We Write Here: Academic Movement in the Writing and Being of Black Learners

• In Event: Subverting the Secondary English Language Arts Classroom

Abstract

Objectives
This study aims to illuminate how correctness and racialized/classist views of the “academic” can marginalize Black voices. The presenter focuses on ELA and intellectual practices that maximize the development of Black writers and the academic potential of Black youth while encouraging educators to consider the ways that Black being and doing are framed through racist framings of teaching and learning.

Theoretical Framework & Researcher Positionings
High school writing often requires that students remove, deny, and ignore important aspects of their writing identities (Johnson, 2017; Yagelski, 2009). The author uses an ecology of writing that encompasses more than individual writers and their immediate context and invites one to explore how writers interact to form systems. With/in writing ecologies “all characteristics of individual writers or a piece of writing both determine and are determined by the characteristics of all the other writers and writings in the systems (Cooper, 1986).
The presenter is a Black scholar writer who writes with/in different communities of Black writers. The presenter argues for a rereading of Black writing that focuses on the intellectual moves that writers make instead of assessing writing based on racism and stereotypes of academic discourse.

Methods and Data Sources and Analysis
The presenter discusses Sankofa as a methodology based on the concept of the Adinkra symbol, which literally translates as “It is not taboo to go back to the source and fetch what you forgot” (Bangura, 2011, p. 175). The research study uses past writing of Black students in order to construct a future for how we might teach them to write. In addition, the researcher returns to and reexamines how writing mentors might read writers and their writing in ways that depart from standardized approaches of assessment and evaluation. In order to address the question: How might teachers and other writing mentors develop (and teach others to develop) competence in critical (relevant, sustaining, diasporic, subversive) writing practices and pedagogies with/in and through ELA/Literacy being and teaching of and writing with Black writers, the researcher goes back to the writing (text production and the act of writing) of Black learners who she has mentored as a writer, teacher, and professor in their school. Their writing and experiences of being (mis)read lend to a tapestry of Black writer experiences that beckons for revision in the ways writing mentors consider how Black writers make sense of the(ir) worlds in writing.

Substantiated Conclusions and Scholarly Significance
The presenter highlights how (Black) writing is academic and ripe for extending thinking skills to illustrate how teachers of writing may teach in ways that help all learners build their own bridges toward academic and intellectual growth. The presenter will lay out ways that writing mentors and teachers of writing might reread Black writing and build on writerly assets; cultivate positive writerly identities; and encourage and support complex, abstract, and higher-order thinking.

Author

• Latrise P. Johnson, University of Alabama