Curators of Educational Dreams: Girls of Color as Creators of Liberatory Artspaces

• In Event: Cultivating Girl and Women of Color Collective Spaces: Reimagining Pedagogies and Methodologies That Center Our Stories and Language and Literacy Practices

Abstract

Girls and Femmes of Color (GFOC) have long been the creators of aesthetic resistant praxes that mobilize their raced-gendered literacies as means of survival, protection, relationship building, and joy (Walker, 1983; Griffin, 2020; Hernandez, 2020). Braiding, cooking, cosmetics, drawing, dressing, painting, nailart, weaving, flower arranging, home decorating, pottery, printmaking, sewing, photography, gardening, sculpting—these aesthetic and world-making practices, some distinctly raced and gendered, are utilized by GFOC as self- and community- preservation and visioning, and yet, they are often relegated outside of schooling and educational research as legitimate learning and teaching methods. This paper highlights GFOC aesthetic genius by narrating the experiences of a collective of GFOC— including Black, Latina, and Asian girls and femmes— as they co-establish a “radical curatorial praxis” (RCP) (Wade, 2021). The authors explore the methodological and pedagogical implications of curation as a means for collaboratively generating knowledge, sustaining joy, and creating critical GFOC artspaces as alternative locations for liberatory learning and teaching.

Building on Feminist of Color theories of multiliteracies, this paper understands that GFOC are holders of multiple raced-gendered literacies born of their experiences, traditions, and contexts. GFOC embodied, relational, visual, creative, aesthetic, digital, and pen and paper literacies can be mobilized to affirm their intelligence, beauty, and worthiness in the face of worlds that continuously devalue them (Authors, 2021; Kaler-Jones, 2021; Smith, Kelly-Morris & Chapman, 2021). We locate BIPOC arts-based method and pedagogy as a space where community, cultural, and spiritual wells of knowledge and multiple literacies can be culled toward transformational theory (Anzaldúa, 2015; Christian, 1988) as the arts allow for a shifting through multiple planes of marginalized knowing, while simultaneously providing routes toward healing (Anzaldúa, 2015). Thus, we highlight GFOC creation of artspaces as locations of liberatory knowledge and theory building where they can creatively speculate and enact educational justice (Author, 2020; Johnson, 2021).

Data emerges from a year-long participatory project with five GFOC, ages 16-20, who have engaged a three-day summer workshop as well as bimonthly meetings, during which they are both learning and implementing RCP—methods that interrupt whiteness by centering Black (and other POC) queer aesthetics to renarrativize GFOC-hood (Wade, 2021). Over the course of a year, participants enacted a RCP to co-create both virtual and in person art galleries featuring GFOC arts to generate knowledge on what girls desire, envision, and enact as educational justice. We frame this RCP as an arts-based and participatory research method where GFOC are central to data collection, analysis, and presentation of GFOC arts as a vehicle for understanding the lives, literacies, and dreams of GFOC.

Findings highlight that through RCP, GFOC commitments to themselves and their communities educational futures become vivid. RCP invites GFOC to engage their aesthetic and critical multiliteracies toward creation, analysis, and communication of liberation both amongst themselves, but also to a larger and more dynamic audience than is typically available through dominant research and pedagogical methods. RCP, then, poses the opportunity to create more colorful, femme, queer, and liberatory pedagogies and research methods in the image of GFOC desire.

Authors

• Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut

• Patricia E. Kim, New York University