Teaching to Affirm: A Critical Content Analysis of Novels About Enslavement

• In Event: Researching for Repair: Enacting Critical Frameworks When Analyzing Young Adult Literature

Abstract

Objective
This study explores the representations of enslavement depicted in middle grades literature using the Black Girls’ Literacy Framework as a means of critiquing how such narratives may reify dominant narratives about Black girls and women. Recent scholarship has exposed the misogynoir (Bailey & Trudy, 2018) Black girls face in schools. For example, they are under-recommended for advanced classes (Evans-Winters, 2014), judged as deficient for asking questions in class, (Campbell, 2012) and in general, over-disciplined in schools (Annamma et al., 2019)). This scholarship points to a legacy that is rooted in enslavement, making it all the more important to critically interrogate the texts on this topic used to teach children (Webster, 2020).

Theoretical Framework
This critical content analysis utilizes the Black Girls’ Literacy Framework (Muhammad & Haddix, 2016) as a tool of analysis for understanding the multifaceted ways Black girl protagonists are represented in these texts. According to Price-Dennis and Muhammad (2021), Black girls’ rich literacy practices have fallen outside prior literacy research, restricting teacher educators' ways of understanding Black girls’ “unique ways of knowing and learning” (p.5). Thus, this framework that centers and celebrates Black girls’ multiple ways of engaging in literacy practices serves as a useful lens. We see this framework as uniquely important for addressing books depicting enslavement as it provides the opportunity to examine representations of Black girls as intellectually creative people who are agents for change in their own lives.

Methods & Data
In order to understand how the BGLF helps to highlight strengths and weaknesses in representations of enslaved Black girls, we adopted a critical content analysis approach (Short & World of Words, 2017). Collectively, we read and discussed the ways the framework was represented in the book Nightjohn (Paulsen, 1993). After that norming process, we proceeded to code the remaining books based on the occurrences of framework components.

Results
Our analysis revealed the significance of attending to more nuanced criteria than simply whether the main character represents the desired demographic (in this case, Black girls). All of the books contained at least three of the traits, with only half containing all of the traits in the BGLF. An additional finding demonstrated that while the framework supports an analysis of how Black girls are represented, it does not provide a critical lens for how whiteness is represented in the texts. Three of the books analyzed included the trope of the kind enslaver. We see this limitation of the BGLF not as a critique of the framework, but rather as a caution to teacher educators who might use the tool as the sole guide for textual analysis.

Significance
As the United States continues to grapple with how to teach, discuss, and repair the trauma left by enslavement, it is crucial that teacher educators and teachers select curricular materials that affirm the lives of Black people in general and Black girls in particular. Toward that end, teachers can begin this by adopting a framework like the BGLF as a tool for text evaluation of books about this topic.

Authors

• Stephanie Robillard, St. Mary's College of California

• Emma Bene, Stanford University

• Elena Darling-Hammond, Stanford University