Abstract
This qualitative study examines how youth participants in an ongoing community-based literacy initiative sought to increase awareness of racial justice among residents of their subsidized housing community in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in summer 2020 and throughout the 2020–2021 academic year. We utilize theories of racial literacy and critical arts-based literacy to examine youths’ engagement in 44 weekly two-hour-long Zoom sessions of the literacy initiative held between June 2020 and June 2021. Specifically, we examine how youths designed, facilitated, and participated in critical arts-based literacy projects related to children's and young adult literature they chose to read focused on racial justice. Findings contribute new insights into youths’ enactments of racial literacy, possibilities for art-making to support youths’ racial literacy, and the urgent need for literacy instruction responsive to youths’ voices and dreams, particularly during times of crisis.
Keywords
As youths across the United States demanded racial justice and organized protests in summer 2020 in support of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, middle and high school students we collaborated with in The Youth Voices Project (TYVP) wanted to contribute to these urgent calls for change. Yet social distancing necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic restricted youths’ opportunities to take action in our ongoing community-based Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) initiative in the U.S. Midwest. As youths noted during a weekly Zoom session, they experienced challenges in determining steps they could take to raise critical consciousness within and beyond their community while continuing to navigate challenges brought on by the pandemic that closed their schools weeks earlier.
Andrea and I were talking about the stuff that's going on right now. Like the Black Lives Matter movement right now. And we were talking about stuff that we could work on I guess.
So basically we were talking about what we could do to try to help spread awareness of what's going on. We didn’t really know what we could do so we were kind of stuck. So we wanted to mention it to see if that could be another thing we can work on as well.
After discussion, Jasmine and Andrea with peers decided to increase awareness of the BLM movement among residents of their racially and ethnically diverse subsidized housing community. During weekly sessions of TYVP, the six youth participants—who self-identify as Black, Lebanese American, and white—selected, read, and discussed children's books and young adult (YA) literature focused on racial justice. Three of the youths then designed and facilitated three critical arts-based literacy projects connected to the books. The youths’ work designing, facilitating, and participating in these arts-based literacy projects contributes insights into possibilities for braiding literacy and the arts in innovative ways that amplify youths’ perspectives and support their racial literacy during times of uncertainty and trauma. As Andrea noted in a group discussion, this work led her to understand that “our voice and dreams matter.”
Andrea's comment resonates as we consider how to support literacy researchers, youths, teachers, and teacher educators in negotiating the lasting impacts of pervasive systemic racism and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic while honoring and amplifying youths’ voices. We, therefore, examine how Andrea with peers attempted to take action and increase awareness of racial justice among residents in their community, with a particular focus on youths’ racial literacy. First, we note how the current context demands that literacy educators, education researchers, and teacher educators take action to disrupt systemic racism and inequities exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. We next frame our research as supporting and extending youths’ racial literacy and amplifying youths’ voices to generate needed insights for developing more equitable literacy research and practice across community and school-based contexts. We discuss our researcher positionalities and research methods, and share qualitative analysis of data through an analytic lens of racial literacy and critical arts-based literacy to examine the research question: How, if at all, did youths’ participation in TYVP support their racial literacy during times of ongoing crises?
Contextualizing Our Inquiry
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic and BLM protests of spring and summer 2020 drew the effects of systemic racism, oppression, and anti-Blackness into sharp focus, the need for literacy researchers and educators to enact change was urgent (Haddix, 2020; Marciano & Watson, 2021). Despite the U.S. student population's increased racial and ethnic diversity, teaching remains centered on whiteness (Love, 2019; Muhammad, 2020). Researchers argue that supporting teachers’ racial literacy is one way to address educational disparities encountered by students of color in today's schools (McArthur & Muhammad, 2022; Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021). Skerrett (2011) defined racial literacy as “an understanding of the powerful and complex ways in which race influences the social, economic, political, and educational experiences of individuals and groups” (p. 314). As Price-Dennis and Sealey Ruiz (2021) noted, such understandings about race applied to education may provide opportunities to “lessen the chasm between teachers and students” (p. 29), a concept we further examine in the theoretical framework below. Yet, even as literacy researchers have examined teachers’ racial literacy development, fewer studies explicitly examine how middle and high school students develop racial literacy. Vetter and Hungerford-Kresser (2014), for example, argued there is a need for research examining how teachers and students share knowledge to develop racial literacy. Contemporarily, McArthur and Muhammad (2022) have urged teachers to enact racial literacy as praxis toward social change across K–12 classrooms and teacher preparation. Our consideration of youths’ engagements provides insights into youths’ racial literacy development, particularly as ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and pervasive systemic racism continue to unfold.
Even prior to our ongoing times of crises, communities and scholars have long emphasized the relationship between literacy and liberatory possibilities (Coles et al., 2021; Fisher, 2009). Stovall (2020), for example, argued, “Learning to understand your conditions coupled with the ability to articulate your concerns across multiple mediums (literacy) is political because it is imbued in a set of power relationships that have often determined power for some and servitude for others” (p. 3). Thus, critical literacy engagements offer opportunities to name and disrupt violent systems and inequitable conditions. However, during the pandemic, existing inequities for students experiencing marginalization were exacerbated (Ladson-Billings, 2021; Richmond et al., 2020), and opportunities to support youths’ literacy learning alongside culturally responsive education were not always available. For example, Price-Dennis et al. (2022) found while educators felt an urgency during the pandemic to engage with social justice, they often dealt with resistance from administrators and limited resources necessary for online teaching. Further, immediate and uncritical focus on youths’ “learning loss” during the pandemic continues to overshadow what students gained, as well as the present conditions of schooling (Bullock & Grant, 2021).
