Collaging Futures: Reimagining Education Through Black Girls' Refusals and Arts-Based Practices (Poster 53)

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Building with the work of Black Girlhood Studies, this study explores how the refusals Black girls make disrupt the ways they are framed as illegible (i.e., invisible, invalid, and dehumanized) in the context of U.S. schools and society. Refusals are a method Black girls use to navigate compulsory school learning environments that frame them as always and already deficient. This study highlights how Black girls render themselves and each other legible (i.e., seen, valid, and humanized) through their agentic refusals that occur when they participate in chosen, consent-based learning spaces. Through a multigenerational approach, this qualitative study centers the lives of three groups of Black girls and women while examining the roles consent and refusal have played throughout their learning experiences.

Study participants/co-researchers engaged in arts-based research methods through interviews and small group dialogues while also co-creating a Chosen Learning Space (CLS) to reflect on their educational journeys and to imagine more justice-based learning experiences for Black girls. Through the co-construction of their CLS, the girls and women in this study modeled how consent-based learning practices positioned them to imagine and create (poetry, self-portraits, collage, multimedia pieces, organizing practices, etc.) beyond anti-blackness and cis-heteropatriarchy. In turn, this study deepens understandings of the intergenerational navigational practices of Black girls and the nuanced ways they make meaning.

Author

• Jazmen Moore, University of Washington
  Presenting Author