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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.

Keywords

educational justice feminist studies/research gender intersections of literacies race and ethnicity

Introduction

The Unnormal Sisterhood was an afterschool writing inquiry group for girls of Color (GOC) co-created and named by seven Black and Asian American middle schoolers, one Asian American high schooler, and myself, an Asian American teacher–researcher. Halsey (all names are pseudonyms chosen by the girls), one of the Unnormal Sisters, was a 13-year-old Vietnamese American girl who performed well in school, was well-liked, and had a characteristic exuberance and energy for learning, particularly about issues of women's rights and antiracism. She was, generally, outwardly cheerful, fun-loving, and social. In her club writing notebook, she scrawled the following statement:

It's a hard knock life for us. I really really really really hate school. So much that I wished it burns down to the ground.

Through a dominant reading of these words, a dominant understanding of early adolescent girlhood, and a dominant view of Southeast Asian girlhood (Lee, 2005), one might supplant assumptions about Halsey as participating in teenaged melodrama, about her being a “bad girl,” about her not caring about her education. I wholeheartedly reject these framings and lovingly take on a feminist of Color framework that, instead, seeks to legitimize GOC critiques of school as grounded in the combined strength of their embodied and experiential literacies. I invite a framework that takes seriously the ways GOC harnesses these resources to imagine and create the educational worlds they deserve. This is especially important in schools where GOC, including girls at the intersection of Black, Brown, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous identities, are continuously overpunished, ignored, and misunderstood (Carter-Andrews et al., 2019; Crenshaw, 2015; Morris, 2016; Player & González Ybarra, 2021).

GOC consistently leverage incisive critiques of schooling through its multiple literacies, including embodied and experiential ways of knowing and communicating. However, often, these critiques are disregarded or misinterpreted because GOC literacies are marginalized, ignored, and misread. When centered and taken seriously, GOC reveal themselves as hopeful and desiring learners who skillfully leverage a bevy of literacies to express their needs and concerns. Lived and felt knowledges of GOC make apparent how school has failed them and how they continue to persist in their learning, work, and future-building, sometimes in ways that are recognized by schools, sometimes in resistance to school standards. We must follow Nyachae's (2019) call to educators to “listen to what young people tell you about how they perceive their world, realities, and academic experiences” (p. 109) and understand GOC are telling us, have been telling us, what we need to know about their needs and desires for schooling that they deserve.

This article narrates an exploration of the question, What happens when GOC are invited to mobilize their raced-gendered literacies to analyze their worlds?, and specifically looks to their critiques and visioning around schooling and education. I will provide a theoretical exploration of a complex view of GOC literacies. Then, I will offer an examination of how the Unnormal Sisterhood used embodied and experiential literacies both to critique schooling and to express their desires for education, positioning school as a pathway toward accomplishing their goals and potentially a place to learn and grow. Finally, I will examine the ways the girls understood the Unnormal Sisterhood as a space of educational promise that built on what they brought to the space: GOC knowledges, ways of knowing, and educational desires.

Positionality

I partnered with the Unnormal Sisterhood as an Asian American woman researcher and educator. I am the daughter of a Japanese-Brazilian immigrant woman and a white American man. I shared some identities with all the girls—for instance, our gender, being of Color, and our urban childhoods. However, as a middle-class, East Asian, Latina, mixed-race, monolingual, adult woman raised primarily in the Southern United States, there are also many identities I did not share with all the girls. Thus, this work required me to enact practices of seeking connection, digging into the ways we were different, and positioning myself as a listener and learner with the humility to upend my own assumptions and biases, understanding the girls knew so much more than I will ever know about what it meant to be them—both as individuals and as a group—in the context of their school, city, and larger world.

Theoretical and Empirical Building Blocks

This work is rooted in concepts of GOC literacies, knowledge, and ways of knowing as hybrid (Player et al., 2021; Price-Dennis et al., 2017) and as blossoming from various sources, including experience, embodiment, culture, intuition, and relationships, in addition to what is considered “school knowledge.” These knowledges exist alongside an American schooling system that is rooted in white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, and which, too often, attempts to eradicate raced-gendered embodied and experiential knowledges in official learning spaces. Therefore, though women of Color (WOC) and GOC understand the world in exceptional depth—because we live in it, because we feel it, because we have received the ancestral stories of survival, because we hybridize school-based knowledges with lived and embodied knowledges—our full range of knowledges is underutilized in formal schooling contexts.

Embodied Literacies and Knowledges

WOC feminist scholars have articulated that literacies are embodied. They arise from the body, the mind, and the spiritual realms (Anzaldúa, 2007, 2015; Lara, 2002; Lugones, 2003; Moraga, 1983; Moya, 2020; Player et al., 2021). Lara (2002) explained that it is necessary to challenge the “mind/body split” and instead engage the “bodymindspirit” as an enmeshed site of knowledge, recognizing we understand the world on multiple planes, often simultaneously, leading to complex and nuanced theorizations of our conditions. So too, Moraga (1983) and Moraga & Anzaldúa (1983) conceptualized “theory in the flesh,” noting that WOC bodies are sources of knowledge essential to theory building. Lorde (2007) illuminated the “erotic”—“a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane” (p. 53)—as a source of knowing that aids our understanding, navigation, and survival in the world.