Our examination of youths’ engagements in TYVP, facilitated online via Zoom during the 2020–2021 academic year when schools closed as a result of the pandemic, challenges notions of “learning loss” and generates insights into possibilities for supporting youths’ literacy learning in times of multiple crises. As Ladson-Billings (2021) attested, possibilities for reimagining education emerged from the ongoing pandemic, and research providing examples of how youths’ literacy learning was supported during the pandemic is beginning to emerge (Marciano et al., 2020; Sciurba, 2021). Our study adds to this growing area of research. As youths from varied cultural backgrounds came together in TYVP, they grappled with the impacts of racial violence and the pandemic. Understanding how youth participants developed their racial literacy while experiencing these challenges provides opportunities for literacy educators and researchers to reimagine literacy education as being designed for youths, not for youths, particularly during difficult times.
Theoretical Perspectives
Our examination of youths’ participation in TYVP is informed by theories of racial literacy and critical arts-based literacies. We present our thinking with and enacting of these theories and approaches with intentionality, as scholars have noted the varying definitions and dilution of these terms (Chisholm & Whitmore, 2021; Laughter et al., 2021; Oto et al., 2022; Pandya et al., 2021).
Racial Literacy
We situate youths’ attempts to forge new understandings about issues of race and social justice in considerations of racial literacy (Guinier, 2004; Price-Dennis & Sealey Ruiz, 2021; Twine, 2004), recognizing the importance of extending literacy teaching, learning, and research to examine and challenge racism. Racial literacy scholarship often draws on the work of legal scholar Guinier (2004), who conceptualized racial literacy as a tool to challenge racial liberalism through “decipher[ing] the durable racial grammar that structures racialized hierarchies and frames the narrative of our republic” (p. 100). Additionally, researchers build with sociologist Twine (2004), who conceptualized racial literacy to name practices white parents raising Black and biracial children in Britain used to impart antiracism to their children. Laughter et al. (2021) found both Guinier's and Twine's distinctive approaches offer nuance to how racial literacy works in analyzing and counteracting individual, institutional, and structural racism.
We move with these framings while building with Price-Dennis and Sealey-Ruiz's (2021) definition of racial literacy “as a skill and practice with which individuals are able to probe the existence of racism and examine the harmful effects of racial stereotypes” (p. 3). Specifically, the authors assert those who demonstrate racial literacy enact three tenets: They “question assumptions,” “engage in critical conversations,” and “practice reflexivity” (p. 22). The first tenet, questioning assumptions about race, involves acknowledging bias and “tak[ing] the stance that much of what [individuals] ‘assume to know’ about race is faulty and incomplete” (pp. 22–23). The second tenet, engaging in critical conversations, involves “focus[ing] on language, on how biases and racist attitudes are articulated, sometimes in an unconscious or dysconscious manner” (p. 23). The third tenet, practicing reflexivity, is “a cyclical process of (re)examining perceptions, beliefs, and actions relating to race,” through reflection to “make changes in our lives” (p. 23). Although these tenets were designed for supporting the racial literacy development of teachers, we are compelled to consider whether and how youth participants demonstrated tenets of racial literacy in TYVP.
Importantly, we consider racial literacy as “contextual rather than universal. It does not assume that either the problem or the solution is one-size-fits-all” (Guinier, 2004, p. 114). Moreover, while exploring the relationship between race and power is integral to racial literacy, racial literacy also “interrogates the dynamic relationship among race, class, geography, gender, and other explanatory variables” (p. 115). Guinier's (2004) conceptualizing of racial literacy involves intersectional analysis (Laughter et al., 2021; Oto et al., 2022), inviting youth participants and adult collaborators to embrace the nuance present in everyday lives. Further, we consider racial literacy development as iterative, resisting oversimplified approaches that frame critical consciousness as fixed and achievable even when acknowledging the fluidity of our lives and worlds (Bell et al., 2022; Guinier, 2004; Rogers & Mosley, 2008; Skerrett, 2011).
Critical Arts-Based Literacies
Although arts-based research approaches are an established tradition in education research (Barone & Eisner, 1997; Leavy, 2015), we consider how art-making may generate opportunities for creating and remaking social consciousness (Loveless, 2019) through new and historicized modes of art creation. Although art-making has been used to support students’ analysis of literature in secondary English language arts classrooms (White, 2019), such engagements often stop short of reflecting critical perspectives necessary in today's context of ongoing crises. We build with inquiries that utilize arts-based approaches and literacy research to engage preservice teachers in justice-oriented stance-takings (Broderick, 2015; Whitelaw, 2019). Whitelaw (2019) examined arts-based approaches in a literacy setting with two English teachers, while Broderick (2015) examined how preservice teachers cultivate critical arts-based practices in interpreting pedagogical beliefs.
We draw from notions of critical arts-based inquiry (Finley, 2017) and critical arts literacies (Chisholm & Whitmore, 2021) to define what we assert as critical arts-based literacies where youths use “the arts in a project of social and political resistance to achieve social justice” (Finley, 2017, p. 561). Our examination of youths’ critical arts-based literacies in the context of TYVP generates new insights into how youths’ racial literacy may be furthered through art-making.
