Looking to these collectives as inspiration, the curriculum of the group relied on feminist notions of solidarity that acknowledge that our intersectional identities both provide insights into our sisters’ experiences, and also are cause for the limitations of our understandings across difference. Thus, learning was necessarily multidirectional and girls simultaneously acted as teachers and students in the group. This was learning that could only occur once a level of trust and intimacy was established so that girls felt comfortable to enter what Kinloch and San Pedro (2014) refer to as a dialogic spiral. In other words, they were able to share their feelings, vulnerabilities, hopes, dreams, and experiences with their trusted companions, and, in turn, collectively produce new knowledge that served their collective vision of social transformation. Findings from this work suggest that the girls valued the safety and comfort of the group, viewed one another as sisters, and felt that these relationships provided them with opportunities to use writing, the arts, and dialogue to learn and teach one another about the issues that mattered to them as a collective of girls of color. These findings challenge notions of top down learning too often utilized in traditional classrooms and, instead, suggest an alternative, relationship-based pedagogy that builds on women of color traditions of teaching and learning through caring relationships.

Data that informed this project includes girls’ writing, art and social media postings; observational fieldnotes; lesson plans; and interviews and transcripts. This data has been iteratively analyzed through inVivo coding as well as ongoing analytic memos serving to reveal meaning through writing (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2008). Foundational to this work is the idea that meaning arises through collective knowledge, and thus findings have been consistently member checked with the participants (Delgado Bernal, 1999). The knowledge generated from the work of the girls adds to a growing body of scholarship concerning girls of color and their knowledges, and specifically, inform the ways we understand multiracial groups of girls of color in growingly diverse schools and communities.

Author

• Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut - Storrs