The African American Policy Forum and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies states, “The risks that Black and other girls of color confront rarely receive the full attention of researchers, advocates, policymakers, and funders.” The limited awareness of the challenges that Black girls face perpetuates the mischaracterization of their attitudes, abilities, and achievement. Thus, school becomes an inhospitable place where Black girls receive mixed messages about femininity and goodness and are held to unreasonable standards. This study explores how Black girls describe and understand their school experiences as racialized and gendered and the ways a conversation space allows Black girls’ meaning making about and critical examination of individual and collective schooling experiences.

Background/Context In our best efforts to increase preservice teachers’ critical consciousness regarding the historical and contemporary inequities in the P–12 educational system and equip them to embody pedagogies and practices that counter those inequities, teacher educators often provide curricular and field experiences that reinforce the deficit mindsets that students bring to the teacher education classroom. For many social justice-oriented teacher educators, our best intentions to create humanizing experiences for future teachers can have harmful results that negatively impact preservice teachers’ ability to successfully teach culturally diverse students in a multitude of learning contexts. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study In this article, we propose a humanizing pedagogy for teacher education that is informed by our experiences as K–12 teachers and teacher educators in a university-based teacher preparation program. We focus on the general questions, How can university-based teacher preparation programs embody and enact a humanizing pedagogy? and What role can curriculum play in advancing a humanizing pedagogy in university-based teacher preparation programs? Research Design In this conceptual article, we theorize a humanizing pedagogy for teacher education and propose a process of becoming asset-, equity-, and social justice-oriented teachers. This humanizing pedagogy represents a strengths-based approach to teaching and learning in the teacher preparation classroom. Conclusions/Recommendations We propose core tenets of a humanizing pedagogy for teacher education that represent an individual and collective effort toward critical consciousness for preservice teachers and also for teacher educators. If university-based teacher education programs are committed to cultivating the development of asset-, equity-, and social justice-oriented preservice teachers, the commitments to critical self-reflection, resisting binaries, and enacting ontological and epistemological plurality need to be foundational to program structure, curricula alignment, and instructional practice.

No abstract

No abstract

In this paper, we introduce poetic collaging as a critical qualitative method through the narratives, experiences, and perspectives of Girls of Color. We deconstruct the process of developing an arts-based method using intersectional feminist frameworks, intentional and deep reflexivity, and the expertise of participants to illuminate the various elements that go into such an endeavor. We do this by applying poetic collaging to data from the Lavender Girls Project, an intersectional participatory study for and with Girls of Color from poor/working-class families. In this poetic collage analysis, we capture the essence of our participants’ lives, including their past, present, and futures. We also elaborate on their ways of knowing, which are grounded in intergenerational collective knowledge, and how they act on the knowledge they hold. We find that the intersectional perspectives of Girls of Color are made possible through the opportunities they have had to share space with one another to exchange ideas, views, and critiques of systemic oppression. We also find that our participants aspire greatly and have generative visions of their futures that include caring for their loved ones as much as caring for themselves. This paper contributes to the growing body of scholarship around the lives of Girls of Color with a focus on their education and demonstrates strengths-oriented methodological approaches for researchers seeking to examine the experiences of people from historically marginalized backgrounds.