We additionally assert critical arts-based literacy as resisting the notion that youths’ artistic engagements are solely supplemental to linguistic meaning-making. For example, the arts are often co-opted as an assignment add-on to reinforce previous lessons or discussions. As Chisholm and Whitmore (2021) argued, “arts-integration has been mischaracterized to ‘decorate’ traditional literacies learning or in service of more ‘rigorous’ literacies learning” rather than as “a mode of ‘thinking/being/becoming’” (p. 319). Across our inquiry, we consider youths’ artistic endeavors—different than merely demonstrating their previous learning in a new way (e.g., illustrating scenes from a book)—as possibilities for generating new forms of knowledge, connection, and communication of complex interpretations and realizations about ongoing issues of social justice, particularly in fostering nuanced understandings of racial literacies. We move with this forming of connection not only across people and ideas but also across recognitions of power and privilege in youths’ sense of “thinking/being/becoming” (Chisholm & Whitmore, 2021, p. 319) that are conjured and made apparent in the art-making and sharing process (Shields et al., 2016; Thomson & Davies, 2019). Importantly, youths in our inquiry centered their artistic interests and literacies, sharing art as knowledge-creation with their peers. Art-making holds possibilities for “transform[ing] perception and thought into images and teach[es] us how both to see and to think with our eyes” (Harste, 2014, p. 96, as cited in Chisholm & Whitmore, 2021, p. 319), shifting perspectives and ways of knowing, being, and perceiving.
As we seek to continue the challenging of the arts as neutral and merely decorative, especially in schools, we also note the racial and cultural liberatory possibilities of arts in education alongside what Gaztambide-Fernández et al. (2018) named as the field's reluctance “to reckon with its racist past and white supremacist present” (p. 2). Despite the fact that researchers, educators, and artists have long critiqued the arts and provided liberatory perspectives, arts in education in the United States often continue to marginalize and erase these perspectives, wherein “the arts” and artistic value and engagements are associated with Eurocentric perspectives (Kraehe et al., 2018; Kraehe & Herman, 2020; Travis & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2018). In this inquiry, we acknowledge that awareness and racial literacies may provide a reimagining through art, while also being aware of ourselves and the power structures within society. This perhaps brings greater attention to the need for—and possibilities of—a theoretical framing situated in racial literacies and critical arts literacies across our inquiry.
Methods
Data examined in this article are drawn from a larger qualitative research study of TYVP, an ongoing, multiyear, out-of-school literacy program Joanne established in fall 2019 in partnership with Patricia, the youth director of a subsidized housing community in the U.S. Midwest.
Research Site
Youth participants took great pride in their identities as residents of their housing community. The six youths featured in this manuscript generated the pseudonym “Pondside Houses” for the community, and often referred to it by its real name or as “the property.” Since they were young children, the youths attended programming at the property's community center together, including an after-school program and community events. The youths often discussed shared memories and frequently asked Patricia—who served as the community's youth director for more than five years—to join them in reminiscing about their shared experiences. The youths’ identities as residents of the community, home to more than 400 racially and ethnically diverse residents, influenced their engagement in TYVP, including the actions they chose to take and the understandings they shared about what it was like to experience economic challenges. More than 85% of families in the community have an annual income of less than $10,000. At a time when harmful negative stereotypes about children, youths, and adults experiencing poverty continue to circulate, we seek to disrupt those stereotypes by naming the reality of youths’ experiences while simultaneously highlighting youths’ strengths and amplifying their voices.
Youth Participants
A total of six youth participants participated in TYVP during the 2020–2021 academic year, the year from which data examined in this article are drawn. The youths were participants in an after-school program at the community center and volunteered to participate in TYVP. They are Andrea, a Black 12th grader (she/her pronouns); Elizabeth, a Black 9th grader (she/her) who is Andrea's cousin; Jake, a Lebanese American 11th grader (he/him); Jasmine, a Lebanese American 12th-grade graduate (she/her) who is Jake's sister; Alex, a white 11th grader (he/him); and Caden, a white 8th grader (he/him) who is Alex's brother. All six youths and their parent(s)/guardian(s) provided informed consent to participate in TYVP and an ongoing qualitative research study about their participation. The research study was approved by the community's leadership and the university Institutional Review Board where Joanne works and where Lauren Elizabeth and Alecia completed graduate studies. All six youths attended nearly every weekly two-hour-long session from September 2020 to June 2021. Alex, Andrea, Jake, and Jasmine were in their second year of participation, having previously engaged in weekly sessions from September 2019 through August 2020. Caden and Elizabeth began joining our weekly sessions in August 2020.
Adult Collaborators
Eight adult collaborators, including the three authors, participated in TYVP during the 2020–2021 academic year. Joanne served as project leader, working alongside four graduate student research assistants: Lauren Elizabeth, Alecia, Lee Melvin Peralta, and Ji Soo Lee. They were joined by the community's youth director (Patricia) and AmeriCorps Vista (Michelle), and a student teacher, Hannah Rosemurgy, who was a former student in an undergraduate education course Joanne taught. All adult collaborators met weekly with youths and held additional whole- and small-group weekly meetings to reflect on the previous session with youths, prepare for the next session, and discuss aspects of the research study examining youths’ participation. All adult collaborators attended nearly every session of these meetings.
