Restorying Digital YAL (Young Adult Literature) Curricula: Learning With and From Black Girls

• In Event: Black Girls and Women Recalling, Resisting, and Reclaiming Self Through Multimodal Composing

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how the historical roots of Young Adult Literature (YAL) and literacy curricula have tied the genre and its associated pedagogical practices to whiteness (Griffin, 2018). To restory this reality, the author details a four-step process taken to cultivate a digital YAL curriculum, using the racial literacy development pyramid (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021) and highlighting the genius (Muhammad, 2020) of the Black girl digital creators to support teachers in decentering witness in digital YAL materials. The author engages in curriculum creation with students, focusing on the concept of un-whitewashing digital literacy curricula to center and uplift the identities, experiences, and curiosities of a collective of nine Black adolescent girls, who were active designers of YAL curricula for a digital age. The author begins with a brief theoretical overview of how literacy curricula have historically been propagated as white property and how this notion has been perpetuated in digital spaces. This is followed by a brief discussion of the affordances of digital texts and a racialized youth lens to restory digital curricula. This paper aligns with the 2024 theme by offering recommendations for teachers who seek to collaborate with Black girls to create learning experiences that recognize, center, and uplift their knowledge, detailing how they might partner with students to disrupt notions of literacy curricula as white property and create learning experiences - and ultimately digital YAL together.

Author

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