GOC understand and make meaning through their body, using, for example, gesture (Ife, 2017), aesthetics (Hernandez, 2020), care (Prieto & Villenas, 2012; Reyes et al., 2020; Valenzuela, 1999), creative acts (Brown, 2013), and spiritual understandings (McArthur & Muhammad, 2017; Muhammad, 2015). Literacy researchers have uncovered various ways embodied literacies play out in the educational experiences of girls (and other youth) of Color (Enriquez, 2011; Gutiérrez, 2008; Vasudevan et al., 2017), collectively pointing to the ways bodies are implicated in learning. Enriquez (2016), for instance, named the way bodies are engaged in interpreting and performing interpretations of texts, what she called “body-poems.” Particularly for raced-gendered bodies, these are monitored, read, and regulated within schooling contexts and, if read as posing risk to the dominant curriculum, are increasingly monitored and regulated. Paired with sociocultural understandings of literacies as expansive, hybrid, multiple, identity-based, and imbued with power within various contexts (Campano et al., 2020; Street, 2005), a recognition of literacies as embodied can illuminate the ways that GOC experience and analyze dehumanizing school practices (Enriquez, 2011; Ife, 2017).

Experiential Knowledges

WOC and GOC know what and how they know because they live, experience, and navigate this world (Anzaldúa, 2007). WOC feminists have articulated that the personal is political (Combahee River Collective, 2007; Lorde, 2007); our everyday lived experiences inform the way we understand our rights, what we desire, and what we deserve. Our “epistemic privileges” (Campano, 2007; Mohanty, 2000; Moya, 2000) position us to deeply understand oppression because we constantly encounter it. So, too, we are positioned to have sophisticated theorizations of change because in our families, in our sisterhoods, in our communities, we have experienced joy and liberation that exist outside of the strangling constraints of the imagination of white heteropatriarchy (Kelley, 2002; Love, 2019). As a product of these experiences, both with oppression and beyond it, we have developed multiple literacies of survival and thriving, literacies that help us to name injustice and to create change (Anzaldúa, 1983; Butler, 2017; Campano, 2007).

Resistant Practices Arising From Embodied and Experiential Literacies

GOC embodied and experiential literacies are mobilized toward resistance to raced-gendered oppressions girls too frequently encounter in their worlds, including in schools. Ife (2017) asked a series of questions that reframe Black girls’ physical responses to schooling. She wrote:

Why must Black girls continue to enter classrooms where teachers aspire to refashion their behavior and to forcibly eradicate loud, wild, and sassy expressions of Black girlhood, rather than “celebrate” (Brown, 2013) their vibrant spirits? Perhaps a Black girl rolls her eyes because it's one way she attempts to shift calcified pain throughout her body?… Perhaps she's signaling her need for creative outlet, a mythical opportunity worth of her sentience?

Perhaps a Black girl rolls her eyes to intervene against daily assaults against her humanity in hostile classes? Where being Black-and-girl incites dehumanization and despiritualization? (pp. 1–2)

Here, Ife prompted us to understand that embodied and experiential literacies are part of a complex web of GOC-resistant practices. These literacies are often hybridized with more traditionally understood literacies such as writing and reading text. As illuminated by Anzaldúa (1983), writing that tends to WOC lived and felt experiences is a mechanism of survival, healing, and truth-naming in the face of a world that constantly gaslights WOC. In the words of Lorde (2007), “Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (p. 37). Writing and other literate engagements for WOC can be practices that resist white heteropatriarchy because they allow women to utilize the bodymindspirit in a tangible and sharable way.

Importantly, it is not only what WOC and GOC say but also how they say it that arises from lived, cultural, and emotional knowledges. Koonce (2012) discussed the Black female speech practice she named “talking with attitude,” which is “used to show confidence or resistance in oppressive situations” (p. 28). These are practices that are misread, perhaps purposefully, through dominant white supremacist and sexist lenses to flatten Black girls as “loud” and/or “having bad attitudes.” As so many have observed, Black language is perceived as “improper,” “aggressive,” and “uneducated” (Baker-Bell, 2020; Flores & Rosa, 2015). In turn, Black girls are often disciplined for their resistant literacy and language practices. However, the linguistic and literate repertoires of GOC are powerful and laden with meaning and often purposefully rebel against the constraints of schooling and are leveraged toward rightfully naming a deservingness of worlds that love and respect them.

WOC scholars have developed a base of empirical work with GOC that delves into the multiple ways that GOC leverage their embodied and experiential literacies that arise from intellectual and spiritual wells. For instance, McArthur and Muhammad (2017) and Muhammad (2015) observed the ways that Black Muslim girls utilized pen and paper literacies as well as spiritual and experiential knowledges and ways of knowing to resist stereotypes and write toward justice. In her work with Latina girls, González Ybarra (2020) explored the ways that they tapped into their “mujerista literacies”—literacies born of a web of spiritual, lived, historical, and emotional knowledges—to engage deep analysis and understanding of their raced-gendered sociopolitical conditions and to leverage those understandings toward transformation and solidarity with one another.

GOC also partake in practices engendered from the (re)invention of literacies that hybridize both historical knowledges and contemporary popular and youth culture. Kelly (2020a, 2020b) investigated how Black girls analyzed and navigated racially oppressive schooling by leveraging “subversive literacies” (Kelly, 2020a)—including their engagements with music, art, literature, and conversations, as well as everyday—in and beyond the English classroom. Using Beyonce's “Black Parade” as theoretical grounding, Griffin (2021) explored how Black girls used their activist and cultural legacies of creating joyful spaces in the face of and in defiance of pain, while creating digital spaces that built on ever-expanding knowledges of technology and media. In addition, my own work (Player, 2022) found that through a host of embodied and experiential literacies arising from their contemporary lives and their hybridized immigrant and local identities, Asian American girls pushed back against misconceptions to claim outspoken, political, and unique social identities that transcend model-minority or forever-foreign stereotypes. Collectively, these works demonstrate that GOC are skilled agents of change who utilize complex webs of knowledges, skills, and ways of knowing to analyze and transform worlds.