Researcher Positionalities
Joanne, Lauren Elizabeth, and Alecia are former English teachers and current teacher educators committed to supporting and learning with and from youths’ sociocritical literacy practices in ways supporting youths’ self-reflection, study, discussion, and action concerning issues of social justice, including the BLM movement and persistent racism, without reproducing anti-Blackness (Dumas & Ross, 2016). As authors of this article, friends, and colleagues, we have an ongoing and developing relationality situated in discussing and understanding issues of social justice over more than five years. We note this important, continued practice of reflection, vulnerability, and challenge in our discussions, where we each examine and hold space for our multiple identities. In beginning and continuing this project, we often took a critical and educative stance toward each other and our collaborative work. These stances continue to be informed by our multiple and intersecting identities. Joanne's identities as a white woman married to a Black man, and mother of their two adolescent children, influence her sustained work in TYVP. Family conversations about racial identity and racial justice inform Joanne's attempts to position herself as a learner and to build with youth participants’ experiences and perspectives as strengths throughout our work together. Lauren Elizabeth is a Black queer woman who values attending to the relational in collaborative endeavors, especially within engagements fostering individual and collective social consciousness. In this project, Lauren Elizabeth frequently offered and invited the sharing of experiences to consider, question, and disrupt understandings of power alongside race, gender, and class. Alecia, as a white cisgender woman, is in a continuous practice of interrogating and understanding race, racism, and inequity. Alecia left our meetings critically ruminating on how we may create and hold space that fosters educational experiences toward envisionings of racial justice.
Project Activities
TYVP was initially designed as a YPAR initiative to support youths in enacting critical literacy practices, including collaborative attempts to develop research questions, engage data collection and analysis, and share findings from research about issues of importance to youths (Caraballo et al., 2017; Mirra et al., 2016). Alex, Andrea, Jake, and Jasmine, along with Andrea's older brother Bryon, were the initial participants in TYVP and met weekly from 6 to 8 p.m. in the community center. However, in March 2020, after the COVID-19 pandemic closed the community center where TYVP was held, the youths asked if our weekly sessions could transition online. As a result, from March 2020 to June 2021, all sessions were held weekly from 6 to 8 p.m. via Zoom.
Each session followed the same general format (see Table 1), with youths deciding whether they wanted to spend the main portion of the session—from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m.—in either whole-group or small-group discussion. During the first whole-group discussion, youths decided to pause their place-based YPAR projects (e.g., improving lighting in public areas of the community and renovating the community's basketball court) because social distancing requirements prevented them from gathering together in the community to enact the next steps in those projects, such as mapping areas that needed lighting and measuring the basketball court. Instead, the youths chose to use our weekly Zoom sessions to discuss and process current events, including the ongoing impacts of the pandemic and racial injustices. For example, on March 26, 2020, they started an online fundraiser, raising $7,500 across three months to assist residents in paying rent and utility bills and buying groceries and personal-needs items (Marciano et al., 2020).
The Youth Voices Project Weekly Schedule.
Times listed are approximate and varied slightly week to week.
After George Floyd was killed in May 2020, Jasmine and Andrea suggested again shifting the focus of our sessions, as discussed at the start of this article. Collectively, the youths decided to increase awareness of the BLM movement among community residents by starting a book club. Across several weekly sessions in summer 2020, the youths selected children's and YA books focused on issues of racial justice they were interested in (re)reading. Together, they selected The Undefeated (Alexander, 2019); Lillian's Right to Vote (Winter, 2015); Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-Ins (Weatherford, 2007); We March (Evans, 2012); Sit In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down (Pinkney, 2010); March: Book One (Lewis & Aydin, 2013); How It Went Down (Magoon, 2014); Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You (Reynolds & Kendi, 2020); All American Boys (Reynolds & Kiely, 2015); and Ghost Boys (Rhodes, 2018). Joanne secured funding to purchase copies of the 10 books for each youth participant, and youths read the books during the summer of 2020. Caden and Elizabeth read the books on their own time after they began joining our sessions in August 2020.
After reading the books, the youths spent the 6:30–7:30 portion of several weekly 6–8 p.m. sessions discussing the next steps. They decided to select one children's book and one YA book to purchase for community residents to read and discuss. However, three challenges arose. First, the youths were unsure which two of the books they read would best accomplish their goal of increasing residents’ awareness of the BLM movement. Second, social distancing necessitated by the pandemic lasted longer than the youths anticipated and they were unsure how to engage residents in a book club if they could not meet with them in person. Finally, the youths wanted to discuss the books in ways that were different from how they typically talked about books at school, but they weren’t sure how to do so. As a result, the youths chose to spend the 6:30–7:30 p.m. portion of several meetings reflecting as a whole group on their understanding of the BLM movement, examining specific principles of the BLM movement (https://www.blmla.org/guiding-principles) to determine which two books were most aligned, and imagining new ways to discuss the books and BLM principles that didn’t involve meeting in person.
