Centering Black Youth: An Extracurricular Book Club and Community-Based Theater in Collaboration

• In Event: Across Time and Place: Black Literature for Youth and the Continued Significance of Communal Literacies

Abstract

Historically and still today, Black Americans have relied upon book clubs as a powerful and rejuvenating catalyst for their communities (Muhammad, 2020). This presentation describes findings from the ‘Harbor Us’ (HU) book club. Designed as a Black space occurring across two K-8 schools and a community-based theater, the HU book club fosters the identity, imagination and literacy development of middle grade readers while countering anti-blackness in their school curriculum. Our research question asks: How do Black middle grades youth develop literary and lived understandings of identity, selfhood, race, and culture?

Through varied genres and authors, Black diaspora youth literature artistically documents Black life. These stories function as cultural artifacts because they communicate values, knowledge, and social practices (Bishop, 2007). To complement this literary tradition, reader response theory offers insight into literary interpretations as an aspect of the reading process. Studies highlight how response is deeply situated within social contexts and linked in multifaceted ways to identity development (Glenn & Ginsberg, 2016). In our analysis, we consider how both text and reader-based influences converge to shape participants’ meaning making. Additionally, theories of ‘Black Lifemaking’ (Mustaffa, 2021) and ‘Black Interiority’ (Quashie, 2017) affirm, define, and humanize meanings of Blackness. These theories, focused on Black youth as alive and experiencing complex emotions, help to explicate our participants’ reader responses as they emerged throughout our time together.

The research design consists of a collective qualitative case study. Participants (25 youth in grades 5-7) engaged in a multi-site, extra-curricular book club. Our two schools reside within a Northeastern city and vary across type and location. Book club gatherings occur multiple times monthly and consist of youth-led discussions, writing and artistic modes of response (i.e., performing monologues with professional actors). Data sources include: (1) semi-structured interviews, (2) digitally recorded book discussions, (3) written responses and (4) artistic artifacts and performances (Creswell & Poth, 2018). Data are analyzed inductively and comparatively by searching for commonly occurring patterns within the student talk, writing and artifacts to develop themes based on recurring ideas that are apparent in the data.

Within our key findings, our first theme explicates the ways participants bring forth wide ranging and complicated emotions (i.e., desire, vulnerability, pleasure, and fear) to connect the stories to their lived realities around race, identity, culture, and selfhood. Second, although the novels counter anti-blackness and align with a culturally sustaining curriculum (Ladson-Billings, 2014), the youth express many types of identification with the stories. Furthermore, the youth are differently engaged depending on the book and even across chapters within the same story. These themes evidence a significant degree of nuance in literary interpretation and meaning making about enactments of Blackness.

Critical analysis that centers on the reading responses, emotions/feelings, and literary representations of a wide variety of Black youth remains scant in literacy studies. Gaping holes also exist in research that imagines more humanistic learning possibilities in extra-curricular contexts connected to both schools and communities. Our results address each of these areas and should be of interest to the AERA audience.

Authors

• Wanda M. Brooks, Temple University

• Susan Browne, Rowan University