Abstract
The articles in this issue all invite us to consider the possibilities and realizations of powerful forms of literacy engagement and learning that are centered on the lived experiences and literacies of people of color (POC). Going further, the authors explore how literacy instruction and other educational practices can develop as well as leverage literacy practices and identities that enable youth of color to thrive across a variety of literacy contexts in which they live and aspire to participate.
In “Girls of Color Embodied and Experiential Dreams for Education,” Grace D. Player explores an afterschool writing club for middle school girls of color (GOC). Player documents through practitioner inquiry how the young women agentively create a space where they can form bonds with one another, engage their multiple literacies, and critically reflect on the ways in which their formal schooling experiences are failing them. The young women examine how they are often positioned in schools as resistant to learning, a positional identity that disintegrates when juxtaposed with the rich literacies and intellectual thought circulating in the afterschool space the GOC have created. Player illustrates the strong commitments the young women have toward their literacy learning and futures in the face of schooling that often misrecognizes their desires and efforts. Building with frameworks of the literacies and knowledge of girls and women of color coupled with the girls’ literacies and lived experiences, Player offers a model of education that centers and celebrates the multiple literacies of GOC.
Emily Phillips Galloway and Heather Meston, in “Pedagogy of Possibility: Proleptic Teaching and Language Learning,” also invoke the language of possibility—what becomes possible when teachers attend to the imagined future identities of their diverse students for literacy learning. Galloway and Meston's article draws from a case study of a social studies classroom that served a majority of Latine students. The authors examine how the teacher used proleptic language, which they define as language that invoked students’ imagined future identities as if they were fully realized in the present, to create a fertile environment to promote students’ academic language learning. Galloway and Meston employ positioning theory to analyze how the teacher offered proleptic bids to the students to position them now within the identities to which they aspired, such as college students, litigators, music producers, and activists. Acknowledging student agency, the authors examine how students variously took up, resisted, and reinterpreted their teacher's positioning acts. They argue that students’ agentive responses to their teacher's positionings opened up opportunities for students to engage in authentic uses of academic discourse and to develop critical rhetorical flexibility—or abilities to use their language resources flexibly and critically to support participation in a variety of social contexts. Based on these findings, Galloway and Meston propose the use of proleptic talk in academic language instruction that centers students’ own goals for language learning and their past, present, and future identities.
Shifting to literacy communities beyond school spaces, but still focused on identities, Addie Shrodes's study examines digital composing in LGBTQ + YouTube reaction video channels, including the composing practices of LGBTQ + people of color. “‘SAME GURL’: Political Feeling in LGBTQ + Digital Composing” presents an analysis of reaction videos composed by vloggers who identify as LGBTQ + that serve as a means to counter anti-LGBTQ + media that perpetuates oppressive ideologies and norms. Shrodes engages in virtual ethnography and constructs and analyzes the multimodal composing events comprising vloggers’ reaction videos and responses to them within a virtual queer-friendly community. These videos, and responses to them in the “comments” sections, are characterized by strong emotion, including humor, and so Shrodes explores the role of emotion in shaping how these writers collectively feel about injustice and write with goals of social change. Shrodes draws on queer and Black feminist theories for analysis, finding that the reaction videos construct and circulate the political feeling of radical joy, or willful and resistant happiness in the face of oppression. Going further, within this virtual community, radical joy is found to mediate satirical critiques of interlocking structures of power and promote the development of belonging in struggles for liberation undertaken by LGBTQ + communities.