GOC Educational Investment and Vision

As part of their efforts to transform the world, GOC use literacies to express a desire and vision for high-quality education. Their critiques are rooted not in an opposition to education itself, but in opposition to the inadequate education they’ve been dealt. Their feelings, not of rejection, but of the desire for better school conditions, contrast with many interpretations of Fordham and Ogbu's (1986) theorization of oppositional identities to schooling. Fordham and Ogbu theorized that certain racial and ethnic groups in the United States do poorly in school because schools serve as extensions of the dominant culture. Shifting away from deficit framings of Black students, they highlighted the dehumanizing nature of schooling for Black children and youth. However, their theories have been interpreted and used in harmful ways (Akom, 2008). Their theory of opposition can be read as describing a culture of deficit that frames Black and other minoritized students as inherently unable to succeed or like school. Further, their work has been used in an attempt to erase schools’ accountability in educational inequity and instead indicate that there is a fundamental dissonance between many minoritized students and school culture (Harris, 2011).

These theories of opposition can also obscure that academic knowledge and cultural knowledge are not diametrically opposed (Brayboy, 2005). In fact, there is potential for important synergy between “schooled” and community knowledge when schools engage in culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017). Historically and contemporarily, access to high-quality education has been at the core of many community struggles against white supremacy. Black community activists, for instance, are largely responsible for the establishment of free education for American children (Anderson, 1988). Further, educational access is often a motivation for the relocation and migration of minoritized and immigrant families into this country (Campano, 2007; Campano et al., 2016). These understandings illuminate the desire and fight for a culturally sustaining education system by and for communities of Color.

Thus, I align myself with Akom (2008), who suggested an asset-oriented approach to understanding youth of Color relationships to schooling. This framework reveals that community agency, knowledge, and political prowess are important resources in critiquing and challenging oppressive and dehumanizing school cultures. GOC do not reject school wholesale, and most do not see schooling in and of itself as fundamentally opposed to their culture (Harris, 2011). Rather, they critique dominant schoolings’ failure to support them or to set high expectations that align with their personal goals (Lee, 2020), basing these critiques on their felt and experience-based readings of what schooling has been and what it could be instead.

Methods

In commitment to centering the knowledges and ways of knowing of GOC (Evans-Winters, 2019), this project utilized methods that allowed for the Unnormal Sisters’ voices and theories to shape design, data collection, and analysis. As Evans-Winters (2019) suggested, research should piece together robust and diverse data viewed through lenses of nonwhite womanhood to build an understanding of the experiences and desires of GOC. At its foundation, this project was a practitioner research study (Campano et al., 2016; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), which allowed me to participate in ongoing analysis and shifting pedagogical moves that took into account the ongoing stated needs, desires, and observations of my research partners. Practitioner inquiry, as a methodology, positioned me not as a passive observer, but as a part of a learning community where questions arose organically from the everyday lived experiences of its members.

Sisters in Research

The research site, a K-12 Catholic school in a large Northeastern city, was selected because I had been working with the school and adjacent community center for two years under an umbrella research project into community-based literacies (Campano et al., 2016) and had, therefore, established relationships and understandings in the community. The girls who participated in this project included seven middle schoolers and one high schooler (a graduate of the school and active participant at the community center), all of whom identified as either Black or Asian. I recruited the Sisters using a flyer shared with all middle school girls at the school and through recruitment meetings with girls from each grade level. All participants joined voluntarily after receiving flyers and participating in the recruitment meetings. Because I had previously done afterschool programming at the school, I already had relationships with the girls who were initially elected into the program. The other girls who joined were good friends of those who initially signed up. In all, then, this work was built on established and growing trust-based relationships.

Data Collection

Data collection was designed to capture the girls’ talk, embodiment, relationships, and written and artistic work. From the 1.5 hour meetings, we held every Tuesday and Wednesday after school over the course of five months, I collected transcripts of semistructured individual and focus group interviews, transcripts of select group meetings (chosen because activities recorded were designed to be primarily discussion based), daily narrative field notes derived from jottings I took during meetings, and artifacts of girls’ writing and artistic work. These artifacts were gathered from activities across a three-unit curriculum that focused on identity, solidarity, and social action for and with GOC. Products from this work included freewriting in journals; responses to multimodal texts, including essays, poems, short stories, videos, art, speeches, and plays; art projects including collaging, photography, and multimedia drawings; and social media postings on our shared Instagram account. These sources of data provided a complex matrix of who the girls were, what they did, and their understanding of the world.

Data Analysis

To analyze the data, I attempted to seek both patterns and anomalies refracted through the lens of feminisms of Color. My analytical process braided together (Quiñones, 2016) multiple layers of analysis to engender meaning from the voices of the Unnormal Sisters. The first layer of analysis included ongoing analytic memos taken as I processed the data. These memos sought meaning through writing (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2008) by tapping into my own raced, gendered, and cultural understandings alongside various theoretical and empirical works I was reading simultaneously.

My second layer of analysis occurred in the form of inVivo coding (Saldaña, 2013), again, filtered through my theoretical groundings in feminisms of Color. Using Atlas.TI software, I derived codes that highlighted thematic patterns. I did an initial slow read of all data and established a large set of thematic codes that tracked the girls’ thinking, relationships, actions, and literate activity, as well as my own pedagogical moves. After rereading my now-coded data, I then categorized my initial set of codes into three overarching codes: Critiques of Schooling, Self-Love, and Sisterhood. Within these codes, patterns about identity, solidarity, and desires for schooling all emerged to tell a complicated story of the girls’ relationships to school, to the space of the Unnormal Sisterhood, and to each other.

