Where Are We Unheard? Creating Intergenerational Racial Literacies With Youth and In-Service Teachers

• In Event: Literacies of Refusal: Writing, Healing, and Creating Outside the White Gaze

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:

The purpose of this presentation is to expand our understanding of how intergenerational inquiry methods can be used between youth and educators that requires collective engagement by educators and students in order to interrogate critical silent literacies within the ELA curriculum and classroom (San Pedro, 2015).

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework:

Since my work is attempting to center the ways critical literacy development fosters deeper collectivity ways of knowing and being among youth and educators, Caraballo et al., (2017) notes that one of the most powerful aspects of intergenerational inquiry is that it sets up the conditions for youth to have agency in identifying educational problems. As a result, educators and students must work collectively to examine the various ways racial silencing manifests in curriculum and how to work in educational spaces to better inform pedagogical practices towards critical literacy in the ELA K-12 classroom.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry

The use of narrative, specifically critical autoethnographic methodology to develop students’ critical literacies is disruptive and allows a blurring of boundaries between research and practice (Lysicott et al., 2021). Through this collective engagement, youth and adult allies can navigate such tensions together to come to a more nuanced understanding.


Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials

This research draws specifically on qualitative research methodologies through multiple forms of data: teacher and student narratives, semi-structured interviews, and classroom observations.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view:

The data suggests complexities that lay beyond the seemingly academically successful youth of color in the classroom including an increased understanding of: 1) the dissonance and expectations of that youth of color experience in schools that render a silencing in the ELA classroom 2) embrace more humanizing pedagogies in engaging with critical silences, especially for students of color.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:

This study is an important contribution towards understanding of critical literacy development in the high school ELA classroom with youth of color and educators. The implications of this work call for more culturally sustaining and humanizing pedagogies to emerge. As Jackson & Mazzei (2012) notes, “Silences do not just appear or happen out of ether. They are produced in response to the dominant reality of the multiple communities [people] belong to” (p.105). San Pedro & Kinloch (2017) take up ideas of silences as language and on what it means to listen through a literacy framework and what implications can we draw for teachers and students in the classroom? They believe that researchers have the responsibility to authentically listen to youth - “to what young people are saying, and how and for what reasons they are saying it…” and to be attentive to people's voices, vulnerabilities, body languages, lived conditions, backgrounds, and ways of being in the world” (p.26). In the ELA classroom, we must continue to expand the ways we develop our students’ various literacies.

Author

• Diana Liu, Teachers College, Columbia University