Practitioner Inquiry Into Black Girls’ Self-Love Literacies

• In Event: Go Off Sis: Journeying Through (Re)Searching With Black Girls Through Space and Place

Abstract

Most children don’t get lessons about how to love or be loving (hooks, 2018). Along with our society, schooling in America further silences and invalidates the humanity of Black girls. Self-love, or “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing, celebrating, preserving, or protecting one’s own or another’s physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual growth” (Griffin, 2020, p. 36) is essential for Black girls to thrive despite and resist the oppression they endure. As a Black woman and literacy educator-researcher, I seek to explore what happens when high-school-aged Black girls in a major urban city, in which we reside, come together to enact our literacies to develop self-love practices.

This paper draws on theoretical Black Feminist perspectives on love and self-love (Jordan, 1978; Combahee River Collective, 1978; Dillard, 2000; Walker, 2004; Lorde, 2007; hooks, 2015; hooks, 2018) including what is it and why it matters for Black women and girls. Further, I attend to Griffin’s (2020) call for researchers to explore the twenty-first-century literacies and self-love by using Black girlhood (Brown, 2013) to create spaces for Black girls to employ their literacies (Muhammad & Haddix, 2016). Black women in America have a legacy of collective uplift and social action (Garrison, 1932; Combahee River Collective, 1978; Pease, D. E., & McHenry, E. 2002) which historicizes the girls’ contributions to scholarship on self-love literacies in these times. Practitioner research blurs the lines between theory and practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). It eliminates hierarchies of knowing and being that persist in and beyond schools and deepens my own knowledge-of-practice through an inquiry stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999).

I present data from a larger dissertation study. The inquiry group, composed of 13 high-school-aged students, met bi-weekly after school at a women’s center on a University’s campus for five months to read, write, and talk about self-love across various texts and modalities. I examine our “life notes”—“broadly constructed personal narratives such as letters, journals, stories, reflections, poetry, music, and other artful forms" (Bell-Scott, 1994, p. 16) work to resist oppression while surfacing the impact of sociocultural contexts that inform their knowledge and practice of self-love. Additionally, I focus on themes that surfaced from reading and writing about various texts to support collective knowledge generation about the practice of self-love given one’s socialization. As a practitioner-researcher, I used our collective inquiry with the girls and other practitioner-researchers to reflect on my knowledge-of-practice to design and facilitate a space conducive to of self-love.

My research builds on the dearth of literature about Black girl literacy collaboratives by highlighting how literacy researchers can design spaces with Black girls that allow them “to practice Black girlhood and sense love, to name it, claim it, and share it” (Brown, 2013, p.1). I present my results through my own multimodal “life-note” and briefly discuss how it can serve as a guide and method for researchers working with Black girls to cultivate self-love through expansive literacies in out-of-school spaces as a tool for resistance against racism and other forms of oppression.

Author

• Barrett Rosser, Morgan State University