Nurturing the Literacy Lives of Boys of Color During COVID-19

Abstract

When school buildings closed suddenly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, educators relied on families more than ever to mediate their children's learning. This yearlong case study details the narratives of 14 Black and Latinx families as they negotiated literacy practices with their teenage sons during remote schooling. This study finds that families bolstered their sons’ literacies through dimensions of family literacy care, a notion developed by the author to describe the material, emotional, embodied, and digital mentoring exchanged between caregivers and boys around literacy practices at home. Entangled in these narratives are the complex ways that families enacted their roles as caregivers and teachers during the pandemic, and in turn, how boys acquiesced to and resisted their parents’ attempts at family literacy care. These findings texture and advance the field of family literacy scholarship to understand better the varied ways boys orient toward (and away from) texts in their family context.

Keywords

family/home-school-community connections race and ethnicity adolescent literacy

When school buildings closed in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the imagined divide between home and school literacies was finally obscured (Compton-Lilly et al., 2020). Once physically disparate contexts, households and classrooms abruptly became entangled spaces for learning. Suddenly, families witnessed their children's schoolwork firsthand and developed new viewpoints on their education. Schools renewed their focus on family involvement, surfacing long-held associations between family engagement and student success (Mapp & Bergman, 2021). Extended time out of school has certainly shifted family dynamics around literacy learning in the home, and yet those experiences have been hard to grasp given all the variables leading to the unique impacts of COVID-19 on schooling and society. Although the study of family involvement in children's schooling is not new, the pandemic brought its significance front and center. It is essential to look critically at this renewed interest in home learning contexts given the prevalence of negative bias toward home practices of families of color.

Long before the coronavirus consumed the attention of the globe, much of the educational scholarship and school-wide family engagement initiatives aimed at families of color were laden with deficit-based perspectives (Allen & White-Smith, 2018). Even well-intentioned efforts often defined Black and Latinx families by what they did not have or did not do in the home. Enmeshed within these definitions were assumptions that framed Black and Latinx families as suffering from “weak” language skills such as lacking robust vocabulary (Fernald et al., 2013) and complex syntactic structures (Huttenlocher et al., 2010). These efforts were fraught with beliefs that Black and Latinx families had low levels of “home learning environments” such as parents’ behavior toward their children, capacity to purchase enough materials to stimulate learning, and investment in their children's homework due to lack of knowledge, skills, and time (Chazen-Cohen et al., 2009; Hwang & Connor, 2020, Mistry et al., 2010).

Similarly, the American media and popular culture have long spun narratives of failure about Black and Brown adolescent boys, associating them with statistics about illiteracy, deviance, and dropout rates (Kirkland, 2013; López, 2002; Sullivan & Bal, 2013). According to the newspapers, these patterns emerge as early as preschool and foreshadow problems associated with boys of color in secondary school. Intersections of racial, ethnic, and gender expectations about boys of color contribute to the problematic discourse of what literacy and schooling mean in relation to Black and Latinx boyhood and masculinity (Dumas & Nelson, 2016; López, 2002). With Black boys more often constructed in popular imagery as athletes than as scholars (Carey, 2015), and Latinx boys perceived as obedient, yet macho, potential manual laborers (Noguera et al., 2013), boys of color must undo harmful images of themselves to imagine themselves as readers and writers. These long-standing portrayals of Black and Brown families and teenage boys are etched into school attitudes and continue to fuel panic about parents’ ability to combat their children's “learning loss” during the pandemic. Through the repetition of these negative assumptions in the literature and across school districts, educators are conditioned to normalize narratives that suggest the “brokenness” of Black and Brown families and their teenage sons, particularly during the pandemic, when teachers relied on caregivers to mediate learning (Carey, 2015; Dumas & Nelson, 2016).

What would happen if, as researchers, we interrogated these assumptions by looking closely at the articulated experiences of Black and Brown families as they navigated the unique educational challenges of a year textured by job losses, the murder of George Floyd, protests over racial injustice, an insurrection in the nation's capital, and the tangible health threat of COVID-19? Taking this charge seriously, this article foregrounds the perspectives of 14 Black and Brown boys¹ and their families² as they navigated literacy learning across spaces of home, remote schooling, and virtual book clubs. This ethnographic case study occurred between March 2020 and March 2021, during the unprecedented historical context of sudden and widespread remote learning. Because literacy is often considered the pathway to educational success and families are often implicated in their children's literacy skills, this article explores the complex at-home literacy relationships between middle school boys and their families. In so doing, I examine the care practices that foster or discourage the values and skills surrounding the literacy practices of boys of color. In contrast to common misconceptions about the lack of involvement of Black and Brown parents in their children's schooling, this article contends that parents enacted teacher roles at home to promote their boys’ literacy development because they believed reading and writing were integral to their boys’ academic success and employment opportunities. In response, the boys resisted their caregivers’ attempts to play teacher and sought out their own literacies sub rosa in virtual gaming spaces to cope with the social isolation of the COVID-19 lockdown. This study asked: How did families support and constrain their boys’ engagement(s) with literacy during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Literacy Sponsorship, Community Cultural Wealth, and Family Literacy Care

As a researcher, my work is grounded in sociocultural theories of literacy. I understand literacy practices as shaped by a constellation of familial, racial, and contextual factors that involve novels, religious texts, homework, cell phones, video games, and Zoom classrooms occurring across schools, homes, and communities (Gee, 2010). In this article, I draw on the concepts of literacy sponsorship (Brandt, 1998) and community cultural wealth (CCW; Yosso, 2005) to advance a new notion, family literacy care, to trace the cultural, affective, and relational dimensions of family–child interactions around literacy during the pandemic.

