(Re)Membering: Black Women Engaging Memory through Journaling

Abstract

This manuscript is a confluence of voices: A Black university professor at a Historically Black University in the Southeast and her two pre-service teachers. Using journaling as a catalyst for transformative healing; three young, Black women discuss their intersecting identities and bear witness to each other’s memories. To resist racist representations Black women must confront the colonizing ideology by developing a critical consciousness. In short, we must confront massive hate by fully loving and embracing our Blackness. The study elucidates how selfactualization writing can cultivate healing while promoting academic success.

Dark Persistence: Black College Women's COVID-19 Photo Essays

“…As a “creative literacy practice that refuses whiteness and anti-Blackness” (Ohito, 2020, p. 188), photo essays serve as transformative compositional spaces that invite high-achieving Black women to bring their rich multimodal repertoires and full humanity into college English classrooms. When situated within antiracist, trauma-informed compositional pedagogies that validate writing as self-expression, freedom, and healing (Smith et al, 2022), COVID-19 photo essays powerfully (re)position Black undergraduate women as experts on their own lives; (re)authorize their multimodal communicative practices in college learning; and (re)affirm their brilliance, strength, and resilience. Considering that high-achieving Black women are often marginalized in college classrooms (Davis, 2018) and traumatized by conventional writing pedagogies (Smith et al, 2022), photo essays serve as multimodal spaces where they can write openly about their COVID-19 experiences in ways that privilege their intersectional epistemologies, experiences, and creativities.…”

“…When situated within antiracist, trauma-informed compositional pedagogies that validate writing as self-expression, freedom, and healing (Smith et al, 2022), COVID-19 photo essays powerfully (re)position Black undergraduate women as experts on their own lives; (re)authorize their multimodal communicative practices in college learning; and (re)affirm their brilliance, strength, and resilience. Considering that high-achieving Black women are often marginalized in college classrooms (Davis, 2018) and traumatized by conventional writing pedagogies (Smith et al, 2022), photo essays serve as multimodal spaces where they can write openly about their COVID-19 experiences in ways that privilege their intersectional epistemologies, experiences, and creativities. In this way, COVID-19 photo essays can work to displace “Whiteness from the center of the curriculum … ensuring that teaching both extends from and responds to the embodied and emplaced lived experiences of Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) … students” (Green et al, 2021, p. 145).…”

“…In this way, COVID-19 photo essays can work to displace “Whiteness from the center of the curriculum … ensuring that teaching both extends from and responds to the embodied and emplaced lived experiences of Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) … students” (Green et al, 2021, p. 145). More specifically, by opening new pathways for college English educators to critically listen to high-achieving Black women and other BIPOC students, respectfully witness their truth-telling about pandemic pain and persistence, and teach writing through vulnerability and authenticity, photo essays have the potential to serve as “a catalyst for transformative healing” (Smith et al, 2022, p. 1673) for all undergraduate students learning, working, and living beyond the global pandemic.…”

“…Despite their rich multiliterate legacies, high-achieving Black college women like Imani are frequently (mis)perceived as unintelligent, incapable, and illiterate compared to their white peers at PWUs (Kynard, 2010). In college English classrooms, Black undergraduate women may not demonstrate their full multimodal compositional repertoires because conventional pedagogies overemphasize standardization and skills, which “shifts writing from being a source of possibility to one of ridicule and limitation” (Smith et al, 2022, p. 1674). In addition, high-achieving Black college women and their multimodal literacies have been marginalized in the research literature “due to the reductive nature of how literacies in college settings are imagined, [and] the lack of attention paid to out-of-school literacies” (Kynard, 2010, p. 35).…”

“…Toward that end, this article highlights how seven high-achieving Black college women's photo essays represented persistence and illuminated, in Imani's words, “the things that brought joy” during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, “photo essay” represents a type of intersectional multimodal composition that Black college women author to “affirm the self and critique dominant narratives of whiteness” (Smith et al, 2022, p. 1676). Guided by intersectional multimodal literacy frameworks and analytic methods, I explore the following question:How do Black undergraduate women's photo essays visually and textually represent their persistence during the COVID-19 pandemic?…”