As the academic year stretched on and the youths’ schools remained closed as a result of the pandemic, Alex, Caden, and Jake grew increasingly frustrated by their online schooling experiences. They decided to spend the 6:30–7:30 p.m. portion of several weekly sessions in a Zoom breakout room with three adult collaborators, Lee Melvin, Ji Soo, and Hannah, writing a letter to school officials about challenges they and other youths in their community were encountering as a result of online schooling. Andrea, Elizabeth, and Jasmine decided to spend the same small-group time in a Zoom breakout room continuing to examine the BLM principles and designing three arts-based literacy projects about the principles that incorporated some of the books the group previously read. Joanne, Lauren Elizabeth, Alecia, Patricia, and Michelle joined the breakout room, asking Andrea, Elizabeth, and Jasmine questions to further their thinking and sharing resources when the youths expressed a desire to know more about a particular topic. After several weeks of discussion, Andrea, Elizabeth, and Jasmine designed three different arts-based literacy projects that could be facilitated via Zoom. They decided to pilot the projects during the 6:30–7:30 p.m. portion of three of our weekly Zoom sessions with Alex, Caden, Jake, the authors, and additional adult collaborators as participants with the hope they could eventually facilitate the projects with members of their community. The first arts-based literacy project involved reading The Undefeated, then cutting images and words from magazines to make a collage reflecting understanding of the book's message. The second project involved reading poetry about racism and police brutality, copying lines from the poetry that resonated onto a canvas, and painting the canvas with watercolors. The third project involved creating protest posters in support of racial justice.
Data Collection
Data examined in this inquiry were collected between June 2020 and June 2021 and included transcripts from video recordings of 44 weekly two-hour-long Zoom sessions held from 6 to 8 p.m. with the six youth participants, including the small-group breakout room discussions; artifacts the six youths generated during the Zoom sessions (e.g., art, Google Slides, Google Docs); and transcripts from three individual interviews with each of the six youth participants. Interviews were conducted before, during, and at the end of the 2020–2021 academic year. All transcripts were generated using the online transcription software Temi.
Data Analysis
Joanne, Lauren Elizabeth, and Alecia completed all data analysis discussed in this article. Data analysis was iterative and ongoing (Luttrell, 2010). Beginning in summer 2020, we met weekly via Zoom to engage in preliminary data analysis. We wrote and discussed analytic memos (Saldaña, 2013) using Horvat's (2013) questions for reflection, including “What is going on at the site that piques my interest?” and “Why do I think X is happening?” (p. 109). We took notes while discussing analytic memos, returning to them as we continued to collect data during weekly sessions with youths. This iterative process reflects the dynamic nature of qualitative data collection and analysis. Our preliminary analysis called our attention to youths’ reflections and discussions about race as a generative research question, leading us to examine whether and how youths’ participation in TYVP supported their racial literacy.
After the 2020–2021 academic year ended, we reviewed transcriptions of the 44 weekly Zoom session recordings. We began by coding the transcripts using in vivo coding to amplify the voices of youth participants (Saldaña, 2013). Codes included “too scared to ask,” “get some of our feelings off of our chest,” and “we’re actually like doing something important.” We next utilized the three tenets of racial literacy (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021) as an analytic lens through which to examine the codes, highlighting instances when youths (a) “question[ed] assumptions,” (b) “engage[d] in critical conversations,” and (c) “practice[d] reflexivity” (pp. 22–23). Throughout this process, we discussed our application of the tenets to the codes to ensure we were applying them in a similar way, collectively returning to the data and the tenets to discuss any questions that arose during this process. We then entered the full youths’ quotations from which the initial codes were generated into a table and organized the quotations by the racial literacy tenet reflected (see Table 2 for a sample of this work).
Data Analysis.
Initial codes are a sample of codes used in data analysis.
We next reviewed each full quotation by tenet, returning to our research question to determine whether and how youths’ participation in TYVP supported their racial literacy. In reviewing the dates of youths’ comments, for example, we found that sessions of TYVP that included discussion of the BLM principles and sessions that involved some aspect of the arts-based literacy projects (e.g., planning, facilitating, participating) generated multiple examples of youths enacting racial literacy tenets. With this in mind, we examined youth-generated artifacts from those sessions and transcriptions from individual interviews with each youth to provide further context for their enactments of racial literacy. Our analysis supported us in understanding (a) the importance of utilizing a racial literacy framework when reading books about race to move beyond racial liberalism, (b) that enacting racial literacy tenets supported youths in deepening understandings of racism as structural rather than individual, and (c) that art-making supported youths in reflecting about and engaging in critical conversations about race. We focus our attention on these understandings in the findings below.
Findings
In examining whether and how youths’ participation in TYVP supported their racial literacy development, we found youths demonstrated tenets of racial literacy in overlapping ways uniquely situated in the context of our online weekly sessions. As Andrea noted in the introduction of this manuscript, youths’ perceptions that their “voice and dreams matter” in the context of TYVP supported them in critically reflecting about contemporary and sociohistorical understandings of race and racism, examining their racial biases and assumptions, and considering how to take action in their own lives to address those biases and assumptions (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021).
Moving Beyond Racial Liberalism
Literature written for young people offers opportunities to explore historical and contemporary issues (MacCann, 2013) while supporting youth readers’ racial literacy (Skerrett, 2011). In our study, examining children's and YA books in conversation with BLM principles generated opportunities for youths to engage in racial literacy tenets involving critical self-reflection and discussion (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021) while challenging racial liberalism. In one session, Alex said, My favorite book of the young adult ones was Ghost Boys. I think that one was the best book of them because it was just interesting how it went from two people's perspective, one that's dead and one that's alive. And I found it very interesting and informing.