I then did a third layer of analysis—writing to discover—which involved rereading data within the categories and writing about the patterns, anomalies, and changes across time as well as my current understandings and ponderings. This allowed for more organic meanings to arise out of the codes, transcending the rigidity of charts and figures. Instead, I engaged narratively, poetically, visually, and emotionally with the knowledges, the girls were sharing (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2008).

Finally, as I wrote this work into more concretized findings, I made sure to member-check (Maxwell, 2013) my understanding of the sisters. I did this in person when possible (I continued to meet with the girls, even after the formal data collection period) or through email and text when necessary. Member checks gave way to the co-articulation of ideas, enriching my findings through dialogue (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014). So, too, it gave the sisters ownership over how they were represented in the research and the opportunity to reject any of my interpretations that did not match their interpretations. From this multilayered analysis, the narrative of sisters’ critiques, hopes, and experiences within a space of educational promise emerged.

Learnings

The sisters leveraged their raced-gendered multimodal literacies toward both critiques of schooling as it existed for them and visioning of the education they desired. The following narratives explore, first, how, in the space of the Unnormal Sisterhood, the girls tapped into various embodied and experiential literacies to leverage critiques of schooling. Next, I provide insights into the girls’ persistent hopefulness for and high expectations of their own educational futures, despite the injustices they address through their critiques. Finally, I consider the ways the Unnormal Sisterhood attempted to put their desires into practice. These sections present not just only the textual literacies they engaged but also the embodied and experiential literacies they leveraged through literacies that hybridized text, talk, embodied expression, and visual, performing, and musical arts.

Critiquing Schooling Through Embodied and Experiential Literacies

Within the Unnormal Sisterhood, the girls leveraged their bodymindspirit toward incisive critiques of school, which they understood as a far cry from what they deserved. The Sisters narrated a schooling experience where the constraints on their bodies, and, therefore, minds, limited the possibilities for their intellectual flourishing. For instance, Diamond, a Black sixth grader, articulated frustration with the constant disciplinary measures she experienced. “We can't breathe in Ms. Z's class,” she claimed. I asked, “Do you think you can do better work when you are able to breathe?” She responded, “Mmhmm.” Shortness of breath is an embodied reading of the constraints her education inflicted on her. When her full humanity, including her bodily health—her right to breathe—was attacked, she could not learn to her full potential.

It's no surprise that the statement “We can't breathe” mirrors contemporary activist discourse. Eric Garner uttered the words “I can't breathe” as he was held in a lethal illegal chokehold by an NYPD officer. So, too, George Floyd uttered, repeatedly, “I can't breathe” as a cop's kneecap dug into his neck. Black activists have used this phrase to point to the literal and symbolic asphyxiation inflicted on Black people by the state. What Diamond implied when she said “We can't breathe” is that, like the larger structures that control the United States, school for her is restrictive and regulatory, and, although perhaps not always literally, life-taking. Through her bodily feeling of suffocation, she understands that schooling is not what it should be. So, too, through her experiential encounters with the fight for Black rights, she puts to use the language of the revolution in her critiques of schooling.

The Sisters wisely explored several ways their school attempted to strangle the use of their embodied and experiential knowledges—the ways they couldn't breathe in the classroom. In a field note, I wrote:

Diamond said that the [substitute teacher] didn't let them speak at all during class. Emily added on, “even during group work.” I laughed and said, “How does she expect you to do group work if you can't talk?” They shook their heads and rolled their eyes.

The girls’ storying and the skillful leveraging of the common GOC literacy, the eye roll (Ahmed, 2017; Ife, 2017), mirrors Saavedra and Marx's (2016) articulation that, by dominant school standards, silent and still bodies are seen as good, teachable bodies. Those that are not still and quiet are seen as bad, unteachable. The girls understood that by exerting control over them—by limiting their movements, their orality, their relationships, and their substitute teacher—was simultaneously robbing them of opportunities to collaboratively learn.

Teachers also attempted to exert control by using demeaning language targeted at students. The Sisters reported verbal harassment and being told to “shut up” by teachers. These discourses their teachers used to discipline students of Color framed them as “‘wild,’ ‘other,’ unruly, and in need of taming” (Saavedra & Marx, 2016). Seraphina, a Black seventh grader, wisely interrogated the emotional effects of these aspersions in a narrative in her notebook:

When I was walking to class and sat down the teacher automatically screamed at our class yes we were loud but she didn't even say stop she called us inmates and animals I don't think she knows how it feels when she does, that it makes me feel like less of a person.

Seraphina addressed dehumanization felt by youth of Color in schools. I want to emphasize Seraphina's use of the word “feel,” which indicates her critiques were not merely in the mind but also emerging from her body. Like Diamond's claim, “We can't breathe,” Seraphina addressed that there are consequences to her education that go beyond school learning. Her felt reaction to—her embodied reading of—her teacher's words are at the basis of her critique of dehumanizing teaching practices.

Exacerbating this verbal dehumanization was what the girls felt was an absence of care in their school. Seraphina directly critiqued this absence, proclaiming, “Ms. X cares nothing about feelings,” a statement that directly speaks to the rejection of the wholeness of girls’ bodymindspirit in academic space. Demonstrative of this lack of care, the girls referenced that they felt their teachers willfully ignored their feelings. Emily, a mixed Vietnamese Cambodian sixth grader, critiqued teachers’ practices in a short play she wrote. An excerpt reads:

Krystal sits and turns around to start talking.