Literacy Sponsorship

Literacy sponsorship, as Brandt (1998) suggested, is the activity of enculturating people into the reading, writing, and social practices of distinct groups. When these groups “sponsor” children to read and write, they also teach them to talk, know, value, and participate in literacy practices in certain ways (Brandt, 1998). Literacy sponsors are not only people but they can also be tools, materials, and spaces that facilitate a contextualized kind of literacy learning for individuals. Brandt wrote: “Sponsors…are any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way” (p. 166). Brandt (1998), and subsequent researchers interested in sponsorship, concluded that autobiographical accounts, as told through interviews, describe influential experiences in which literacy learning happened (Lawrence, 2015; Smith et al., 2020; Wargo & De Costa, 2017). By advancing understanding of the literacy sponsorship that occurs through human actors in the home, this inquiry is intended to contribute to the discourse about family–child dynamics in literacy learning in the early adolescent years.

Community Cultural Wealth

Although Brandt's (1998) concept of literacy sponsorship is powerful, I found that it was insufficient to capture the experiences of families of color in the context of mandated remote schooling, when teachers relied so heavily on families to facilitate learning. To address this issue, my analysis also weaves in Yosso's (2005) CCW framework, which draws from critical race theory and advances six forms of resources and capital that communities of color maintain. As one of the six facets of Yosso's CCW framework, familial capital signals the importance of the cultural knowledge nurtured among family and employed by students to gain better economic standing and social positioning. This familial capital is rooted in a particular history, memory, and cultural intuition (Yosso, 2005, p. 79). For instance, Cuevas (2019) detailed how Latinx parents employed family capital by highlighting the sacrifices that Latinx parents made—such as giving up expensive medication to afford a child's SAT preparation class—to support their children's schooling. Similarly, Allen and White-Smith (2018) found that Black mothers refused to acquiesce to the disciplinary measures being used against their sons in school and activated considerable cultural wealth in circumventing the expulsion hearing processes by creating the space and time needed to garner support and expertise from their community. Looking through a CCW lens means challenging deficit theorizing about Black and Latinx communities. Instead, it means focusing on the knowledge that communities of color do possess.

Family Literacy Care

I found that neither Brandt's (1998) nor Yosso's (2005) concepts fully captured the tenderness that so thickened the family dynamics around literacy in the first year of the pandemic. To address this, I built on Brandt's and Yosso's concepts to develop the notion of familial literacy care as a way to trace the cultural, affective, and relational mentoring exchanged between caregivers and students of color through dialogue, practices, and values that influence children's orientations to texts. In so doing, I examine how Black and Latinx families—as caregivers and mentors—utilized their knowledge to set parameters around literacy for their sons at the same time that they negotiated family relationships, digital tools, schoolwork, and emotions, all within the context of the continued threat of COVID-19 and the onslaught against Black lives. The notion of family literacy care implies not only a relation to specific texts but also a relation to the family and community—it implies becoming a full participant, a member, a kind of person. By mobilizing familial literacy care, I seek to draw attention to the complex forms of knowledge and support that families of color employed when they assumed greater teacher roles than ever before to facilitate remote learning during the first year of the pandemic.

Review of Literature

In this section, I review a number of areas in the scholarship related to this study. First, I draw on scholars who have investigated family literacies (Compton-Lilly et al., 2012; Compton-Lilly et al., 2020). Then, I think with scholars who have explored school-wide perceptions of Black and Latinx families (Allen & White-Smith, 2018; López, 2002; Marsh & Noguera, 2018; Oliveira et al., 2021), and finally, I outline scholars who have explored the digital literacies of families of color (Lewis, 2013; Lewis Ellison & Wang, 2018).

Family Literacies

It is widely believed that literate people are more intelligent, more suitable for employment, and therefore, more likely to overcome poverty than those without literacy skills (Gee, 2010; Street, 1984). Given this, children's literacy skills have long been prioritized by schools as they are associated with opportunities for individual transformation and social mobility. Family literacy scholarship emerged as an inquiry into children's early orientations to texts in their homes and investigated an array of practices such as lap reading, bedtime routines, and oral storytelling (Compton-Lilly et al., 2012). All of these early descriptive studies suggested that the parent–child interactions in the home played a significant role in how children understood the functions of literacy practices, which, in turn, influenced their academic development and achievement. Although a large body of family literacy scholarship recognizes the range of literacy practices found in diverse families and highlights parents’ agency as they support their children (Compton-Lilly & Delbridge, 2019; Kirkland & Jackson, 2009; Tatum & Muhammad, 2012), many of these ethnographic investigations have missed the complexity of the family–child relationship, the technologies involved, and the racialized and ethnic contexts that mediated the expressions of literacy learning today (Compton-Lilly et al., 2012; Compton-Lilly et al., 2020). This article talks about these contextual aspects of family literacy learning during a time when “in school” literacies were fostered in students’ homes, and when traditionally printed texts were scanned in and consumed digitally during the COVID-19 quarantine.

Perceptions of Families of Color

Another relevant body of literature has documented and challenged long-standing negative perceptions about families of color and their ability to support their children's educational achievement (Cuevas, 2019; Edwards, 2016; Kirkland, 2013; Lopez-Robertson, 2017). These scholars have traced how the school—as an institution—often conducted literacy education with the expectation that caregivers of color either would not or could not be involved because of ignorance, apathy, lack of English proficiency, or time limitations (Cherng, 2016; Oliveira et al., 2021). In their ethnographic investigation, Allen and White-Smith (2018) challenged these beliefs by documenting the counterstories of Black and working-class mothers and illustrating how they met rejection even when attempting to utilize the school's recommended communication tools or participate on parent committees. Similarly, Black and Latinx boys often encounter negative assumptions about their cognitive and behavioral abilities in school. For example, Marsh and Noguera (2018) highlighted how teachers, who are predominantly white and female, often draw upon racial stereotypes and pathologize Black boys as intimidating, aggressive, and culturally deficient. Along with related lines, López (2002) examined how Dominican boys were viewed in secondary school as threatening and potential problem students, whereas girls were treated in a more sympathetic fashion. López posited that the boys’ concrete lived experiences with race and gender processes throughout their lives led them to articulate doubts about their prospects to further their schooling. What this study contributes to the scholarship is an antideficit approach to gaining deeper insight into how Black and Latinx families nurture their sons’ literacies in ways that are often less understood or ignored by schools.