It's about a boy named Jerome who was shot by a white police because his friend gave him a toy gun and the police officer thought it was a real gun. So he shot him without asking any questions. So he died and then there's this white girl who's the only person who can see him and they have to work together, even though he hates white people now. And she's trying to learn and understand more about what happened and racism and her dad is the one that shot him. So she's learning more about what her dad did and how it was being racism and everything and trying. And then she starts like a whole page and everything trying to stop it from happening. I don’t want to give any more away, but that's what basically it's about…. It starts off and it kind of reminded me of like this story of a while back of a guy, um, little kid carrying a toy gun at a park, then two police officers pulled up on him and shot him. Do you guys remember that?
Jake's summary of the text directly addressed issues of police brutality and racism while connecting the text to Tamir Rice's murder by police, pushing us to consider ideas that may have otherwise remained absent from the discussion of the book. Joanne then asked Alex if he could share why he thought the book was a good one for the community to read. He said,
I thought it was pretty interesting and it shows how people who are different have to work together for the bigger cause, because at first he hated her. Her father killed him…. He had to slowly realize that it wasn’t her fault what happened.… And she was showing him that she was going to try to find a way to solve it, even though he's dead, but she was going to try to prevent it from happening ever again. And he didn’t believe her. And I thought it was a really good story. That's why I think people around here would like to read it. The beginning is a bit boring, but when it gets to, like later in the story, it's really interesting.
Although Alex, Jake, and Joanne did not address perceptions of the white savior narrative in the book, their conversation extended Alex's initial consideration of Ghost Boys as a book he appreciated because of Jerome's journey and the multiperspective element as it called to other instances relating to the state-sanctioned murder of Black youths.
As youths continued to discuss the books during our weekly sessions, they further reflected about their connections to the texts and shared from their own racial identities, lived experiences, and understandings of their community. Youths’ critical conversations led to a collective desire to learn more about issues of racial justice. For example, while discussing The Undefeated, it became apparent that youths understood the book and racial justice more broadly, in different—and at times problematic—ways. This became evident as Jasmine shared: We need to let people understand why it's important that we all matter and that we’re still here to stay. We’re not leaving. And that everyone's voice should be equally the same…. No one should be valued higher than anyone else. And I feel like this book does a really good job showing that.
In response, Joanne asked us to pause. She thanked Jasmine for sharing, noting that it offered an opportunity for learning, pushing us to ask: What are the specific goals or outcomes that BLM is asking for? [Because] it's time for some voices to be louder than others…. [T]hat's what Kwame Alexander is trying to tell us in his book since he specifically chooses to focus on all-Black history in the book. I agree, Joanne. In school we’re taught the history of basically the white people and not the history of everyone. And I feel like we really should go over like the BLM movement's, like goals, because it gets lost in like text…because, like, you know the game telephone, you say the goal and you go on, and things get lost in context.
Alongside Andrea, Jasmine was one of the first youth participants who suggested we generate space to respond to anti-Blackness, racism, and police brutality in our sessions. Jasmine's desire for raising awareness of BLM and other social causes, such as the pro-Palestinian movement, was apparent; however, her comments during this session depict a dissonance that often arises as people first begin to have more in-depth conversations about racial justice (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021). As a Lebanese American young woman in the Midwest who often visits Lebanon, Jasmine may have been attempting to name connections she saw among anti-Blackness and white supremacy, settler colonialism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia. Still, we find it crucial to highlight this encounter because in decentering Black people, Jasmine's comments reflect perspectives of racial liberalism and could be read as taking up an “all lives matter” stance. A racial literacy analysis makes evident that using contemporary Black children's and YA literature reflecting antiracism and anti-Blackness without also using critical racial literacy invites racial liberalism, rather than combating it (Gardner, 2017). As is visible in Jasmine's response, one can hold contradictory perspectives that may go unnoticed without deeper prompting or in spaces where opportunities for interactive reflection and feedback are absent.
Deepening Understandings of Racism
Jasmine's suggestion that we revisit the guiding principles of BLM supported youths in deepening their understanding of racism as structural rather than individual. For example, discussing the BLM principles led to more direct and critical conversations about Blackness and anti-Blackness in our sessions. For example, when youths expressed a desire to examine what it means to be “unapologetically Black,” we traced historical and contemporary underpinnings of the principle by thinking with the texts youths selected to read, such as All American Boys and Ghost Boys, alongside other artifacts, including informational materials, music, and work by artists such as Kehinde Wiley. In response, youths moved from reflecting about books and multimedia artifacts to reflecting about their own lives, sharing reflections in critical discussion. Andrea, for example, noted our discussion of anti-Blackness and being unapologetically Black led her to think about times she walks the hallways in her majority-white high school, and people tell her that she “looks mean”: A lot of people tell me, like, before they were talking to me, “Um, you look so mean like every time I see you, you just look so mean you never smile.” And it's just like, well, like, you know, I don’t want to walk in the hallway, smiling all the time, but it's like, just because, you know, my face is the way it is. I didn’t really think of it as anything. But like now, it makes me question…
Andrea's questioning is indicative of “a move toward racial literacy,” what Sealey-Ruiz (2020) named “‘Archeology of the Self’—the self-exploration, probing, and understanding of where issues of race and racism live within oneself” (Bell et al., 2022, p. 3). Though here, Andrea is not naming where racism lives within herself, she is naming how racism has been acted upon herself through self-exploration.