Mr.

Jordan scares Krystal.

Krystal:

You’re a weirdo!

Mr. Jordan:

What did you say?

Sharea:

She said you are a weirdo!

Mr. Jordan:

You can get locked out with Krystal! You can’t come back til you give me an apology!

Emily demonstrates the tensions between students and teachers, describing teachers as scaring students, leveraging an embodied reading within the classroom. She further describes the denial of educational opportunities as a form of punishment when the characters are kicked out of the classroom. Folded into this punishment is an unwillingness of the teacher to listen and learn from the girls and understand why they reacted as they did. In the following discussions about the play, she doubles down, expressing a sense of dismay at teachers’ unwillingness to listen: G:

Do you think if teachers saw your play…do you think this would change their mind about anything?

Maybe, but some teachers, but some teachers don't care.

Yeah? Do you think there is a way to get teachers to care more?

For them to just listen!

Unsurprisingly, others highlighted this feeling of being unheard. Kathleen, a Black seventh grader, commented:

K: Teachers could benefit from this club because they could finally understand…how the students or…just kids in general feel about the world itself and about grownups and how they want to actually talk to grownups but not in like a bad way, like actually get their words out cuz kids usually can't get their words out to the grownups because the grownups will be like be “quiet,” “shut up,” stuff like that. So, I think that the teachers will understand how to talk to us more and be there for the students more than they are…. Listening and speaking to them in a good-mannered way. Not take out, not take all their anger out on them because of their problems, also. That's a huge problem also.

Kathleen articulates that adults too often put primacy on silence and obedience, rather than creating opportunities for students to express themselves and for teachers to engage with them respectfully. Kathleen's embodied and experiential reading offered the critique that a denial of nurturance in the classroom leads to misunderstandings between teachers and students. Of significance, Kathleen repeatedly addressed the emotional side of learning—the presence of the bodymindspirit—citing the importance of youth being able to express their feelings and how they are affected by teacher anger.

And, with this emerges a sophisticated critique: that there is a clear imbalance in who is allowed to feel and express emotions. As often occurs with GOC and WOC, the Sisters’ rights to feeling were diminished while their white teachers were positioned to feel and act upon a range of negative emotions, often leaving the girls as casualties of their wake. Seraphina commented:

I don't like when teachers yell at [students] and take away their education. And call them inmates because it degrades a person. It's not cool… You shouldn't, like when you get mad, don't take away our education.… So [I think teachers should learn about] kind of respecting students, seeing them as…human beings.

In Seraphina's reading of the teachers’ anger, she saw it as eclipsing everything that happens in the classroom, causing educational and emotional damage to the students. Seraphina gave the following example, explaining how a teacher threatened, in her words, “misbehaving” students: “Ms. X said we aren't going to have a graduation… The principal is just going to hand us a diploma. That's pretty mean.” Seraphina explains a cruelty that demonstrates teachers’ detachment from the material realities of students’ lives. To even threaten, youth of Color with canceling graduation makes evident that their accomplishments will, to some, always remain secondary, or even invisible, to what has been falsely established as their deficiencies. Seraphina's embodied reading of the teachers’ meanness, and the hurt she feels, illuminates that her teachers are failing to understand the experiences and emotional needs of youth of Color. Cumulatively, the girls’ critiques, born of and bolstered by embodied and experiential literacies, demonstrate that the Sisters understood they deserved more than school was giving them.

Striving for Educational Futures, Despite It All

Diamond wrote the following poem on a large blue sheet of construction paper during freewriting time one day: Free at last, But we’re really not Can the Earth be free at last War; fights; racism it has gotten worst Why shoot when you can shoot a basketball Why make fire when the sun rises! But its 2016 let's try and make it good Let's fight but over good Let's not break hearts Let's break the chain Last let's do it together Now smile.

Diamond's poem (edited slightly here for clarity) reflects the liminal space so many GOC find themselves in—a space between the oppressive and violent realities in which they exist and the hopefulness and future gazing they co-create (Player et al., 2022). This positionality was reflected in the girls’ embodied and experiential explorations of schooling, which confronted the realities of the unfairness of schooling, while also reflecting their commitment to educational futures.

When I attended an eighth-grade graduation, all the Sisters graduating that year wore Honor Roll sashes. They were also, by all accounts, generally liked by classmates, all of whom were of Color, contradicting an overgeneralization of Fordham and Ogbu's (1986) theory that academic achievement can be associated with “acting white,” creating fissures between successful students of Color and other classmates of Color.

Seraphina's attitude toward successes in school invite a necessary critique of an overgeneralized concept of Black opposition to schooling. She was simultaneously one of the most consistent critics of school and visibly and agentively proud of her Blackness while also being voted as class president and among the highest achieving students in her grade. She wrote about herself confidently and often. In one poem she proclaimed: I’ve overcame all but the fact I’m 12 makes it better if I would let that get to me I’ll be dead But I realize I’m awesome I can cook I can draw Im one hell of a package

Seraphina directly addresses the complicated space she finds herself in—one of potential devastation, one where she has been made to feel she might not survive—pointing to the ways the dehumanizing circumstances she is in affect her emotional, physical, and intellectual well-being. She addresses the way her Black girl body could be caused to perish because of the conditions she's in. And yet, she understands that, in spite of this, she is awesome. She is a creator, a nourisher, “one hell of a package.” This experiential and embodied understanding highlights that she felt deserving and empowered, despite it all. And she lived in this understanding, excelling in ways both sanctioned and unsanctioned by schooling.

