Reading Against The Grain; Examining Student Journalism for Glimpses of Black Life

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 11:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: “Seeing” Social Contexts through Innovative Methodologies

Abstract

In the backdrop of one of the country's longest federal desegregation court cases, Tabsy v. Estes, lies the student journalist of Lincoln High School leaving glimpses of Black life in the columns of “Dear Voice” lamenting the questions of Black teenagerhood, the poems of the creative corner, and the assemblages of local stories for the Lincoln Tiggergram. Lincoln High school is Dallas’s second Black high school and the center of debates of the elimination of historically Black High schools, magnet schools, and the long fight for desegregation in Dallas ISD. This paper asks; What can student journalists offer us about Black childhoods?, How can student journalists inform a Black sense of place? How can their voices unsettle school reform memory?

Author

• Bethany Bass, Stanford University