Centering Black women’s ways of knowing: A review of critical literacies research in early childhood

Abstract

In the most recent edition of the Handbook of Reading Research, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and colleagues (2020) identify the need to recontextualize critical literacy pedagogy and research in ways that center Black and Indigenous communities. Although critical literacy has a rich tradition in emancipatory work (e.g. Freire, 1996), Thomas et al. argue for the need to begin elsewhere, with the knowledge and traditions of Black and Indigenous communities, to produce literacy research and pedagogy that is more responsive to current social issues and iterations of racism. In this article, I combine their insights with those of early literacy researchers, such as Candace R. Kuby and Tara Gutshall Rucker, (e.g. Kuby, 2013; Kuby and Rucker, 2020) to suggest that the shifting of theoretical framings may be a useful way of broadening the context of critical literacies research and scholarship. Kuby and Rucker’s (2020) examination explores offerings from postructural and posthumanist theories for expanding conceptions of literacy in efforts to challenge our ideas of literacies, inequalities, and justice in early literacy research. Similarly, I analyze the affordances of Pro-Black and marginalized theories in critical literacies research, such as Black Feminist Thought (Collins, 2002), for understanding and expanding how we attend to positionality in early literacy educational research. Grounded in Black Feminist theories (Collins, 2002) and methodologies (Evans-Winters, 2019) as well my own positionality as a Black woman, this article takes up one specific concern from the call for this special issue, that is to address the lack of Pro-Black research in early literacy education. In so doing, I aim to broaden the ways that a historically praxis-oriented body of research in early childhood and elementary education, critical literacies research, is theorized and enacted by integrating more thoroughly Black women’s ways of knowing. I explore how to leverage our individual and combined perspectives, which are grounded in our rich history of resistance and thriving in the face of adversity, to produce knowledge and literacy practices useful for justice-oriented education. Through an analysis of academic literature related to critical literacies research and Black women educators in early childhood and elementary education, I address the question: How are Black women’s ways of knowing integrated in early childhood and elementary critical literacies research with participants who are Black women educators? I offer a sense of the extent to which Black women educators’ ways of knowing are associated with the term critical literacy and also identify fruitful strategies that critical literacies researchers can use to integrate Black women’s ways of knowing into the knowledge base and practices of critical literacies in early literacy research. Some strategies include integrating Black women educators' emotions and spiritual knowledge into the research and co-researching with Black women who are also participants.