Of course, there were some Sisters who did not do well in school, but this was not a result of not desiring to succeed. On report card days, the girls who were not doing well, some receiving F's, expressed frustration and anger that they did not receive higher marks. They felt anger at their teachers for not seeing the hard work they did in school. Here, it seemed that failure was imposed on students, despite their efforts and desires to do well.

This feeling of deservingness and aspiration was reflected on a poster about their educational desires that they created for a presentation on our learnings to an audience of women educators. As they worked on their presentations, they took breaks to add to the poster, a large red piece of poster paper on one of the unused tables in the room. Sometimes they wrote themselves, sometimes they dictated to me what they wanted to add. The final poster read:

We deserve schools…

That treats girls & boys equally

That allows us to express ourselves in different ways

That treats us with respect. Don't scream at us!

That has clean & safe bathrooms

That has high expectations for girls

That doesn't put unfair pressure on girls

That isn't over controlling

To have restorative justice

To have a comfortable environment

Let us be able to express ourselves

This poster makes it evident that the Sisters’ understandings of school were in many ways rooted in their experiences and feelings in school. The girls listed ideas that reflected not only a desire for rigorous education but also a desire for their emotional well-being in school. They indicated that they deserve schools where teachers respect them, where they aren't overly controlled, and where they are allowed to express themselves. Further, they brought up their bodily physical needs, claiming the demand for cleanliness and safety. This makes it abundantly clear that the Sisters did reject education; they did, however, reject schooling as it existed for them. Through lived and emotional interpretations, they dreamed up schools that met their academic, emotional, and physical needs—in other words, their bodymindspirit. And, in response, the Unnormal Sisterhood evolved as an academic space that built on what the girls brought, particularly their embodied and experiential literacies, to grow intellectual, emotional, and lived possibilities.

The Unnormal Sisterhood as a Space of Educational Promise

Guided by the needs and demands set forth by the Sisters, the Unnormal Sisterhood endeavored toward becoming a space of educational promise. Although imperfect and ever-shifting, as any educational space is, we attempted to create what Coles and Kingsley (2021) described as an “outerspace,” a space that interrupts and transcends the confines of white, heteronormative, patriarchal bounds of dominant education. Instead, it strove toward a reframing of what counted as knowledge and ways of knowing, celebrating the wholeness of the girls’ bodymindspirit, and giving space for girls to explore their worlds by putting those literacies to use.

The Unnormal Sisterhood, in many ways, reflected what Carmen Kynard (2010) theorized as a “hush harbor.” Building on the legacies of African American resistance, she defined hush harbors as a space, “hidden in plain sight” (p. 34), that allowed those involved not only to survive and find relief in a safe haven but also, in doing so, to actively theorize and disrupt “the reproduction of bourgeois whiteness” (p. 34). The Unnormal Sisterhood was a space at the border of schooling, like Foucault's (1984) concept of “heterotopia,” a space of otherness that operates outside of hegemonic structures, yet is connected enough to those structures to offer a space to critique and challenge them. Wissman (2011) has postulated that the writing spaces she created for GOC reflect Foucault's (1984) theorizations of “heterotopias” or “other spaces,” “in which he explores the emergence of spaces that acknowledge and affirm difference in ways that also comment upon and contest dominant or official spaces” (p. 410). The Unnormal Sisterhood occurred not only on the physical margins of school but also on the intellectual margins. The centrality of the bodymindspirit in our work allowed the girls to tap into their deep recesses of knowledge and leverage important critiques, create joy, feel cared for, and care for one another in the ways they described themselves as deserving.

Seraphina described the contrast between schooling and the Unnormal Sisterhood with the following:

Writing in school is ok. We give you a prompt, follow the prompt and if you don't you are in trouble… Writing in school is OK but it can get tedious because if you are doing it constantly, constantly. The thing [in the Unnormal Sisterhood] is you can do whatever you want. It's cool. So, I would prefer this one better because in school you have to follow something directly. I don't mind doing that, but sometimes it just gets annoying where you are not allowed to be creative or think on your own.

Diamond added, “In [the Unnormal Sisterhood], of course, you have to follow some instructions, but it's sort of like your own instructions.” The girls both indicated they appreciated the greater flexibility and ownership over their writing, Diamond specifically highlighting that it was not that there are few limits or rules within the Sisterhood. Instead, the girls were a part of that process of creating boundaries and making choices about what and how they would create texts. By breaking with scripted and narrow curriculum, girls were given pathways toward content, modality, and genre that tapped into their bodymindspirit.

GOC Knowledge and Ways of Knowing at the Center of Critique

One day, Diamond rolled her eyes at me while I was giving instructions for a writing engagement. I made eye contact with her and, by instinct, I exhaled a drawn-out “Woow…” Then, I paused. I said: “It's okay. You are allowed to get annoyed with me. I know I can be annoying.” She started laughing and then hid her face in a book and we moved on with the activity. At this moment, I tried to acknowledge, with care, that I understood that her eye rolling was valid—that I saw it, but that there wasn't a point in letting it upset me. After I acknowledged her eye roll, edge melted into laughter. My choice to read her eye roll as a legitimate embodied response to her environment (Ahmed, 2017; Ife, 2017) was an effort to understand that eye rolls, hand claps, outbursts of laughter, tears, yelling, cursing, and dancing were ways that girls were, in their full humanity, reacting to the world, making sense of the world, and expressing those understandings. The volume, tone, and physical movements alongside their words unearthed the girls’ full understandings and critiques. And, as the teacher in the room, it was my responsibility to take those expressions seriously and allow them to influence my practice, not injure me.

