Writing Children's Books as Creative Capital and Narrative Healing

• In Event: Exploring Creativity as Community Cultural Wealth, In and Beyond the Classroom

Abstract

Objectives
Grounded in Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2005), the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how undergraduate students draw from their lived experiences to create beautiful stories of resistance while forging connections with their peers. This paper highlights examples of undergraduate students’ creative capital through their authored children’s stories. This writing activity promoted creativity and the opportunity for students to forge connections amongst each other therefore presenting the opportunity of healing from negative portrayals and omissions of narratives of Communities of Color .

Theoretical framework
Grounded in a Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) Framework (Yosso, 2005), this project centers on the experiences of Students of Color and their communities in the classroom. CCW, is grounded in Critical Race Theory (Solórzano, 1997) with the goal of advancing social and racial justice. CCW as a pedagogical approach invites students to share their lived experiences in the classroom to co-construct stories of resistance.

Methods & Methodology
Guided by CCW and Engaged Pedagogy (hooks, 1994), a class of 30 undergraduate students engaged in a writing assignment where they produced their own children’s stories. The focus of the course is diverse children’s literature, where students are engaged in topics of representation of Characters of Color, and critical analysis of children’s books. Insights about the student’s creative capital were derived through in vivo coding (Saldaña, 2015) of their manuscripts and their written reflections of authoring their books.

Findings
Preliminary findings indicate that students were not only able to challenge their perceptions of children’s literature as only being “fun” and instead learned new insights about diverse cultures, and racial and ethnic identities traditionally not represented in children's books. The themes that students have written books about include grief and loss, cultural myths, family recipes and food traditions, stories about their hometown, and cultural celebrations. In addition, students often shared the sentiment of wishing they had diverse books growing up and this motivated them to tell their own story. Most importantly students enjoyed learning about their peers through stories, forging bonds and community among the class.

Scholarly Significance
Findings from this research project yield significant insights for creative capital. This asset-based approach, which invites students to take up their epistemological strengths to create children’s literature, situated in their worlds—either worlds they come from, or the worlds they imagine, is deeply transformational. This is true not only for its challenge to dominant narratives where stories like theirs are often misrepresented or erased, but also internally, in students’ pedagogical, self-reflective conocimiento (Anzaldúa, 2015) which is inherently a creative process. In some ways, it is the process of creating oneself. The pedagogical contributions of this approach are particularly important for Students of Color, as it invites a praxis that not only critically engages children’s literature but takes an active approach to creating tools for transforming in the field. Furthermore, as educators and researchers, adding creative capital to the CCW (Yosso, 2005) framework opens opportunities for deeper understandings of how we process, and how we create, as we learn.

Author

• Lorena Camargo Gonzalez, California State University - Sacramento