“Sustaining Textual Passions: Teaching With Texts Youth Love” by Karis Jones and Scott Storm also addresses the important relationship between literacy and feeling, and the need to center, in asset-based ways, the literate lives of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) students in literacy education in school. Jones and Storm present a social design experiment study in an urban high school English classroom that intentionally brought together academic practices and students’ fandom practices. Drawing on theories of fandom and affect, Jones and Storm examine how affect was sustained and dampened as the class engaged with the popular television show Grey's Anatomy, with a particular focus on BIPOC focal students’ experiences. They found that affective resonance was dampened through the derision and dismissal of certain texts and experiences by peers, primarily white male students, and that this dampening was undergirded by dominant narratives about fandom and literary taste. BIPOC students’ passion for the texts of which they were fans was sometimes positioned as excessive, indicating a racialization of emotion. The authors also found that students who were fans of the show nonetheless persisted with a collective desire to teach their peers who were not yet fans about the show. Jones and Storm point to the role of respectful discourse between fans of the show and potential fans for sustaining “collective intensities.” They also observed other acts of agency by young women of color in the class who engaged in fugitive literacy practices, such as refusal to engage with white students who critiqued their passions, moves that allowed them to resist dampening practices.
The racialization of passion in the classroom in which Jones and Storm conducted their study is a reminder of the necessity of teaching students to recognize and address the many ways in which race functions in schools and broader social life. Annie Daly, in “Race Talk Moves for Racial Literacy in the Elementary Classroom,” illustrates the efforts of a white literacy teacher to develop her elementary-age students’ racial literacy as a crucial part of their literacy development. Daly's case study examines how the teacher used discursive practices named “race talk moves” to support students’ racial literacy development during whole-class read-alouds. Daly found that the teacher used four moves that have been previously documented in literature discussions: listening, participating, synthesizing, and challenging. Daly situated these existing discursive moves within a racial literacy framework, enabling her to notice how the teacher drew upon these moves in ways that were responsive to students’ racialized identities and emergent understandings about race. Daly's analysis further identified a new move, “anchoring,” that supported students in moving from surface-level conceptions of race to a deeper understanding of systemic racism. Daly elaborates that the move of anchoring is enacted by teachers’ actively responding to and deepening students’ racial literacy contributions, thus co-constructing critical race knowledge with their students. With a number of previous research studies illustrating the challenges and complexities inherent in white teachers addressing race in their teaching, Daly's study provides a hopeful counterpoint, demonstrating the moves white and other teachers can make to support students’ racial literacy development.
A focus on discourse and diversity in literacy learning is continued in the final article in this issue, “Teacher and Emergent Bilingual Student Read-Aloud Mediations,” by Iman Bakhoda, Tanya Christ, Ming Ming Chiu, Hyonsuk Cho, and Yu Liu. These authors explore emergent bilingual students’ talk-turns during read-alouds, how earlier talk-turns were related to later talk-turns, and how talk-turns varied across more versus less culturally relevant books. This study contributes to the sparse research on this topic in several ways, including providing a quantitative analysis of talk-turns, exploring how students’ later talk-turns might be related to previous talk-turns that are not immediately in proximity, and how talk-turns may vary depending on the cultural relevance of the text under discussion. Bakhoda et al. make use of zone theory to analyze one teacher and her four students’ read-alouds across two sessions using constructs of the Zone of Free Movement, Zone of Promoted Action, Zone of Proximal Development, and Zone of Actual Development. Their statistical discourse analysis showed that several Zone of Free Movement mediations (book/lesson/off-task) predicted comprehension talk-turns (developed connections/comparisons/contrasts). They found that the Zone of Promoted Action mediations predicted subsequent talk-turns in the following ways: (a) Reiteration/modeling was related to children expressing developed factual knowledge, (b) clarification/extension was related to children expressing developed opinions, (c) clarification/agreement was related to children expressing developed inferences, and (d) 11 talk-turns supported children expressing vocabulary knowledge. These findings emphasize the importance of dialogic interactions with emergent bilinguals to support their participation and success in read-alouds. The study's findings also hold theoretical and instructional implications related to zone theory.
Taken together, these articles are compelling in their analyses of the literacy practices and attendant identities of POC and the frameworks they offer for promoting learning spaces, in and beyond school, that is joyful, authentic, culturally responsive, and racially just.