Cultivating a Dream as a Child Growing Up in the Deep South: Keeping the Dream Alive for Today’s Children

Abstract

The 2021 Oscar Causey Award Address presented at the Literacy Research Association by Professor Dr. Patricia A. Edwards is a response to two self-reflexive questions: “How were my dreams cultivated as a little Black girl growing up in Albany, Georgia during the mid-fifties. sixties, and early seventies?” and “What implications does my story have for cultivating the dreams of today's children?” To explore these questions, Edwards uses a qualitative methodology termed portraiture ( Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) to capture her insights and experiences, allowing her to “paint” rich pictures of the participants “in an effort to capture the complexity, dynamics, and subtlety of human experience and organizational life” (p. xv). Through portraiture, which relies heavily on the use of storytelling and narration, Edwards converts the term “research” into “I-search” ( Macrorie, 1988), affording her the opportunity to reflect on her lived experiences and share those moments and events with the world while also abolishing the “gaze” that some forms of quantitative and qualitative methodologies employ. In turn, she leverages narratives—via pictures, portraits, and audio—of her life as a Black girl growing up in Albany, Georgia, to construct meaning of her experiences and of her life. In doing so, Edwards highlights the impact of The Albany Civil Rights Movement in cultivating her dream. She invites teachers, school districts, literacy leaders, and the broader community to use her narrative portrait as a basis for creating a new norm that cultivates the dreams of young Black students, and of students of color in general.