"World" Traveling and Loving Perception With Girls of Color

• In Event: (Re)Imagining Education for Girls of Color

Abstract

This paper narrates learnings that arose from the collaborative inquiry pursued by four Black girls, four Asian American girls, and the presenter, an Asian American woman, as they co-constructed a critical feminist of color writing pedagogy. This practitioner research study examined the ways that girls of color used multimodal literacies to engage with one another and with themselves in an afterschool writing club, which they named “The Unnormal Sisterhood,” specifically designed for and with girls of color. The Unnormal Sisterhood challenges the often deficitizing and flattening narratives that erase the brilliance, activism, and compassion that exists amongst girls of color within and beyond the club. This work builds on the already growing body of academic work about girls of color literacies by providing analysis of Asian girls and of multiracial groups of girls, gaps that have yet to be adequately filled by critical literacy scholars concerned with the intersections of race and gender.

To address the specificities of the literate lives and the powerful knowledge arising from the experiences of girls of color, this paper uses a feminist of color theoretical framework. Drawing from Patricia Hill Collins’s (2000) concept of an “ethic of caring,” this paper frames relationships as sites of knowledge building and social activism. In this care-centered project, the researcher came to understand how girls of color came to better and more lovingly understand one another through literate practices. The curriculum of this club was designed to foster what Lugones (1987) refers to as “world”-traveling, loving efforts to understand and affirm pluralities of women and girls with an emphasis on building solidarity. Rather than framing difference as an insurmountable barrier to solidarity, differences were seen as points of creative synergy (Lorde, 2007). The club was designed to provide the girls opportunities to consciously listen to one another with raw openness, attuning themselves to both radical similarities and difference (Keating, 2013).

This study utilized practitioner research methodology (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), so that the author was positioned to both observe patterns and to create conditions for new possibilities. The curriculum, data collection, and analysis were iterative in design, the author and the girls co-creating justice aimed curriculum that was responsive to girls’ desires and needs. Through this process, the author collected and analyzed field notes, semi-structured interviews, and girls’ writing. Findings indicate that in their “world”-traveling, the girls affirmed one another, learned from one another, and co-created new critiques about the worlds they occupied. This new consciousness generated systems of interdependence in which they supported each other at their most vulnerable in the face of intersecting racism and sexism. It seems that the implementation of curriculum that is responsive to and designed with girls of color is a political act that opens possibilities of loving and collective resistance. This study adds to literature that indicates the importance of reimagining the shaping of public schools to center the needs and desires of girls of color (Evans-Winter & Esposito, 2010; Haddix, et al, 2016; Sealey-Ruiz, 2016).

Author

• Grace D. Player, University of Pennsylvania