Together Apart: Online Community, Healing, and Racial Justice During the Pandemic

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

In her Poem for South African Women, June Jordan (1978) commemorated a decades-long resistance movement led by women who stood up for justice and freedom, inciting others to do so as well:

And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing
back into the mountains and if necessary
even under the sea

we are the ones we have been waiting for

Several decades later, the COVID-19 pandemic has further exposed endemic racism and public health disparities, brought into greater relief by a global crisis and exacerbated by the most recent acts of violence perpetrated against our Black brothers and sisters. Building on the 2021 AERA theme of accepting educational responsibility, we seek to continue to expose the systemic racism that upholds and privileges Whiteness and marginalizes nondominant groups in education.

In this session, we explore the literacies and pedagogies fostered in youth-centered spaces where educators, youth, and community members build together and explore emergent, innovative pedagogies that can amplify youth voices in online contexts, in the interest of social justice. The pandemic has highlighted the myriad ways in which racism, and anti-blackness in particular, are ongoing public health crises. While recognizing that educators and policymakers must continue to address the disparities in access and resources, exacerbated by the racial and public health crises brought into greater relief by COVID-19, this symposium seeks to amplify the myriad ways that BIPOC youth and teachers have been leading and innovating in the face of adversities. Youth-engaged work, now reimagined in virtual communities, offers important counter-narratives to the deficit discourses that frame BIPOC youth. Within these youth-centered communities, arts-based literacies are activated as a mechanism for teaching, learning, and community-building that aims to decenter whiteness and amplify the knowledge of communities of color in working collectively towards social transformation.

The presenters will examine the limitations of traditional structures of pedagogy that center adult knowledge and expertise and that rely on physical classroom spaces as a necessary location for teaching and learning. The youth involved in the work represented in these presentations have engaged youth literacies and digital spaces as a locus for culturally and socially relevant and sustaining pedagogies (Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2017).

The papers in this symposium seek to center the experiences and perspectives of youth and early career teachers of color who are engaged in intergenerational research collaborations and transforming/transformative online pedagogies -- we build on the vulnerability and necessity of remote learning and virtual community as a time for "freedom dreaming" (Love, 2019) and necessary disruption in what are often toxic environments for minoritized youth. Some guiding concepts for the session include:
• Exploring the intersection of youth engagement, intergenerational collaboration, and virtual literacies and pedagogies during the pandemic
• Documenting pedagogical moves and new possibilities/challenges afforded by our online spaces
• Analyzing the implications of the current context of multiple racial and health pandemics for advancing social justice in pedagogy and practice, theory, and research

Sub Unit

• Social Justice Action Committee

Chair

• Limarys Caraballo, Teachers College, Columbia University

Papers

• Real Community in Virtual Spaces: Online Pedagogies for Justice and Social Action - Limarys Caraballo, Teachers College, Columbia University; Mijin Yeom, Queens College, City University of New York; Anthony Wheeler, The Graduate Center, CUNY; Olivia A. McNeill, University of Massachusetts - Amherst; Sofia Meadows-Muriel, University of Massachusetts - Amherst; Jayna Tavarez, University of Massachusetts - Amherst; Aliyah Martinez, Cyphers for Justice; William DeFermin Muñoz, Cyphers for Justice; Jordon Comrie, Cyphers for Justice; Sikirat Mustapha, Cyphers for Justice; Elkin Mantilla, Cyphers for Justice

• Building a New Table: Tracing the Pedagogies of Early Career, Women of Color Teachers during the Pandemic - Danielle R. Filipiak, University of Connecticut - Storrs; Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut - Storrs

• "It felt as if we were all in this together": Intergenerational Praxis for Educational Change - Karen Zaino, CUNY Graduate Center; Limarys Caraballo, Teachers College, Columbia University; Mijin Yeom, Queens College, City University of New York; Naysa Harraway, Cyphers for Justice; Aliyah Martinez, Cyphers for Justice; William DeFermin Muñoz, Cyphers for Justice; Jordon Comrie, Cyphers for Justice; Ramlee Mustapha, Purdue University; Sikirat Mustapha, Cyphers for Justice; Elkin Mantilla, Cyphers for Justice; Wena Teng, Cyphers for Justice; Marissa Desir, Cyphers for Justice

• Racial Healing Collective: Healing, Equity, and Justice with BIPOC Youth in Virtual Spaces - Jamila Lyiscott, University of Massachusetts – Amherst; Olivia McNeill, Brown University; Sofia Meadows-Muriel, University of Massachusetts - Amherst; Jayna Tavarez, University of Massachusetts - Amherst; Keisha L. Green, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Teacher and Youth - Mijin Yeom, Queens College, City University of New York; Naysa Harraway, Cyphers for Justice; Aliyah Martinez, Cyphers for Justice; William DeFermin Muñoz, Cyphers for Justice

Discussant

• Ernest D. Morrell, University of Notre Dame