Black Male Students Negotiate Ways of Knowing Themselves During Digital Storytelling

Abstract

We explore how valuing Black male students’ literacies within academic contexts during multimodal writing can position students’ ways of knowing at the center of their learning. This centering requires a repositioning of students’ cultural literacies at the core of instruction. Using multiliteracies and Critical Discourse Analysis frameworks, we analyze and share excerpts from conversations with three Black adolescent high school seniors as they composed and reflected upon authoring digital autobiographies for an assignment in their Black Literature class. These reflections illuminate how the students drew on culturally salient texts to share elements of themselves with their peer and teacher audience.

Genders, Cultures, and Literacies

“…While the scope of this chapter does not allow for a lengthy discussion of how Devonte juxtaposed the images of his childhood with quotations from renowned hip-hop artists, Tupac Shakur and the song, "Juicy" by the Notorious B.I.G., it is important to mention that Becky has written elsewhere (Beucher & Seglem, 2019) about how Devonte and other Black male youth in this study used Black male literacies to situate their narratives in discourses of Black masculinity. So, Devonte couched what he kept "on lock" within the music and quotations threaded across his digital narrative and quotes in his college essay.…”

What Matter Matters? Retaining the Critical in New Materialist Literacy Research

“…Malcolm generated his autobiographical video during a semester-long ethnographic study examining racialized youths’ processes and products of digital storytelling in an urban public high school African American literature class (Beucher, 2015). Malcolm, a 19-year-old senior, was one of three participants in the original study.…”