Family Digital Literacies

To a great extent, the COVID-19 quarantine meant that people experienced multiple activities that were previously embodied in real life (like going to school) as, instead, mediated by the computer screen. Given this, it is important for this study to consider scholarship on families and their children's digital literacy practices. Lewis (2013) defined digital literacies as multiple and interactive practices, mediated by technological tools such as the computer, cell phones, and video games, that involve reading, writing, language, and exchanging information in online environments. In their case study of two African American mother–son dyads, Lewis Ellison and Wang (2018) investigated the push–pull dynamic between mother and son while collaborating on a digital story and how their interactions caused tensions of resistance and redirecting. Lewis Ellison and Wang highlighted how mothers nurtured their sons’ literacies by providing various supports and instilling agency. Lewis (2011) detailed one Black mother's “symmetrical power relationship” with her sons as they interacted on a computer together, each one apprenticing the other in a different aspect of digital literacy learning. These few studies describe how literacy, particularly digital literacy, influences families, specifically as linked to how they talk, express intimacy, and identify themselves on a daily basis.

At present, family literacies have shifted in unimaginable ways during remote learning brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although more research on this topic is surely emergent, so far academic studies have focused largely on the experiences of teachers and administrators (e.g., Johnson et al., 2020; Primdahl et al., 2021) or of parents and children separately (e.g., Bhamani et al., 2020; Literat, 2021). Missing from these discussions are the perspectives of Black and Brown families who were navigating online school during the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism. We need research that reveals the ways families interacted with one another around their students’ literacy practices, and simultaneously contests assumptions about the involvement of Black and Latinx parents in their children's schooling. Building on work that has explored the use of printed and digital texts in the home, this article contributes to scholarship by attuning to how Black and Latinx families and sons interacted with a breadth of literacies—ranging from reading PDFs on borrowed Chromebooks from school to writing essays on Google documents, to text messaging on cell phones, to participating in virtual video-gaming communities.

Methods

Consistent with this study's sociocultural approach to literacy research, I employed a qualitative research design that utilized what Stake (2004) called an “ethnographic case study.” In this section, I describe the research context and focal participants, detail my methods, and document my positionality as a researcher.

Research Context

This article draws on data generated from a larger, yearlong study tracing the literacy lives of boys of color and their families in the COVID-19 crisis. Specifically, I examined 14 caregiver–child cases with a focus on their relationship around literacy practices in the home by (a) interviewing boys and parents over Zoom about their literacy experiences; (b) observing the boys during the online book clubs I facilitated; (c) observing the boys during their online English lessons in school; and (d) personal communications with parents and teachers throughout the year. All interviews and observations in this study took place over Zoom while participants were in their homes and in virtual book clubs. This article draws in particular on the 14 interviews with boys, 14 interviews with their families, and frequent personal communication with caregivers. For the purposes of this article, the interviews and personal communication best reflected the dimensions of care occurring between caregivers and children in the participants’ homes.

Recruitment and Participants

Participating students and families came from three urban charter schools in underserved communities in the Northeastern United States. As a former English teacher, I relied on network sampling (Merriam, 1998) to reconnect with previous colleagues with the hope that they could introduce me to school personnel who may be interested in my research. Through these connections, I then met with teachers and principals across three middle schools, all of whom were enthusiastic about the idea of starting book clubs during the pandemic, in part because they believed it would create learning opportunities for middle schoolers who were labeled as “falling behind” or “in danger of grade retention” (their words, not my own). Through “purposeful selection” (Maxwell, 2013, p. 97) based on recommendations from school administration, I selected 14 boys, ages 11–16 (see Table 1), to participate in the book clubs outside of the online school day. Classroom teachers reached out to specific caregivers and students to explain my project and request consent for participation. All 14 caregivers consented to the project with the understanding that I would focus on school texts and standards. All 14 caregivers were the biological parents of the boys in the study. The boys were perceived by their teachers to be “struggling” readers or to have “resistant” attitudes to literacy, meaning they were considered in need of remediation or defiant when asked to complete English assignments. The participants identified as Black and Latinx males and reflected the larger racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic demographic of the schools, whose student population was characterized as predominantly Black and Latinx children who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch programs.

Table 1.

Participant Demographics and Self-Identification.

Participant	Grade	Race/ethnicity	Family origin	Languages spoken at home	Literacy sponsor
Valien	8th	Latinx	D.R.	Spanish	Melisa
Simon	7th	Black	Haiti	French Creole	Delphin
Rashawn	7th	Black	U.S.	English	Maya
Jacinto	5th	Latinx	Columbia	Spanish/English	Susana
Alvaro	5th	Latinx	D.R.	Spanish	Andrea
Jerome	8th	Black	U.S.	English	Layla
André	8th	Black	U.S.	English	Natalie
Keyan	8th	Biracial (Black/Latinx)	Guyanese/Puerto Rican	Spanish/English	Odalys
William	8th	Black	Cape Verde	Cape Verdean Creole	Adilson
Evan	8th	Latinx	El Salvador	Spanish	Diana
Ezekiel	8th	Black	U.S./Congo	French/English	Arthur
Daniel	8th	Biracial (Black/white)	Africa (unknown country)/Poland	Polish/English	Luiza
Julian	8th	Latinx	D.R.	Spanish/English	Anabel
Leo	8th	Black/Latinx	Trinidad/D.R.	Spanish/English	Danielle

Note. The shaded areas demarcate each of the six book clubs.

D.R. = Dominican Republic.

