“The Light of Love”: Critical Reflections on Self-Love as Practitioner-Researchers

• In Event: Divine Love in Me: Black Girl Love as Resistance Against Oppressive Schooling

Abstract

Most children don’t get lessons about how to love or be loving; however, there is still hope, even if we did not learn self-love in our youth (hooks, 2000). Throughout this presentation, we, two Black women, Black girlhood literacies researchers and educators, draw on hooks’ notion of “the light of love” to explore ideas of self-love (Author, 2020) related to our reflections on our work with Black girls as researchers and literacy practitioners. We engage in autoethnography to explore how our identities and experiences deeply inform the work we do alongside Black girls and the ways these identities necessitate critical reflection and iterative identity work in order to engage in humanizing thought work with - rather than on - Black girls. We think through how we ourselves have evolved through our work with, commitment to, and time alongside Black girls.

In this panel, we share artifacts (journal entries and images) from our various research projects with Black girls across the years that depict the words and art we create with Black girls, and we discuss the impact that practitioner research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999) has had on our praxis. We conclude our panel by presenting activities and prompts to engage both Black girls and Black women educators in practices of self-love.

Authors

• Barrett Rosser, Morgan State University

• Autumn A. Griffin, University of North Carolina - Charlotte