Girls of Color Embodied and Experiential Dreams for Education

Abstract

Through an exploration of an afterschool writing club for middle school girls of Color (GOC), this article puts forth the argument that GOC consistently leverage incisive critiques of schooling through multiple literacies, including embodied and experiential ways of knowing and communicating. However, oftentimes, these critiques are ignored because their literacies are marginalized, ignored, and misread. As informed by their lived and felt experiences, it becomes apparent how school has failed them and how they continue to persist in their learning, their work, and their building toward the futures they deserve and desire, sometimes in ways that are recognized by schools, sometimes in resistance to school standards. Further, the article puts forth a model of what education can look like when GOC multiple literacies are centered and celebrated. Educators, researchers, and policy makers must understand GOC as hopeful and desiring learners and create spaces that honor and respect their multifaceted literacies.

Composing college identities: Latina girls writing their way to the Universidad

“…The mentor and mentee relationship is similar to a familial relationship, that of a hermandad [sisterhood], in which we strive to support our escritoras in accomplishing their goals and developing personally and academically. This is central to feminist-mujercentered spaces where mentors celebrate the brilliance, genius, creativity, and fight of Black and Brown Girls and Youth of Color (Muhammad, 2014;Brown, 2013;Player, 2022).…”

“…Community-embedded scholars have documented the transformative and worldchanging power of intentionally designed arts-based and literacy spaces that center on the rich cultural, linguistic, and familial assets of Girls and Youth of Color (García and Gaddes, 2012;Guti errez, 2008;Lee et al, 2022;Muhammad, 2012Muhammad, , 2014Player, 2022;Wissman, 2011). In these spaces, Girls and Youth of Color join in community to examine their histories by reading and discussing culturally relevant texts rooted in their experiences, composing personal narratives, and engaging in various performative acts.…”

Implications of the Science of Learning and Development for the Field of Literacy

“…Moving beyond a view of literacy as a decontextualized act of reading and writing the printed word, multiliteracies acknowledges the multiple modes (oral, aural, gestural, linguistic, spatial, and multimodal) available for expressing and generating meaning (for more on multimodal theory, see Kress, 2009). Multiliteracies theory has enabled scholars to focus on the relationships between literacies and identities, showing, for example, how literacy is connected to gender, sexuality and sexual orientation, race, and culture (Blackburn, 2003;Leent & Mills, 2018;Player, 2022;Price-Dennis et al, 2017;Reid, 2022), and it has generated a groundswell of research aimed at understanding how literacy learning occurs across dynamic outside-school contexts, both local and global, in which people engage in their self-sponsored literacies and embrace a range of social processes and cultural practices. This area of research, with its heavy focus on school-age youth, has identified important features of learning environments that are inclusive of and further build youth literacies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2005de los Ríos, 2018;Nash & Brady, 2022;Skerrett & Bomer, 2011, 2013.…”

On the Page and Off the Page: Adolescents’ Collaborative Writing in an After-School Spoken-Word Poetry Team

“…A broad body of literature on out-of-school literacy in the United States has attended to youths' writing practices, addressing family and home literacies (Segel, 2023), informal or youth-led literacies (Shrodes, 2022), and formal groups or after-school literacy settings (Player, 2022). Out-of-school spaces can potentially foster writing practices that are not always valued in schools, including participatory and collaborative writing (e.g., wiki writing or fan fiction; see Curwood et al, 2013), translanguaging and multilingual writing (Gallo & Corral, 2023), and performed or dramatic writing (Lenters & Smith, 2018).…”