Data Sources

Book Club Observations

Data for this project were generated, in part, from observations from online book clubs. I facilitated these book club meetings once or twice a week, for one hour, with one to four students. The book clubs lasted for three to seven months depending on the student and school requirements and occurred outside of English class time. The boys were grouped into book clubs by school and grade to account for their developmental and experiential levels (e.g., eighth graders were only with other eighth graders). This way, all students were focused on the same assignments and knew each other from school. One student was alone in his book club as his teacher felt only he needed additional support in the class. The focus of these book clubs was to encourage participants in their literacy development using school-required texts and assignments. However, book club meetings also became a time for the boys to divulge about the literacy lives they led outside of their parents’ and teachers’ purview. The boys were generally quite energetic and participatory during book clubs. During these sessions, I noted and screenshot bits of dialogue, commentary in the chat, and interactions between myself and the children, and then transcribed these jottings into field notes, writing reflective memos within a few hours after each observation (Emerson et al., 2011). For the purposes of this article, the book clubs were a way for me to access and interview participants.

Interviews

I conducted 28 Zoom interviews with both caregivers and their sons about their literacy lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. The interviews were semistructured, lasted 30–60 min and consisted of different aspects of the participants’ literacies (e.g., the people, spaces, and materials that shaped participants’ relationships to texts), eliciting responses related to the dynamics around reading and writing in the home before and during the pandemic. From spring of 2020 through winter of 2021, I conducted 26 interviews in English and two in Spanish, which I then translated. The interviews were critical to investigate the research question as they provide entry into family–child dynamics and participants’ orientations to literacy learning.

Reflexive Thematic Analysis

For this article, I analyzed transcribed audio- and video-recorded interviews through reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Data were analyzed continually and recursively during the research, in which I wrote analytical memos and notes to identify patterns found in the literacy care between the families and their boys.

Phase 1: Codes

I marked the texts with descriptive codes related to the familial literacy care framework and research question (Miles et al., 2014). I read through the data and asked questions to label the information, such as, who are the caregivers and what kinds of familial literacy care practices are occurring? What materials are they using? I established 14 deductive and inductive initial codes: (a) literacy caregivers (e.g., mothers); (b) familial literacy practices of care (e.g., verbal encouragement); (c) location of literacy care practice (e.g., bedroom); (d) materials (e.g., books); (e) technologies (e.g., laptops); (f) time (e.g., past or present day); (g) digital literacies; (h) printed literacies; (i) art; (j) attitudes; (k) video gaming; (l) the Bible; (m) emotions (e.g., loneliness, boredom); and (n) physical closeness.

Phase 2: Themes

A back-and-forth approach between inductive and deductive codes during data collection and analysis, and a search for discrepancies, helped me to refine themes in the data (Ragan & Amoroso, 2019). Throughout this iterative analytic process, I continued memo writing to facilitate sense-making within and among cases as coding took place (Miles et al., 2014). After rereading, I realized that several of the initial codes were repetitive; therefore, I removed some and collapsed others. After several rounds of coding and recoding, the most stable codes were materials, emotions, familial literacy practices of care, location of literacy care practice, tools, and time. These stable codes evolved into four themes—material, emotional, embodied, and digital—that I will later discuss in the findings.

Positionality

As a former teacher and researcher, I situated myself as a facilitator in the book clubs. I explained to the youth and their families that my inquiry into the boys’ relationship with literacy stemmed, in part, from my experiences as a mother of three boys and as an English teacher who taught in the same city in which they lived. More specifically, I highlighted how some aspects of my identity as a straight, white, Jewish, cis-gendered woman were privileged in English classes. To this end, I framed the book clubs as an opportunity to read the required texts and complete homework assignments for remote schooling (as this was the strong preference from the teachers and parents), but to do so by acknowledging that our respective identities, languages, and histories provided unique access points into reading and critiquing literature. On some days, we focused primarily on school-related tasks. On other days, we worked on standards-aligned exercises as suggested by the teacher but through creative writing projects and other multimodal activities selected by the students. In particular, Latinx families often connected with me outside of book clubs to ask clarifying questions about school assignments given that I am a fluent Spanish speaker from years of studying in Mexico, Cuba, and Argentina.

As a participant observer, I wrestled with overarching questions while in the field to address the “dangers seen, unseen and unforeseen” and asked what I could do to mitigate the “othering” and perpetuation of negative stereotypes of culturally and racially diverse families that often comes along with this type of research (Milner, 2007). As a way to check in with myself about my potential biases, I followed Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater (2002) in asking myself three questions: What surprised me? (tracing assumptions about families of color), What intrigued me? (tracing positions), and What disturbed me? (tracing tensions). Memoing allowed me to move purposefully between the varying roles (e.g., book club facilitator/researcher) I took on through the data generation and analysis phases of the work.

Although my interpretation of my participants’ experiences comes from an outsider's standpoint, I connected with families by drawing on my adult identity as a mother who was juggling to complete work while supporting my children in remote schooling. I write as a white woman, aware that I cannot know what it means to live as a boy, let alone a Black or Latinx boy attending remote school. I write, as well, as someone who cares deeply about these boys, having built relationships with them and their families across several months and beyond the parameters of the study. Regardless, I know that despite my efforts, I make mistakes and cause harm due to the confines of my perspective and experience. To address these limitations, I have attempted to heed the advice of Anzaldúa (2012), who emphasized that privileged people, particularly white people, “come to see they are not helping us but following our lead” (p. 107). I try to respect this wisdom by drawing on the work of literacy and education scholars of color (Allen & White-Smith, 2018; Carey, 2019; Kinloch, 2017; Lewis Ellison & Wang, 2018).

Nurturing the Literacy Lives of Boys of Color

In my analysis of interviews with the boys and their families, I trace four dimensions of familial literacy care that the families in my study took up—the material, emotional, embodied, and digital—to foster literacy practices in the home. In presenting these four dimensions, I draw upon illustrative exemplars from the interviews with caregivers and their sons in order to delve into the details of the practice and its meaning for families.

