Black Is a Feeling: Seeing Joy, Historic Memory, and Self-Determination as Indexes of Children's Learning

• In Event: Emotion and Sense-Making in Politicized Contexts: Expanding the Conversation

Abstract

Despite tendencies to analyze affective responses as discrete categories, recent and seminal studies of racial identity and the educational experiences of African American youth have examined the complex interrelationship(s) between Black pain and Black joy/agency (e.g. Kelley, 2003; O’Connor, 1997; Tichavakunda, 2021; Warren, 2021). This work has helped to establish Black experience(s) and identity development as learned and fluid, a product of historic memory, self-determination and everyday experience within a racialized, largely anti-Black society. Relatedly, the field of the Learning Sciences has become increasingly sensitized to the politics and ethics of learning, to include attention to how the “particulars configurations” of race, class, place & positioning have bearing on young people’s meaning making and experiences (Nasir et al, 2006). While there is a robust body of research on Black racial identity and emotion for young adults and adolescents, affective meaning making, agency and sociopolitical learning of Black children is seldom an empirical focus (Davis & Schaeffer, 2019; Davis et al, 2020). Thus, the field has little insight into how Black children leverage and portray the complexities of racialized joy, pride and imagination while simultaneously recognizing histories of marginalization and violence toward Black people.

Taking the above context into account, this paper draws from scholarship on emotional configurations (Vea, 2020), arts-based methods and sociopolitical learning to analyze Black children’s representations of racial identity and experience. Arts-based methods, to include drawing/illustration, have been offered as a tool for capturing learning and conveying abstract ideas that aligns with children’s ways of knowing and doing (Causey, 2017; Grover, 2004; Koh, 2010). As part of a larger 18-month ethnographic study, 29 drawings were crafted by 4th/5th grade students in response to the prompt: “What does it mean to be Black?”. After a period of drafting, each child had an opportunity to describe the elements of their pictures aloud. The illustrations, along with the debriefing conversations serve as the corpus of data for this project. Each drawing was carefully analyzed with attention to the aesthetic elements, references to history/place, affect and layers of meaning making.

Children’s illustrations vividly portrayed feelings of racial pride, joy and the dynamism of Black culture. At the same time, children’s double-consciousness (Dubois, 1903) and understanding of history and everyday racism sometimes created a dilemma as children aimed to develop one “representative” composition. Many children relied on active representations of Black self-determination and resistance, portraying instances of Black people contesting prejudice in practice and/or proudly engaging in forms of creative communal expression. I argue that their pictures offer a window into the embodied experience of Blackness and ways that Black children are already learning/learned about the importance of self-definition outside of an anti-Black, deficit imaginary. Findings from this paper extend current research on learning and emotion by foregrounding the truths and emergent understandings of Black children. They also suggest a need for the continued development and sharpening of methodological tools for capturing how children learn about racism and experience the joys and traumas of racialization in their bodies.

Author

• Natalie R. Davis, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author