“Harriet Tubman Is a Superhero": Conceptualizing Young African American Children’s Sociopolitical Awareness as Imaginative Praxis

• In Event: You Can’t Steal My Joy! Practices and Possibilities for Black Joy in Urban Education

Abstract

African American children are rarely offered opportunities to freedom dream (Kelley, 2002) in U.S. schools. Given the persistent preoccupation with the achievement gap (Ladson- Billings, 2007), joy and imagination are often relegated to the margins or eliminated from their classroom experiences entirely (Dunn & Love, 2020). Furthermore, although the fight for racial justice is ongoing, the varied role of children in social movements and liberation struggles and their centrality in ushering in just futures remains underexamined (Franklin, 2021). Addressing the dearth of research at the intersection of examining young African American children’s emergent sociopolitical consciousness and their literate meaning making practices, this article details how five African American first graders enrolled in an independent neighborhood elementary school in an urban Northeastern city illustrated their knowledge of enslavement, bondage, and incarceration and used their imagination to develop counternarratives of resistance and agentic possibilities. Informed by Hamilton’s (1986) theorization of hopescapes and Greene’s (1995) social imagination, I put forth imaginative praxis as a conceptual tool to analyze how young African American children name historical and contemporary sociopolitical realities and generate joyful visualizations of purposeful, actionable resistance. The children in the study engaged in imaginative praxis, revealing concrete yet creative thinking linked to action aimed at racial justice, and thereby rejecting the notion that the fight for Black liberation is void of joy. This article has implications for early childhood educators committed to antiracist literacy teaching and learning as well as scholars who work at the intersection of Black Education and Critical Childhood Studies.

Author

• Wintre Foxworth Johnson, University of Virginia