Material Care

The dimension of material care involved the ways parents leveraged “things” (e.g., desks, books, and Chromebooks) to mediate and contextualize their boys’ literacy activities (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017). For instance, during individual Zoom interviews with Simon, Andre, Jerome, Alvaro, Rashawn, Leo, and Valien (all names are pseudonyms), each of them showed me the nooks or spaces that their mothers had constructed for reading and writing. They showed me shelves stocked with books and desks set up in corners as if to mimic a classroom environment. Simon chuckled as he told me that he liked to read on the toilet. He pointed to the basket of books his mother had placed in the bathroom. In interviews with families, mothers such as Maya and Anabel recalled marching down to the schools to demand Chromebooks—another material object in addition to desks and shelves—to support their sons’ remote learning. Parents’ material support provided their sons with the things they believed were essential to literacy learning.

Dissonance emerged, however, when parents’ attempts at sponsorship were met with their sons’ reluctance. As Simon explained, “If I said, Mom, can I get this book? She’ll order the book on Amazon immediately. I find it annoying sometimes.… I’ll be so tired and she will basically tell me to just go read.” Simon's annoyance with his mother is a sentiment that carried throughout the interviews when the boys reported that their parents urged them to leverage the materials associated with literacy learning. Often, after showing me the desks that their parents had purchased at the start of the pandemic, the boys admitted that when they completed their “boring” school assignments, if at all, they did so at the kitchen table, nested in a family couch, or curled up on a windowsill, spaces where they felt physically closer to other household members or to the outside world. Thus, parental attempts at literacy care through materially supporting them (e.g., buying a desk) sometimes led to resistance. Simon, Andre, Jerome, Alvaro, Rashawn, Leo, and Valien all expressed irritation and avoided spaces designated for literacy learning in an effort to connect with other people in their homes and communities.

When I asked parents why they invested so much time and so many material resources into their sons’ literacies, many parents expressed their belief that literacy was essential to their sons’ social mobility and well-being. Danielle, who had arranged a library system for signing books in and out of their home bookshelf for her son Leo, commented:

I am raising a Black man.… If you can’t articulate what you’re thinking…then how [are] you ever going to contribute to the conversations? I want people to say, “Look at this young man. We believe what he is saying.” Literacy is the key. People judge you on how you speak, how you articulate yourself, how you write or read. I want my son to believe that he is capable of doing all that.

Across interviews, parents like Danielle perceived that their provision of material support was a high-stakes matter connected to their Black and Latinx sons’ success in their communities. In this sense, they drew on their familial capital (or intuitions) to attend to the materials necessary to racially socialize their boys through literacy learning (Allen & White-Smith, 2018). By playing the role of teacher and creating a home environment that emulated aspects of the school environment, parents believed that their care for their sons’ literacy learning was tied to shaping how their sons, as Black and Latinx boys, articulated themselves in a world that would judge them racially and linguistically for how they expressed themselves.

Through material care, parents developed an architecture of learning by cultivating literacy-rich environments at home with many of the same material resources found in an English classroom. In doing so, they constructed an imaginary of their newfound roles as teachers during the pandemic, while learning was happening in the context of homes, spaces once defined by their roles as caregivers. Literacy, to many of the parents, was the ticket to long-term prosperity and respect in the community.

Emotional Care

The second aspect of my notion of family literacy care is emotional care. In addition to providing the material resources they believed were needed, the parents I interviewed also leaned into their roles as teachers during remote learning by providing emotional support to their sons through verbal reinforcement. Across interviews, the boys spoke about parents’ motivational, rather than academic, support of them to persevere through the monotony of their school literacy tasks. None of the boys or their families recounted moments when parents had edited a paper or read aloud to them, but they did illustrate moments when their parents voiced encouraging words that compelled the boys to complete an assignment. Along with these lines, Odalys reflected on her role at home in nudging her son Keyan to engage with Of Mice and Men: “I’m the warden.… My job is to light a fire under his butt when he slows down.” Similarly, Leo's mother, Danielle, described her son's need for emotional support when she commented,

My son likes to know that…the work he is doing gets a big smiley face and big red A…. So now we are constantly telling him, “You got this, Leo!” and “We know you can do this.” My husband and I will be like, “Sit here” and “Do this now.” If I get on him…he’ll do it. We are just concerned that he’ll be kept back in eighth grade and then his spirit of school will be crushed for a long time.

Odalys's and Danielle's examples of playing “warden” and cheerleader (e.g., “You got this, Leo!”) emphasized their strong belief that their sons needed emotional care to participate in literacy assignments for school. Their verbal encouragement signaled a familial knowledge about the relational and affective elements their boys needed to interact with the required texts from school.

Despite the lengths parents went to provide emotional support through verbal encouragement, their sons often resisted. Twelve of the 14 boys I interviewed complained that their parents placed too much pressure on them to read, especially during the summer months when they were not required to read for school. Jerome, whose mother, Layla, worked outside the home, expressed frustration with her incessant texts and Facetime calls trying to nudge him to get out of bed and read “for fun.” During a book club meeting in July, Jerome explained that it had only been a few days since his godmother passed away from COVID-19. That morning, his mother texted him to pick up a book and read “for fun,” when all he wanted to do was “sleep and lie in the dark.” Jerome's example captures his mother's attempts, though unsuccessful, at emotional care by trying to allay his grieving process by pushing him to read. In this particular instance, Layla believed reading could be an emotional tool that would ameliorate her son's heartache amid the sorrow brought on by the pandemic. In general, the boys reported that they ignored, challenged, or succumbed begrudgingly for a short time to their parents’ verbal encouragements for them to read and write. This ongoing push and pull of the parent–child discourse around literacy practices in the home challenges Brandt's more top-down model of sponsorship by highlighting the boys’ agency in their literacy learning (Lewis Ellison & Wang, 2018, p. 67). With the lens of family literacy care, rather than sponsorship, these examples of emotional support underscore daily verbal interactions between parents and their sons rooted in affection and family cultural wealth around literacy that debunk previous notions in the scholarship that families of color are apathetic to their children's literacy practices.