As we transitioned to a conversation about resisting internalized, experienced, and institutional anti-Black linguistic racism (Baker-Bell, 2020) while embracing unapologetic Blackness, Elizabeth shared, “Teachers often assume that English is not my first language, but I don’t know why.” Andrea supported Elizabeth by reflecting about and discussing similar experiences, including one she had in sixth grade with her math teacher: I was asking her a question and I say, like one word wrong in my sentence. And she just kept correcting me. And like, I was confused at first because I’m like, why does she keep cutting me off? I need help on my math…. I feel like she still was like, understanding what I was trying to say.
As youths continue to endure the ongoing pandemic and news of racial violence, school shootings, economic crisis, and war, space to discuss and process social issues in contexts where youths perceive their perspectives are valued is urgently needed. Andrea noted our weekly online sessions, I feel like it's a comfortable space. So, when I feel like I wanna share an experience or something personal, I feel like I’m comfortable enough because there's like no judgment or no negativity. It's all like comfort and positivity.… Like even if we may not have the same opinion on things or we may not have the same view, no one tears each other down or no one says, well, your opinion is wrong or your view is wrong.… We’re all open-minded. So I feel like it's just very easy to share things.
Art-Making, Reflections, and Critical Conversations
When the youths first decided to consider how children's and YA literature could increase awareness of BLM in their community, Andrea emphasized a desire to “educate the youths” without it feeling like, as Jasmine called it, “a lecture.” Jake suggested they incorporate art-making into a discussion about the books. He said, What if the kids paint…something that they think of when they talk about Black history…[and] they paint their painting on a wood piece. And then with that wood piece, we create a bench and then put that bench or picnic table in the park next to the office to create another table. It's just something that we can look back at and say, this is what you guys created.
The resulting three arts-based literacy projects Andrea, Elizabeth, and Jasmine designed and facilitated (described in the Methods section) supported youths in questioning their assumptions through critical conversation. As an illustrative example, we focus our attention on Andrea, Elizabeth, and Jasmine's facilitation of “painting and poetry” with our whole group during one of our sessions. Prior to the session, Andrea, Elizabeth, and Jasmine asked Joanne to print and distribute copies of a collection of poems titled “Poems for Black Lives Matter at School” curated by the youth editors of Charm: Voices of Baltimore Youth, scissors, glue, watercolor paints, and canvases for youth participants and the adult collaborators living near the community. The materials were delivered before the weekly Zoom session began. Then, during the middle of the session (from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m.), Andrea, Jasmine, and Elizabeth explained how the materials would be used. They screen-shared a bright-pink Google Slide with the title “Stamped.” Andrea explained, “Stamped,” it doesn’t refer to the book. We took it in a different direction. So we decided [to call] this activity “Stamped” because it reminded us about sending a letter or getting a stamp from a teacher on an assignment. We connected it to the activity where we are going to place poetry over a painted canvas. It signifies us stamping down significant poetry that speaks to us.
Elizabeth's canvas featured the outline of a clenched, raised Black fist with lines of poetry around and in between the first (see Figure 1). She explained, I basically just drew this.… [T]he poem I picked was “Knees on Our Neck” and I basically thought every line from that poem was important and I tried to make it simple so people would focus more on the lines instead of the actual painting.
Elizabeth’s artwork.
Andrea showed her artwork next: a canvas with lines of poetry handwritten against a background of black, red, yellow, and green watercolor rows that blended together at the edges (see Figure 2 in the online, supplementary archive). Andrea explained how the colors in her painting correlated with each line of poetry she selected to create a found poem, remixing multiple lines from several poems in the anthology (Ayoola, 2020; Brown, 2020; Burke, 2020a; Burke, 2020b). She explained, I did colors that remind me of Pan-Africanism…green, yellow, red, and black.… The black stands for like our skin color…“rich in melanin, you’re pure…our skin will still be seen as a threat.” I used the red to signify the blood that has been shed…“we bleed the same blood…another life to mourn….” For the yellow, I used it as quality or status or how we’re seen, those who would judge you for how you look and what you are…“same smile created with sunshine and society shames her.”… The last one I used it for land. There wasn’t really much lines that correlated with this but the line I found was “My god, what country do I call this.”
Jake's art featured watercolor rows of green, pink, blue, and yellow with the word “change” written in black and punctuated with a period (see Figure 3 in the online, supplementary archive). He said, “Change—my font isn’t the best and this is my first time painting. I tried to make a rainbow. And yeah, that's my painting.” After a pause, Jasmine asked: “Do you feel comfortable discussing why you chose the color scheme?” Jake replied, I wanted to choose the whole poem, you know in general. Every line kind of stood out to me….every line, you know, kind of led to change…. [W]e need a change, people can say we changed in the years but I don’t think we changed, so I think we need change. Change, to me, is the number one answer with all this happening. With Black Lives Matter, with Asian hate, with everything happening, you know, discriminating the LGBT community, everything. So change is number one to me, I kind of like tried to put it out in simple text.
