Missing Stories, Missing Lives

Abstract

In this critical ethnography, interpretivist methods were used to focus on the perspectives of African American, Latina, and Native American girls in an urban middle-school classroom to better understand how they constructed social identities of gender and race through their experiences with literacy. Because the enacted curriculum lacked critical awareness of the sociocultural contexts of gender and race, the perspectives of the girls in this classroom were largely missing from transactions with literacy. Consequently, girls' efforts to make intertextual links to their own lived stories were not taken up in meaningful ways. Transactions with literacy created a felt sense of fractured or compartmentalized social identities, and the girls in this study learned to separate their public, academic lives from their private lives. As a result, the girls did not take up the literature in ways that could potentially enable them to realize social and cognitive transformation in their lives.This study explores how urban girls' constructions of gendered and raced social identities emerged from their negotiations with texts in a particular eighth-grade English classroom. The intent was to look across the perspectives of African American, Latina, and Native American girls to discern the meanings girls constructed from their transactions with texts and the ways in which their understandings may be linked to their perceptions of the larger social order. Although a feminist analysis of the relationship 279

Creating Spaces for Black Adolescent Girls to “Write It Out!”

“…The importance for black adolescent girls to construct meanings of themselves and resist misrepresentations is cited among research that has also focused on reading and responding to literature. These studies examined how black adolescent girls make meaning of themselves when confronted with stereotypical images of black women, bounded ideologies of beauty, and racial discrimination and the ways in which literature provided a medium for them to negotiate and explore selfhood (Brooks, Browne, & Hampton, 2008;Carter, 2007;DeBlase, 2003;Sutherland, 2005).…”

Black Girls’ Reading Motivations: Centering Their Perspectives and Experiences to Redefine a Hegemonic Construct

“…Value answers the question: "Do I want to be a good reader, and why?" Research on Black girl readers addresses value by describing tensions between "text-centered, teacher-based" instruction (DeBlase, 2003) and Black girls' "subversive literacies" (Kelly, 2020). "Text-centered, teacherbased" instruction reflects the tendency for instruction to focus on readers' ability to acquire information from text, rather than their experience of a text, because students are evaluated on discreet skills (e.g., knowledge of literary conventions, providing text-based interpretations).…”

“…This poses a problem when Black girls value initiating meaning for themselves (Boston & Baxley, 2007;Jones, 2020). In response, they may critique pedagogical strategies, including questioning text selection and teacher-approved interpretations (DeBlase, 2003), or remain silent to navigate classroom literacy structures (Kelly, 2020). Researchers recommend increased alignment between what type of reading is valued, thus improving reading motivation.…”

“…However, researchers investigating adolescent reading motivation have taken color-evasive approaches (Jones, 2022a), avoiding discussions of race (Annamma et al, 2017). Much like literacy classrooms center the voices, knowledge, and experiences of white people (DeBlase, 2003), reading motivation research has prioritized perspectives, participants, and measures that assume white as "normal" (Jones, 2022a). Exploring other students' reading motivations (e.g., Castillo, 2020) through this framing inadvertently centers whiteness and limits our understanding of reading motivation for the increasingly diverse students (de Brey et al, 2019) in urban and urban characteristic (Milner, 2012) classrooms.…”

“…Amidst curricular silencing (Boston & Baxley, 2007), Black girls often engage in ways of knowing (Evans-Winters, 2005) and literacy practices that are restricted (DeBlase, 2003) or ignored within schools (Muhammad & Haddix, 2016). Ignoring race in theory development and instrument design creates a misalignment between researchers' definitions and Black girls' enactment of reading motivation.…”