Embodied Care

The third dimension of my notion of family literacy care is embodied care involving the physical closeness between caregivers and their sons, which was evidenced in interactions surrounding school assignments and religious texts. Across the interviews, the boys reported that their parents’ proximity was the most effective way to compel them to engage with school-sanctioned literacy. Phrases such as “sat down,” “sat beside me,” and “sat next to me” punctuated 13 of the 14 interviews as students spoke about moments when they felt driven to participate in “boring” assignments such as writing a five-paragraph essay or annotating a text.

What makes embodied care a distinct form of literacy care was, as participants characterized it, that it was a reciprocal exchange between mother and son. Unlike the other components of familial literacy care, embodied support was not simply about mothers mediating their sons’ literacies, but rather it was a two-way flow wherein each party cared for the other. Evan explained that his mother, Diana, insisted that he “sit down next to her” after she got off her night shift. On these nights, Evan showed Diana how to open his Google classroom folder and then translated his essays from English to Spanish so she could ensure his work had been completed. Evan commented, “She always does check my work and I try to do the best…. She basically tells me if something's not finished. She reminds me by texting me or calling me to do the work the next day.” Evan's example highlights his need for physical closeness to feel driven to complete assignments, while also exerting his agentic role in nurturing his mother's English and computer literacies. Just as Lewis (2011) found, Evan's digital literacy practices supported an empowering reciprocal relationship in the teaching and learning experience. By sitting next to one another, mother and son each enacted a form of care that supported the other by fulfilling their needs for closeness and facilitating literacy learning.

A number of parents spoke directly about the reciprocity involved in embodied support. Consider Julian's mother, Anabel, when she said:

I have been sitting with him and going through his assignments. I am kinda just sitting there with him, not even doing very much. He will only work in my room over the course of the day. I think he's just missing personal contact with other people. As of right now, he wants his mommy…. You know, he's a 13-year-old boy. He won’t always want me so I’m willing to do that right now.

Anabel introduced a family and digital literacy culture in which she and her son could connect physically around a text. They were in the same room at the same time, sometimes without conversation, yet they were still part of the same literacy practice surrounding a scanned copy of a text on a Chromebook from school. For Evan and Julian, their desire for closeness to their mothers complicates the image of the teenage boy as unattached or seeking autonomy from parents. In both cases, their mothers’ physical presence was the necessary driving force to nudge them to complete English assignments. Their mothers’ familial capital and instincts to provide closeness to their sons during their literacy practice highlight the complex roles they navigated as literacy caregivers and mothers during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the one hand, they provided the attention to refocus their sons on their work as stand-in teachers. On the other hand, they knew that their sons craved closeness amid the physical distancing requirements of the COVID-19 quarantine.

Although Anabel and Julian did not exchange learning around the assigned texts, they engaged in an emotional exchange that each needed. Across the interviews, Anabel and four other parents explained that their sons were lonely, given that they had not been physically near another person their age for at least 10 months. Additionally, Anabel craved closeness for herself and was well aware that her 13-year-old son, on the cusp of manhood, “won’t always want” her proximity. Family literacy care thus relied on a two-way reciprocal dynamic that wrapped both mother and son in closeness while mediating the boys’ literacies. Much of the family literacy scholarship is centered on care practices for young children (e.g., oral storytelling, bedtime routines, lap reading) (Gottfried et al., 2015; Knopf & Brown, 2009; Mindell & Williamson, 2018). Evan's and Julian's cases shed light on the necessity of literacy care practices for adolescents who also thrive from intimate reading and writing experiences.

Some of the boys I interviewed and observed, especially those from immigrant families, reported that their parents provided embodied care to promote fluency around religious texts. Simon, Valien, Ezekiel, William, and Alvaro spoke enthusiastically about reading the Bible with their parents and grandparents in Spanish, Haitian Creole, Cape Verdean Creole, or French. For instance, Ezekiel spoke fondly about reading aloud in prayer circles led by his grandfather in French and closely surrounded by his Congolese family on Sunday mornings. Similarly, William spoke about attending church, where he quietly read the texts in Creole while his mother belted them out in song alongside him in the pews and surrounded by their Cape Verdean community. In the context of religion, students accepted their parents’ efforts to employ their families’ cultural wealth to mentor a literacy practice steeped in traditions and proximity with caregivers. This cultural and linguistic affirmation found in religious literacy scenes for the students was in direct contrast to the labeling they experienced in school as struggling readers who needed remediation to access the “academic language” required for complex thinking processes (Rosa & Flores, 2017). Reading the Bible became a way for boys to experience the closeness they craved during a time of physical isolation as well as the cultural and linguistic affirmation they needed to feel engaged with the text.

Through embodied support, caregivers balanced their teacher and parent roles more than with other dimensions of family literacy care. Like teachers in a classroom, parents remained focused on supporting their children to complete schoolwork and participate in text-based literacy practices. However, as parents aware of their sons’ needs, they leveraged their familial capital by providing the physical closeness they believed their children desired during the time of mandated distancing. The two-way flow of closeness between parent and child during literacy learning complicates Brandt's (1998) hierarchical model of sponsorship, in which an expert apprentices a novice. Instead, these examples of familial literacy care practices illustrate how mothers and sons positioned themselves and each other as agentic in a symmetrical caring relationship.

Digital Care

The final dimension of my notion of family literacy care is digital care involving parents’ constraint of their sons’ video-gaming practices as a means to incentivize their sons to complete schoolwork. In the same way that Brandt (1998) suggested that sponsors support literacy, so too, she contends, that they censor it. For 11 of the 14 parents, the act of their sons engaging with texts digitally in front of a computer or a television screen while using headsets and video-game controllers became problematic. Simon's mother, Delphin, commented, “He is [a] very smart boy…very good at spelling, but all he does is play, play, play that game.” She lamented that her son played until the wee hours of the morning with his friends and then fell asleep during his morning English class. As a result, many parents restricted their sons’ video-game use or took away consoles altogether, in order for them to allocate more time to in-school literacy assignments.