Youths, in making and sharing art, experienced new ways to enact tenets of racial literacy. As Alex, who provided an analysis of a youth poem (Burke, 2020a) in his artwork (see Figure 4 in the online, supplementary archive), noted in a later Zoom session, “People need to be able to express themselves through the art even if everyone is not an artist.” The following week, Andrea shared, “Art is a great way to express someone's emotions and how they feel, especially when some people may not want to use their voice or are not ready to use their voice.” Youths reiterated how art-making created space to process multiple and complex ideas and to make emotionality seen and heard in a tangible form. Art allowed for the translation of experience to occur in the process and product across persons. Alex and Andrea noted this phenomenon of sharing a felt experience of knowledge sharing and creation, positioning art creation as an avenue for everyone to use as a medium of voice, expression, and change.
Discussion and Implications
Our examination of youths’ racial literacies and critical arts-based literacies demonstrates the need for literacy instruction designed with youths, particularly in times of crises. As youths grappled with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing systemic racism, they invited us to follow their lead as they considered how to reflect upon and raise awareness of racial justice. In shifting the focus of their work to examine children's and YA books alongside the BLM principles and making art to examine issues of race and justice, youths demonstrated evolving ways of enacting tenets of racial literacy (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021) reflective of experiences and perspectives in three areas of interest to literacy researchers, teachers, and teacher educators.
First, youths reinforced the importance of making space for and listening to their voices in our attempts to support their literacy learning. For example, Andrea and Jasmine's exchange at the start of this article reflects youths’ desire to ask critical questions connected to their lives. Literacy researchers, teachers, and teacher educators should consider whether, how, and why engagements with youths generate opportunities for youths to share perspectives and desires. Further, it is important to consider how those shifts may be taken up alongside youths, particularly as doing so requires flexibility on the part of adult collaborators. Yet if the purpose of our literacy teaching, learning, and research with youths is to build with experiences and perspectives as strengths—as we believe it is—then demonstrating the flexibility needed to follow youths’ desires (Tuck, 2009) is a necessary aspect of this work. In classrooms, this may involve providing time and space for students to share their experiences and ask questions about what's happening in the world around them.
Secondly, youths invited new ways of thinking and building with tenets of racial literacy differently than how the tenets may be examined with teachers (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021). In focusing on youths’ enactments of racial literacy, we found that youths often initially engaged in the first two tenets simultaneously, questioning assumptions and biases about race through critical conversations that involved self-reflexivity, listening, learning, and sharing. Further, we found that youths’ enactments of the third tenet of racial literacy, “(re)examining perceptions, beliefs, and actions relating to race” to consider “where we need to make changes in our lives” (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021, p. 23), generated new ways of thinking about what it may mean to enact change. We consider youths’ art-making as action-taking and return to Guinier's (2004) considerations of racial literacy as contextual, particularly as youths’ attempts to increase understandings of BLM and issues of social justice in their community were limited by social distancing and the closure of the property's community center necessitated by the pandemic. We further think with Skerrett's (2011) assertion that “a racial literacy perspective admits the institutional and environmental constraints on individuals’ actions” (p. 314) and wonder whether and how we may have supported youths by more deeply considering what may facilitate or hinder their action-taking. For example, we consider how inviting community members to engage in critical arts-based literacy projects focused on issues of racial justice, now that most social distancing restrictions have been lifted, may additionally contribute new insights about intergenerational racial literacy development. Further, we understand the context of TYVP as one that brought together youth and adult collaborators with varied racial and ethnic identities, which contributed to unique opportunities to share diverse perspectives and learn across differences. Although we envision a future where youths and adults continue to collaborate across differences, we envision opportunities for youths in less racially and ethnically diverse contexts to also develop racial literacy through their own engagement in critical arts-based literacy projects. Literacy research, teaching, and learning focused on racial literacy development with youths and adults across a variety of school and community contexts are needed to generate further insights into whether and how youths and adults enact racial literacy in unique ways across multiple contexts.
Finally, youths demonstrated that art-making may reflect action-taking stances reflective of racial literacy. Youths chose to foreground the arts as they sought to increase awareness of racial justice in their community, working with and across poetry, painting, protest posters, and collage. We view youths’ engagement with art as generative in providing opportunities for learning from and with youths’ perspectives. In building with racial literacies as living practice (Bell et al., 2022, p. 4) requiring iterative formings of self, community, and collective reflection and meaning-making, youths chose to integrate art-making and sharing as a primary source of knowledge-making. Across our inquiry, youths invited multiple layered understandings of identity, history, and the present space, drawing on art as a core component of reflection and learning processes. We, therefore, encourage literacy researchers, teachers, and teacher educators to invite youths to spend time focused on art created with social justice movements as a framing toward remaking and contemplating multiple understandings, especially offering time to share in the process and explication of art-making. Taken together, our examination of youths’ engagement in TYVP offers new insights into possibilities for generating learning contexts that honor and build with youths’ voices and support their racial literacy now and into the future.
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Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors are immensely grateful to the youths and community-based educators who collaborated with us across their participation in The Youth Voices Project. The authors also thank Lee Melvin Peralta, Ji Soo Lee, and Hannah Rosemurgy for their work as research assistants in the project, and JLR's editors and anonymous reviewers for their generative feedback. The research reported in this article was supported by funding from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Education Research Service Projects; the AERA Division G, Social Context of Education, Small Grants Program; and the AERA Division K Re-envisioning Teaching and Teacher Education in the Shadow of the COVID-19 Pandemic small grants program.
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) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the American Educational Research Association.
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References
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