(Re)Writing Literacy Relationships: Tracing Writing Memories, Literacy Trauma, and Healing for Girls of Color

• In Event: Healing and Trauma Across Learning Contexts: BIPOC Youth Perspectives and Practices

Abstract

Despite growing recognition of trauma-informed pedagogy in education, the specific ways that racialized literacy experiences shape academic writing relationships for Girls, Women, and Femmes of Color (GWFoC) remain underexplored in education research. Trauma research shows that repeated racialized stressors imprint on the nervous system, shaping students’ sense of safety in learning spaces (Haines, 2019; Menakem, 2017). Building on these bodies of work, this qualitative portraiture study asks: (1) How do GWFoC at a predominantly White institution remember schooling‑based literacy trauma? (2) How do those memories shape their present relationships with academic writing? and (3) How might healing‑centered pedagogies support GWFoC in (re)constructing academic literacy relationships?

Guided by Black Feminist and WOC Feminist epistemologies that honor lived experience as theory (Collins, 2000; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 2015), Critical Race Theory’s critique of structural racism (Crenshaw, 1991), and Latina/Chicana Feminist concepts of conocimiento and nepantla (Gonzalez, 2021), the project weaves Lawrence‑Lightfoot’s Portraiture (1997) with somatic and embodiment scholarship that positions the body as both archive and agent toward the healing of trauma (van der Kolk, 2014; Menakem, 2017; Haines, 2019).

Over 9 consecutive weeks, a purposive cohort of 8-10 undergraduate GWFoC students will participate in a healing‑centered literacy relationship workshop. Weekly sessions will braid critical reflective journaling, guided somatic grounding rituals, and communal pláticas—dialogic exchanges grounded in Chicana/Latina feminist praxis that foreground cariño and cultural intuition (Hannegan‑Martinez, 2023; Delgado Bernal, 2018). The workshop is supplemented by an in‑depth individual plática for every participant, weekly reflexive journals, and ethnographic fieldnotes.

Transcripts, journals, and field notes will be coded through iterative open, axial, and selective cycles (Corbin & Strauss, 2015) that allow for portraits to unfold as insights emerge. Preliminary data from a pilot study suggests 3 threads: (a) persistent internalization of deficit narratives tied to K12 literacy experiences, (b) embodied practices and physiological responses to acts of writing in academic context and (c) the function of communal storytelling and (re)membering in re‑authoring literacy identities (Muhammad & Haddix, 2016; Player & González Ybarra, 2021; Dillard, 2011).

By conceptualizing “literacy trauma” (Carvajal Regidor, 2023) as an embodied phenomenon and situating it within a praxis of somatic healing, the study bridges trauma studies and critical literacy scholarship, advancing anti‑racist, healing‑centered toolkits for writing educators. Findings will offer concrete, trauma‑informed, healing-centered pedagogical strategies and insights on the workshop series as a potential literacy education intervention.

Author

• Catherine Ventura, University of Michigan