Despite their parents’ attempts to control access to digital spaces and tools (screens, headsets, controllers, consoles) involved with such literacy practices, the boys continued subversively to play video games with their peers by sneaking in opportunities when parents were sleeping or working. To 13 of the 14 boys, gaming was an invaluable part of connecting socially when many of them had not seen another peer their age for months. The boys reported using the virtual gaming communities to recount details of their days, discuss politics, and strategize around “smart plays, girls, and life,” as Simon described. Indeed, the boys found that gaming provided an opportunity to connect with peers and a reprieve from their parents’ attempts to mimic their teachers at home.

Some of the boys found an alternative dimension of literacy care through their virtual gaming communities that were not permitted by their parents. For instance, Simon, Rashawn, William, and Leo participated in virtual Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests through NBA 2K20, a basketball simulation video game. Through currency acquired in the game, they adorned their players with T-shirts and COVID-19 masks with phrases such as “I can’t breathe” and “Black Lives Matter.” Simon and Rashawn organized their own virtual BLM protests by texting with friends and posting on social media platforms (e.g., Instagram, Snapchat) to rally friends in the wake of George Floyd's murder. Simon and Rashawn staged three BLM protests with up to 60 people in virtual basketball stadiums. Simon described:

There was one point where people would walk around crossing their arms and start protests through the game.… If we saw big crowds, we would just join them. That builds your respect through the community. The more people see you doing that, it shows your loyalty to what's going on, loyalty to the grind, and shows respect to the lives that were taken.

Simon described his video gaming as a means to connect with peers around a social movement. His assertion—“That builds your respect”—demonstrated his desire to connect with a community during a time when he was otherwise relegated to home due to the COVID-19 mandates.

The virtual communities found in video gaming became an affinity space for Black and Brown boys to gather, regardless of the distancing requirements of the quarantine. It became a conceptual space for them to discuss current events and exchange ideas about being boys of color during a time when school was only providing them with texts such as Of Mice and Men that felt “boring” and not purposeful to them. The boys leveraged the technologies to be one another's caregivers to cultivate activist literacies in order to teach one another about what it meant to be a Black and Latinx adolescent during these times.

In the context of video games, parents leaned more strongly into their teacher roles despite recognizing their sons’ need for connection with peers. As Adilson, William's father, explained:

We talked to him every day about getting up and doing his stuff, and he sleeps and then he doesn’t get up. So, I took away his PlayStation. He's a smart kid. I don’t know what happened. It's just this COVID thing…. I ask him, What is going on? What can we do? He is just being lazy. Poor kid is always home.

Adilson's conflicting emotions about his dual role in the pandemic as parent and teacher are highlighted in the way he characterizes his son (“smart,” “lazy,” and “poor kid”). He later described some guilt about his son being home alone navigating online schooling by himself, given that he and his wife worked outside the home during the day. He was sympathetic to his son's loneliness, and simultaneously appalled by his son's behavior. He recounted the barrage of phone calls he received from the school describing his son Zoom-bombing other classes, writing expletives in the chat, and playing video games during lessons. Adilson felt he must push aside his emotional instincts and enact a kind of literacy care that constrained William's access to his PlayStation so his son could focus more on school and possibly avoid having to repeat eighth grade. In this context, parents played into their teacher roles by restricting video games as the ultimate lever in augmenting their sons’ attention to in-school literacy assignments. Like all of the parents I interviewed, Adilson's intuition that literacy would somehow secure his son's future outweighed his understanding that video games were an outlet for his son to cope with loneliness. In response, William, like most of the boys in this study, resisted his father's efforts to constrain his gaming by finding opportunities to play, organize, and connect with peers when his father was not looking.

Discussion

The goal of this study was to explore how Black and Latinx caregivers nurtured their sons’ literacy practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. The 14 cases provide some insight into the complexity and challenges of familial literacy care. This section is broken into two parts. First, I begin by nuancing common understandings of parent–child dynamics around literacy learning in the home. Then, I detail the ways the boys accepted and resisted their parents’ attempts to cultivate their school-sanctioned literacies during this unprecedented time.

Nuancing the Picture of Parent–Child Dynamics Around Literacy

Although research on parental involvement has generally characterized parents of color as uncaring or uninvolved in their children's literacy development due to limited knowledge, language proficiency, and time (Hwang & Connor, 2020), in the current study, this characterization does not hold true, as the parents enacted different dimensions of care to foster their sons’ literacy learning. I contend that the 14 parents encouraged their children persistently across four themes of familial literacy care—material, emotional, embodied, and digital—to participate with texts during the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout these various forms of mentorship, parents mostly inhabited a teacher role by providing resources, verbal encouragement, and digital restrictions, hoping to augment their sons’ engagements with school-sanctioned literacy. This article reinforces the body of literature disputing the idea that low-income families are not involved in school-sanctioned literacies in their homes (Compton-Lilly, 2012; Compton-Lilly & Delbridge, 2019) and adds to the richness of the body of family literacy studies (Lewis, 2011; Lewis Ellison & Wang, 2018).

To further nuance the picture of parent–child dynamics, my findings suggest that parents were so fervid in nurturing their sons’ literacy lives because they believed that literacy was what one mother called the “key” to their sons’ social and economic success. Parents’ literacy care was rooted in the ideological assumption that school could reduce the effects of social class and racial inequality by providing students with literacy that would grant them access to further their schooling, employment, and social mobility. At a time when parents were acting as proxies for their children's English teachers, and when the English teachers mandated the goals of schooling, it is no surprise that parents devoted so much energy to mediating their sons’ literacies and curtailed anything that was perceived as an obstruction to their sons’ pathway to success (e.g., video games). These are the meritocratic myths that the institution of school promises to parents—that school-sanctioned literacy leads to social mobility—which inevitably influenced parents’ persistent enactment of the home teacher role during the pandemic in spite of their sons’ resistance. However, this assumption about literacy needs cautious handling by educators and parents. Literacy is not always a remedy for Black and Brown boys’ long-term success. For instance, when college-educated George Floyd was murdered, his literacy skills were not enough to protect his future. While this is an extreme example, my point is that it is dangerous to exaggerate the capacity of school-sanctioned literacy to ensure a better future for Black and Latinx children when systemic racism and class oppression are reproduced in many domains outside of schools that hinder their academic and economic success (Prendergast, 2003). The Black and Latinx parents’ dedication to mentor their sons’ literacies during the COVID-19 pandemic is testimony to their deep care and active involvement in their children's schooling.

