Black Joy, Love, and Resistance: Using Digital Storytelling to Center Black Students' Full Humanity

• In Event: Toward Critical Multimodality: Exploring Theory, Research, and Practice in Transformative Educational Spaces

Abstract

In recent years, critical multimodal research suggests that students can explore issues around social justice, race, racism, and Whiteness (Aguilera & Lopez, 2020; Love, 2014; Matias & Grosland, 2016; Rolón-Dow, 2011; Author 5-2, 2020a). Digital storytelling, a multimodal tool, can be used as a critical approach for students to work in solidarity to question, interrogate, and dismantle anti-Black racism and anti-Blackness. The presenter, a Black woman scholar, recognizes the marginality of Black students and the need to center Blackness in educational spaces. Thus, this breakout session shows how students in an eleventh grade English classroom explored and made sense of race, racism, anti-Blackness, and Blackness.

In using justice-oriented solidarity (JOS) (Author 3, 2020), the presenter shows how two Black woman teachers carved out a Black Space (Paris, 2017). She highlights how students critically reflected on and interrogated each other about love, joy, pain, and trauma that affect Black Bodies to center Blackness. She builds, further, on critical consciousness research (Freire, 2000; hooks, 1994; Willis, 2008). Willis (2008) argues that “what makes a person critically conscious is challenging the underlying assumptions that work in the internal and external worlds to privilege some while deprivileging others” (p. 5).

Expanding on the concept of critical consciousness, the author shows how students engaged in what she termed as critically conscious talk (CCT) (Baker-Bell, 2020; Author 3, 2019). CCT amplifies Freire’s humanizing pedagogy, which involves critical consciousness. Willis, (2008) who quoted Lyra (1996), conveyed that “the role of dialogue and establishing a relationship of mutual respect” (p. 42) can serve as a catalysis to help students “interrogate the everyday social realities of power, representation, and identity” (Aguilera & Lopez, 2020, p. 583). Also, the research employs visual discourse analysis to analyze and interpret students’ digital stories because it “offers a way of thinking about meaning in which language and visual texts work in concert, and which language is not the primary source through which meaning is mediated and represented” (Albers, 2014, p. 87). By employing both visual discourse analysis and critical consciousness, the research elucidates the importance of teachers incorporating critical multimodal practices that help students understand the interconnectedness of race, racism, and anti-Blackness to ultimately center Blackness (Dumas & ross, 2016; Baker-Bell, 2019; Johnson, 2018: Author 3, 2020). Data for the research centers on the students’ visual images and their narratives.

This breakout session aligns with the proposed workshop. Since this will be an interactive session, the audience will be able to engage in discussion, examine digital stories, and explore how they can use critical multimodality to support students’ critical consciousness.

Author

• Jackson Davena, Boston University