From Black Girl Exclusion to Black Girl Empowerment: Understanding One Black Girl's Digital and STEAM Literacy Practices as Empowering, Liberatory, and Agentic

• In Event: Freedom Dreaming: Black and Latinx Youths' Multimodal Compositions of Future Selves and Literacies

Abstract

In this paper, we use the framework knowledgeable agents of the digital (Author 4, 2018) to
understand the agentic experiences of one adolescent Black girl’s digital and STEAM literacy
practices. After discriminatory acts deterred Star from her interest in exploring STEAM literacy
practices in school, her involvement in a digital application workshop for Black girls and their
fathers and a robotics club workshop for Black girls, reshaped her understanding of herself as a
digital and STEAM leader. Through qualitative and multimodal data sources, including surveys, interviews, observations, photos, audio/video recordings, focus groups, vision boards, and digital app-making, we explore her actions as a knowledge maker, creator, and producer, roles that
reaffirmed her interests in STEAM. This study is important for rethinking collective efforts to disrupt systems that discourage and marginalize Black girls and women of varying identities in digital and STEAM literacies.

Authors

• Tisha Lewis Ellison, The University of Georgia

• Tairan Qiu, University of Georgia - Athens