Critical Doesn’t Have to Mean Traumatic! Writing Beyond Pain in Youth Poetry Slam Communities

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

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:

The youth poetry slam community has often rewarded stories of pain, hurt, and trauma given the tradition of speaking out against personal and social injustices on stage. While it is important to create and nurture spaces for youth to discuss, process, write about, and perform stories of pain and hurt, young people also need models of healing, joy, and reconciliation. The purpose of this presentation is to advance critical Hip Hop and spoken word pedagogies that move us beyond trauma-centered narratives and towards joyful storytelling practices.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework:

Rosario-Ramos (2018) insisted that critically caring teachers who seek to support the radical healing of their students “must be willing to engage in critical witness and testimony” (p. 214). Similarly, Shawn Ginwright’s (2010) research on radical healing and activism with Black youth reminded us that “the act of testifying exposes the raw truth about suffering and releases the hidden pain that is the profound barrier to resistance” (p. 9). Likewise, Dutro (2011) has written about “writing wounded” in her explorations of trauma, testimony, and critical witness in literacy classrooms.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry:

Poetic inquiry (Davis, 2018, 2021; Faulkner, 2020; Prendergast et al., 2009) suggests that we might understand the poem itself as a form of research that (re)renders one’s experiences in an intentional, methodical, and systematic way—that is, using the systems of language and representation to communicate ideas about the world and our ways of coming to know it. Many of the spoken word poems represented in this study questioned, theorized, argued, and represented the “data” of lived reality and experience.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials:

The data in this retrospective study include spoken word poems written and performed by four young adults who participated in a youth poetry slam in high school. Secondary data sources include semi-structured interviews and focus groups that explore the youth poetry slam in the context of radical healing (Ginwright, 2010) and critical consciousness (Freire, 1970).


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

The findings of this study highlight the need for literacy classrooms, pedagogies, and policies that 1) build meaningful and sustainable pathways towards postsecondary futures in which youth continue to write, dream, and act in solidarity with one another, 2) reimagine the relationship between trauma and joy in the narratives we ask students to read, write, and perform, and 3) embrace the role of spirituality, healing, and collective memory in the writing classroom.


Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:

This study challenges us to think about the narratives we ask students to read, write, and perform. Participatory literacy spaces like the one in this study can influence our capacity as educator-researchers to become worthy witnesses (Winn & Ubiles, 2011) as we testify about our own pain and healing alongside one another. Additionally, this study highlights the role of memory and its relationship to healing in the context of writing and literacy research.

Author

• Brian Mooney, Fairleigh Dickinson University