This article explores how extracurricular programs designed as interventions in the criminalization of Black girls may constrict their identities. Through a womanist theoretical framework, authors investigate the discourses about Black girlhood that permeate one extracurricular initiative which aims to counter the effects of exclusionary discipline practices on Black girls. The authors find that these discourses advance respectability politics, thus reinforcing an exclusive model of ideal Black girlhood as one aligned with White, Western, Judeo-Christian, patriarchal, heterosexist, and middle-class values. Authors conclude with suggestions for how extracurricular initiatives may develop programming and curricula that are inclusive of pluralized Black girlhoods.
There has been a recent rise in research that has attuned to matters of the body in literacy learning. This article is a contribution to that emerging corpus of scholarship. Specifically, the article is a Black feminist narrative inquiry into the undertheorized role of embodiment-and relatedly, the embodied knowing that materializes as emotion or affect-in racial literacy learning. To illustrate, I employed a blend of embodiment, affect, and assemblage theories to examine an episode of a university-based (self-described) antiracist pedagogue's racial literacy instruction in an English teacher education program in the United States. A sociomaterial approach to literacy frames my exploration of the relation between the emotions generated during classroom discourse about the contents of a curricular text used by the Black female pedagogue and the reproduction of anti-racist ideology. Findings underscore that racial literacy instruction is (inter)embodied and affective and that each body is a particular racialized, sexed, gendered, and otherwise marked text. These findings underpin my clarion call for a turn to Black feminist racial literacy instruction, an approach entailing the enactment of reparative and healing pedagogical practices that care-fully tend to the embodied and psychic wellness of Black women and girls in particular while simultaneously cultivating pedagogues' and students' commitments to justice and humanization in English teacher education classrooms.
Without the body there is no textThere is no text without breath No breath without the body The body is the text This is about landscape and psyche This is about language and earth Breathing together we are the text We are speaking even when we are silent (Herron, 2013, p. xiv)
#SayHerName: A PreambleOnce upon a time, on the ancestral lands of the Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Osage people, there lived a brown-skinned Black woman named Breonna Taylor. On March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor' s heart was badly hurt. In the wee hours of the dark night, six of the 32 bullets fired by three white Louisville Metro Police detectives-Brett Hankison, Myles Cosgrove, and Jonathan Mattingly-struck the Black medical worker' s body as she lay dead asleep in her Kentucky home. The detectives "fired into the sliding glass patio door and window of Ms. Taylor' s apartment, both of which were
Background: This article explores critical curriculum mapping in experiential education through immersive travel or Study Abroad Programs (SAPs). Purpose: The tetrad of authors theorizes then models the practice of criticality in curriculum mapping for SAPs. Methodology/Approach: Using Black feminist thought as a theoretical moor and dialogue and reflexive narrative as methods, authors present a curriculum mapping framework that is berthed to collective knowledge of how Black women in the African diaspora make meaning of lived experience to survive a perpetually precarious world. Findings/Conclusions: The framework exemplifies an epistemological alternative to dominant individualistic Euro/American approaches to curriculum mapping. Such approaches privilege predictability and linearity, contributing to the low participation of collectivist-oriented Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students in SAPs. Implications: A collectivist critical orientation to curriculum mapping may, therefore, be useful for (a) epistemologically diversifying curricular responsiveness (with implications for teaching and learning in the unpredictable chaos of the current COVID-19 moment) and (b) addressing enduring issues of equity and inclusion in SAPs.
Entanglements of power, language, identities, and ideologies perturb Black feminist poets and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) scholars alike. Here, we detail our use of Black feminist poetry to address concerns with rigor in CDA. We marry Black feminist theorizing about language to feminist CDA to illuminate how—for qualitative data analysis—poetry can foster rigor. Poetry also illuminates the suitability of feminist CDA for the Black feminist project of unveiling Black women’s discursive subjugation. Through poetry, we deconstruct and reconstruct initial analysis of data, then construct new analyses from emerging insights. Black feminist poetry provided a pathway for us to demonstrate rigor by (a) engendering precise identification, distilling, and conveying of evidence substantiating findings; (b) enriching researcher triangulation by prompting deepened dialogue—about and with data—to occur for coresearchers; and (c) stimulating reflexivity. We conclude with questions useful for leveraging Black feminist poetry for rigorous, expressly political critical qualitative inquiry.
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