Accepting and Resisting Familial Literacy Care

Despite parents’ family literacy care practices during the COVID-19 lockdown, their sons did not readily comply with requests from parents to read and write. My analysis of the dimensions of literacy care revealed a push–pull dynamic as boys sometimes accepted, but more often resisted, their parents’ mentorship efforts (Lewis Ellison & Wang, 2018, p. 67).

Accepting

The more parents leaned into their caregiving through embodied support, the more often boys embraced school-sanctioned texts. When parents provided closeness, their sons accepted their efforts at literacy care. This was evident in the boys’ accounts of “sitting next to” caregivers while completing schoolwork or reading the Bible alongside parents. Embodied support became a means for parents to mentor their children's literacies while also providing children with the closeness they craved. Although reading and writing are often viewed as autonomous activities for middle school students, this study underscores the idea that proximity with families informs how students negotiated literacy practices during the pandemic. My findings suggest that caregivers need to lean into their affective instincts to promote school-based literacy learning with their teenage sons and resist the pressure to behave like traditional classroom teachers in the home. The construct of physical and emotional closeness is relatively understudied in the family literacy scholarship involving teens, though a corpus of scholarship does exist concerning closeness in early childhood family literacies (e.g., see studies on lap reading: Knopf & Brown, 2009; Lamme et al., 2004; Mindell & Williamson, 2018).

Resisting

Typically, parents in this study set the terms of mentorship by determining which materials to provide, which words of encouragement to voice, how often to provide closeness, and how much access to video gaming to permit. As parents determined the parameters of care, so too did they encounter resistance. The 14 boys I interviewed and observed found ways to resist their parents’ attempts at literacy care in three of the four dimensions—the material, emotional, and digital—by avoiding spaces designated for literacy learning, challenging pressure to read for fun, and sneaking in opportunities to play video games. My analysis suggests that the more parents leaned into monitoring their sons’ behaviors and activities to ensure that schoolwork was completed, the more their sons avoided school-sanctioned texts, which ultimately did a disservice to their literacy learning.

The boys’ resistance to what they perceived as their parents’ enactment of teacher behavior was a political act, a boycott to demand an education that cultivated their valued literacies while acknowledging their humanity as boys of color who craved closeness from parents and who were navigating middle school pressures online at the height of a global health crisis surrounded by headlines and images about violence against Black and Brown bodies. The boys knew they had to mentor one another's personal and racial literacies by co-constructing virtual spaces in their gaming communities that affirmed their experiences, ranging from mundane concerns (e.g., having a crush on a girl) to pandemic-specific emotions (e.g., mourning the loss of a loved one due to COVID-19 and yearning to participate in the BLM movement). As these experiences and emotions were not affirmed when their parents leaned into their teacher roles at home, they resisted school-sanctioned literacies that felt disconnected from their lives. This article contests the work of educational scholars who attribute adolescent boys’ resistance to literacy tasks to a motivational slump (Lamote et al., 2013), thus locating the problem within the boy without accounting for the broader context of literacy curriculum and instruction (including books like Of Mice and Men) that lack cultural relevance for the boys (Frankel & Brooks, 2018; Kinloch, 2017).

Conclusion

The historic events that unfolded during the time in which this study took place—the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the insurrection in the nation's capital—reconfigured the family literacy care practices for many parents, who felt they could no longer rely on teachers to provide the support they believed their children needed to thrive in school. One limitation of this inquiry is that it is temporally confined to a distinct time period in which remote learning was required by the state. Hopefully, a pandemic of this magnitude will not occur again, but current questions about the impact of potential coronavirus variants and conversations about expanding family–school partnerships compel us to look more closely at the literacy care occurring between parents and children at home. More inquiry is needed to better understand whether the findings in this study transcend the COVID-19 lockdown.

What this study contributes to the research literature are the perspectives of families of color as an antideficit approach to understanding how they foster their sons’ literacies in ways that are entangled in race, social class, and care that are often overlooked by schools. As negative assumptions about Black and Latinx parent involvement continue to inform district-wide family engagement initiatives, I believe there is an ethical imperative for school personnel to approach their work with boys and their families of color relationally. The adoption of a relational approach, which promotes proximity with youth and families, decreases the chances of writing students off as “struggling” or “resistant” readers and limits the chances of estranging parents from the school and reducing their roles to simply monitoring the homework of their children (Allen & White-Smith, 2018).

For educators to distance themselves from boys and to view them as decontextualized from the web of family literacy care practices occurring in their homes is to put the work of schools dangerously out of touch with the literacy lives of boys of color. For home and school partnerships, this implies the need for educators to shift their tone with families so conversations no longer center on the discipline and remediation of Black and Brown boys, but rather, on the incredible power of families to nurture and advocate for their sons’ literacies. For teaching and learning, this implies the need to understand the multiple positions and relationships students navigate inside their families, and concurrent to their English classes (Smith et al., 2020). When literacy educators acknowledge that Black and Latinx boys crave closeness and have authentic feelings such as loneliness, they might challenge themselves to think about their roles in supporting boys of color, in defending them from assaults on their motivation, individual practices, and family involvement. School and home must be places that are less concerned with being spaces that control boys’ literacies and more concerned with being spaces where boys can find closeness and connection with family and peers without these activities being perceived as threats to their literacy attainment. At the end of the day, the work of teachers is not only about what they teach but also about how they relate to their students and the literacy possibilities that open up for youth and families through these connections.

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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

Marisa Segel

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Notes

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