Authentically engaging in the girls’ critiques required me to recognize the full range of ways GOC analyzed and expressed their understandings of their worlds and, in particular, schooling. This meant recognizing that not only were their words laden with theories but also were their embodied responses. It meant rejecting ideas like “If you want to ‘succeed’: develop your reason, conceal your emotions, fragment your mind from your body” (Lara, 2002, p. 434) and, instead, seeing the bodymindspirit as a whole and robust source of knowledge. It meant embodying culturally sustaining (Paris & Alim, 2017) pedagogies that better understood and, thus, held high expectations and respect for students (Lee, 2021), forging pathways for critical work in and beyond our learning space.

Feminisms, Experiences, and Feelings at the Core of Learning

The Sisters claimed that part of their appreciation for the Unnormal Sisterhood was that they were able to freely explore topics and experiences that were taboo in most official education spaces. Ciara, a Black sixth grader, explained she liked the group because she had the opportunity to “talk about the things that [she] wouldn't normally talk about,” and named feminism and sexual harassment as examples. She went on to explain that the Unnormal Sisterhood allowed space for “talking about the things that happened during school, which be irking my soul.” Here, she names feminism, a theoretical territory that builds on GOC and WOC knowledge and experience, experience-based knowledge—things that happened during school—and embodied knowledges—what “be irking [her] soul.” Ciara's understandings of the Unnormal Sisterhood illuminate an effort to center GOC wholeness and bodymindspirit.

Halsey added that the Unnormal Sisterhood was a “comfortable place to share your feelings.” She explained:

We could all talk really in that there shouldn't be drama involved in it. That we can also learn a lot about gossip in this school, which is a freebee. And it is fun to do something after school to help us engage our brains and not be at home, be all bored, and complaining about it.

Halsey highlights the necessity of comfort around the sharing of feelings and stories. She speaks to the necessity of a “drama-free” environment, a place where the girls were not seeking to tear one another down or stir up bad feelings toward one another, but instead, to relate with one another as they shared stories, sometimes in the form of gossip, ideas, and emotional reflections with one another. And, as she highlights when she comments that the Unnormal Sisterhood was a place “to help us engage our brains,” the work done here, often rooted in experience and emotions, was intellectual work.

The girls also emphasized that a product of the work was a deep investigation into social justice issues. During a whole-group conversation, Seraphina reflected on the year, saying, “It was fun being here because you get to talk about stuff which you usually wouldn't talk to, about… We learned about social injustices, which I like, and that's pretty cool.” Halsey added, “I really liked hanging out with these girls. People. Humans. And I get to learn about a lot of you guys and even make some new friends, and I learned a lot about social equality, especially on Asians, like myself.” In a one-on-one interview, she also commented that she developed friendships with people she would not have otherwise been friends with and then elaborated:

The thing that was important was that we learned each other's ethnicity and race, and family background…. Like culture, and we learned about other people's culture are very important so you have more knowledge so you won't offend anyone else of that race.

Here, Halsey cited the importance of building a politics of solidarity from the relational work the Sisters did together. Halsey's understanding was still emerging, citing learning not to offend as the main benefit of this work rather than the development of solidarity or coming to a deeper analysis of systemic racism. Nevertheless, she provided an important indication that the relational work of understanding difference across intersectional identities mattered. This was work that provided a foundation for their evolving GOC politics. Giselle, a Filipina seventh grader, also explained her enjoyment of the club as based on relational as well as political work. She commented, “It was like this is where we had a fun time being with these girls and knowing them more…. And learn a lot about women's power.” For Giselle, joy was central to the work of building feminist politics alongside her Sisters. Knowing her Sisters and understanding their stories was core to her theoretical and political learning.

Traversing Genres and Modalities

In the Unnormal Sisterhood, diverse writing and artistic genres allowed for the creative leveraging of embodied and experiential literacies as well as textual literacies. Breaking from the highly structured and overly controlled school-based writing, these expansive literacy practices allowed girls to tap into a fuller breadth of their intellect and humanity. What's more, their multimodal literacies built on lineages of woman of Color intellectualism as well as contemporary culture, allowing the Sisters to reflect dynamic identities and communal and cultural knowledge (Campano et al., 2020).

The girls reflected on the ways that the different genre worked for them. Poetry often came up as one of the most important genres for them. When viewed through a feminist of Color lens, this is not surprising. For, as Lorde (2007) explained,

It is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless—about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding. (p. 36)

In other words, poetry can be used to explore the bodymindspirit and put language to GOC and WOC theories, observations, and understandings. Diamond explained that her writing not only benefited her, but those who read it as well. I asked her what she thought people would learn from reading her poetry. She claimed, “They’ll learn that you can express yourself, don't care about what anyone thinks, basically. You can express yourself if you want.” She understands that poetry has intellectual and expressive power in that it accesses the personal and gives the writer control of how they represent themselves, unencumbered by outside opinions. Further, when she says, “You can express yourself if you want,” she indicates an understanding that poets have agency in when and how they share themselves in writing.

Similarly, Emily reflected on the importance of poetry as an access point to exploring emotions in the Unnormal Sisterhood. G:

So, what would you say is your favorite part of this club?

When we write poems and express our feelings.

Mmhmm, and why do you like that?

Because it helps me get everything out.

…

So, what do you feel like you’ve learned in this club?

Like, to express your feelings, don’t care about what anyone else say, and other things.

