Composing Futures: Children, Youth, and Teachers Dreaming Educational Justice in and Through Writing

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

In this session, we explore writing as a means for examining the past, subverting the present, and imagining expansive, justice-driven futures. The first paper uses ethnographic methods to examine how children’s writing practices made their everyday civic engagement visible in the present. Through ethnographic case study methods, the second paper centers the voices of five Latina youth writers, documenting how their vision for the world is rooted within their ancestors’ stories. The third paper draws on humanizing ethnographic methods, illustrating how Black girl community organizers wrote as refusal to compulsory schooling, envisioning more just learning spaces. The fourth paper documents how engaging in critical proleptic writing helped early literacy teachers imagine liberatory pedagogies and change their practices in the present.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Writing and Literacies

Chair

• Emily Machado, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Papers

• Politics on the Playground: Children's Participation in Social Movements - Haeny S. Yoon, Teachers College, Columbia University

• "We Are More Than That!" Latina Girls Writing Their Communities From Margins to Center - Tracey Terece Flores, University of Texas at Austin

• Reimagining the Way Forward: Writing as Refusal in Chosen Youth Spaces - Jazmen Moore, University of Washington

• "Rise Up, Hand in Hand": Early Childhood Teachers Writing a Liberatory Literacy Pedagogy - Emily Machado, University of Wisconsin - Madison; Maggie Beneke, University of Washington; Jordan Taitingfong, University of Washington

Discussant

• Gerald Campano, University of Pennsylvania