Mirror-Work: Creating Critical Literacy Spaces for Positive Black Identity Development

• In Event: 14.044 - Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: 14.044-13 - When School Matters: Critical Literacy Spaces by and for Black and Latino Youth

Abstract

Using a lived experience approach grounded in storytelling, the author explores how three working-class African American children “read race” and negotiate multiple voices of racialization. In an effort to extend and support the children’s literacies, the author draws from their everyday literacies and narratives of lived experience. Informed by Hick’s (2002) assertion that reductive ideologies emphasizing school -centric literacy limit opportunities for “moral action and creative responses of children’s situated histories” (p.157), the author argues for educators, parents, and community liaisons to co-construct justice oriented literacy spaces for mirror-work. She argues such spaces can holistically support the literacies of low-income and working class Black children affording opportunities for affirmative and resilient racial/ gender identities, critical consciousness, self- recovery and discovery.

Author

• Roberta Price Gardner, Georgia State University