Writing poetry was not a benign act for Emily. Rather, it served as a mechanism for her to process important aspects of her life by “get[ting] everything out.” As explored across this article, there were so many instances where emotions were devalued and even made taboo in the official classroom space.

Seraphina also spoke directly about her favorite modalities, claiming:

The poems are good. I like writing about myself. Um, I think one of my favorite things was the collage… Tak[ing] the pictures, that was pretty cool cuz you got, you have to fuse all the elements, the drawing, the writing, and they are all based off of you.

Here, she acknowledges the utility of multimodality, expressing her desire to combine words and images to create meaning based on her own identity and experiences. She highlights the importance of being able to center herself in the genres that we explored, and, for her, this was most present in the multimodal projects we did.

Ciara also spoke to genre, saying her favorite thing we did in the club was playwriting, explaining that it allowed her to explore issues of sexual harassment and reflect on her feelings about it. The girls collectively placed value on writing and text production that allow them to explore their emotions, their identities, and the social justice issues that affect them the most through a lens of personal experience. They collectively put forth the idea that writing that transcended the typical confines of school-based writing mattered for their emotional health and understandings of the world.

Conclusion: The Unnormal Sisterhood as a Space of Wholeness

Seraphina once summarized the Unnormal Sisterhood by saying, “It's a club where you can prewrite, predraw. This is like a creative place where you have people trying to help you do good things. And it's pretty awesome. Because the person there who runs it is pretty awesome.” Here, she emphasizes several aspects of an educational space that attempted to meet the needs and desires of GOC. She traces the academic aspects of engaging process writing. She emphasizes creativity as central. She emphasizes the idea that this work was aimed at helping the girls be good and valuable members of society. She emphasizes the importance of relationships in learning. And to her, collectively, these things create something awesome. And shouldn't that be what we strive for when creating an educational space?

Within the Unnormal Sisterhood, GOC aired their educational needs and desires in part because their experiences and emotions were recognized as powerful resources worthy of exploration because they were recognized as complex and transcendent of dominant monoliths. It was abundantly clear that the girls loved learning, writing, teaching one another, learning from one another, and exploring WOC and GOC written texts. Their educational growth matters to them, and they felt successful and expansive when the curriculum and teaching followed their needs and desires. During the Unnormal Sisterhood meetings, they were able to go on an intellectual journey of theory-building, political exploration, and coalitional justice work that was engendered by respect for their wholeness as thinkers, creators, and humans.

GOC can thrive in educational spaces where they are supported in expressing and developing, in their full capacity as humans with feelings and experiences, their needs and concerns as GOC. In the Unnormal Sisterhood, the girls demonstrated that the embodied and experiential literacies of GOC were pathways to explore, develop, and live their critiques of and desires for their educational lives. By putting their embodied and experiential literacies to use, they illuminate the ways that schools so often directly attempt to silence, control, and delegitimize their embodied and experiential knowledges and ways of knowing. And this work was cyclical and ever-evolving. When space was created that respected and centered their bodymindspirit, their critiques blossomed; as their critiques blossomed, the space shifted to be more responsive to their needs and desires.

It is important, then, to highlight that it appears that the silencing and marginalizing of the bodymindspirit in schools may be purposeful. The embodied and experiential literacies are the very literacies that illuminate the centrality of whiteness and heteropatriarchy in schools. If they are choked, they have less potential to dislodge systems of power. And thus, in resistance to a racist, sexist, heteropatriarchal status quo, we must promote curriculum and teaching that centers GOC literacies of the bodymindspirit. Further, educational shifts must be made in partnership with GOC, who are best positioned, as can be seen throughout this article, to critique schooling and offer suggestions for what it could be. Educators, researchers, policy makers, parents, and community members can and should take heed of the ways girls are building critiques and visions of schooling through their multiple literacies. Perhaps then we can create conditions where GOC are able to flourish in educational spaces that celebrate them, that take their knowledge in all forms seriously, and that provide bridges to the opportunities they fight so hard for. Perhaps we can create spaces that allow girls to thrive as they strive.

In general, too many GOC will continue to go to schools where their educational dreams are not a reality. As demonstrated by current attempts to ban antiracist books, attacks on critical race theory, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigrant educational legislation, and the persistence of standardized testing and curriculum, there are powerful and loud voices that work against the freedom GOC deserve and desire in schools. And, thus, as we continue to wage a fight toward educational freedom, we must build and maintain spaces beyond formal schooling for GOC and other marginalized youth to thrive in bodymindspirit.

Halsey claimed that she hoped that my research would “show people that kids can actually do stuff, do strong, independent stuff and they don't need an adult all the time, that…they can show strength through independence.” Cumulatively, the girls’ reflections clarify their felt need for a curriculum that valued their knowledge and ways of knowing, that pushed them to develop that knowledge and those ways of knowing, that cared for them, and that trusted them. It has been time for us to lean in and listen to GOC in order to reframe our understandings of girlhoods of Color, including how we push beyond gender binaries, and how GOC leverage embodied and experiential literacies toward critiques of schooling. As Wun (2018) said:

I suggest that schools begin to examine the complexities of girls’ lives by reframing the problem. Instead of seeing them as the problem, the girls’ narratives reveal that there are larger problems that may elicit anger, necessitating their agentic assertions and resistance. The girls’ narratives suggest that the problems do not lie with them, but are embedded in the structures of school that govern their lives. (pp. 12–13)

If aided by a broadening recognition of their multiple literacies, we understand GOC as sophisticated knowers, seekers, and visionaries, perhaps we can create schools where GOC are not forced to engage in ongoing struggles to succeed in a system that doesn't love them.

Supplemental Material

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Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Grace D. Player

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