Mulitcultural Education

Embracing a broader definition of literacy

alxbclrk@washington.edu — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 19:59:52 +0000

Embracing a broader definition of literacy

November 9, 2023

As the U.S. is facing another literacy crisis, particularly with the Science of Reading, Lakeya Afolalu has a solution. It’s to challenge schools and society to redefine literacy. “If we solely define literacy as reading and writing, then we omit the diverse ways that people communicate through multiple modalities,” she says. “We need to think more broadly about literacy, which will help schools and spaces create anti-racist, equitable and socioemotional approaches to literacy education.

An assistant professor of language, literacy and culture in the UW ��ߺ��’s Teaching, Learning & Curriculum program, Afolalu first became interested in the topic of literacy as a child. “I was born in the Bronx, New York and raised in Detroit, Michigan. My mother is African American, born and raised in Detroit. My father is Edo Nigerian, migrated from Edo State, Nigeria to the United States,” she explains. “So, as I spent my childhood and adolescent years between New York and Detroit, Nigerian and African American languages and literacies were always around me.”

Over time, and through her doctoral studies, she learned that narrow definitions of literacy that privilege reading and writing often cause tremendous harm to youth of color in the education system. “I always like to say that this current literacy crisis is not new,” says Afolalu. “Literacy has always been gatekept, especially for communities of color.”

I always like to say that this current literacy crisis is not new. Literacy has always been gatekept, especially for communities of color.

She describes the experience of visiting cousins in the suburbs of Detroit who were her age and realizing that they were reading the same books, only fuller chapter versions than she got at her school. “That got me thinking at a young age about how your zip code influences the type of education, and especially literacy education, you get. This all inspired me to become a teacher.”

Another formative part of Afolalu’s experience included making sense of her African American and Nigerian identities, which was especially prominent during her travels between Detroit and New York. In Detroit, which is predominantly African American she was “Lakeya” — the name given to her by her African American mother. “But when I would go to New York City, I crossed into my Nigerian identity and cultural world,” she says. “So much so that when I walked through my father’s door, I was now called by my Edo Nigerian name, “Iyore.”

Overtime, Afolalu began connecting literacy to the arts and humanities when she taught middle school students. “My 6th grade students in Newark, New Jersey and 7th grade students in Harlem loved to dance during recess and in the hallway from one class to another,” she says. “The administration saw their dancing and music as a conflict with the curricula, but it was actually helping them get through the school day, to bond with each other, and instead of reading in the library, they were recording dance videos and sharing them.” In her students, she saw that dance and music are also gestural and oral literacies and forms of communication.

Expressing identity

Now in a position to further impact the education system, Afolalu’s research and teaching continue to amplify this message — literacy is more than reading and writing. Her expanded definition of literacy speaks to the potential of education to evolve to meet the needs of all its students and the future. Digital literacies, visual literacies, dance literacies, fashion — these expanded concepts of literacy truly support students’ identities. She doesn’t believe that we should get rid of traditional literacy basics, such as phonics, word recognition, and comprehension but rather that we should couple it with forms of literacy that are inclusive of students’ racial, ethnic, linguistic and gender identities. This is needed for an equitable anti-racist, and just approach to literacy education.

Her research, which focuses on Nigerian immigrant youth, is concerned with two questions. “I ask myself what happens to Nigerian immigrant youth identities when they move to the United States, and I also ask how do they use language literacy and especially digital literacies in making sense of their new host country, the United States,” says Afolalu.

Lakeya Afolalu

She describes how, in Nigeria, there are societal identity markers like ethnicity, gender and religion. “But when they come to the United States, it’s such a hyper-racialized place,” she says. “And so, for the first time, when many immigrant youths come here from the Caribbean and African nations, they must reckon with race, racial constructs and anti-blackness. So, I ask how U.S. racial identity constructs and racialization processes, in particular, influence how they make sense of their identities, languages, and literacies."

Her research highlights the many ways Nigerian immigrant youth navigate U.S. school and societal spaces. Some transition to natural hair, seek trendy fashion trends, visit symbolic U.S. stores like Starbucks and Target, and exchange soccer for American football. Literacy practices like these helped the youth racially, socially and culturally position themselves in the United States. Others hold onto their Nigerian languages and cultural values by using digital literacies to communicate with school friends in Nigerian on WhatsApp and Xbox chat.

On the other hand, some of the Nigerian youths’ parents told Afolalu that they didn’t bring their children to the U.S. to get into aspects of American popular culture but to pursue the best education. One 5th grade Nigerian girl, whose parents had lived in the U.S. the longest, allowed her to maintain a more hybrid identity, through her art literacies and visits home to Nigeria, that honored both Nigerian and American values. This approach more fluidly integrated the languages and literacies of where she’s come from and where she finds herself.

Digital spaces are also critical to Afolalu’s research. “Texting, Xbox chat, virtual drawing platforms, these spaces don’t often have the same racial, linguistic, and cultural hierarchies and boundaries that exist in the real world offline,” she says. “So, youth, especially African immigrant youth, are able to rise above identity expectations and showcase their preferred identities online.”

Becoming whole

As someone who understands educational inequities firsthand, Afolalu considers it her service to society to put her research into practice. She recently founded LitiARTS — a nonprofit organization that uses literacy, arts-education, and college and career preparation mentorship to enhance educational justice for youth of color around the globe while keeping their identities and well-being at the core. The organization aims to support the whole student in three ways, with mentorship on college applications, art-based workshops and meet-ups for students for community-building and resource-sharing. In their first year, LitiArts was selected as a finalist for NewSchools Racial Equity funding opportunity. They were also recently selected as a recipient of Common Impact’s Day of Service project where they worked with a team of volunteer staff from NVIDIA to strengthen LitiArts’ digital marketing.

This organization manifests one of Afolalu’s core beliefs — every student deserves access to a high-quality education no matter their zip code. LitiARTS partners with youth and communities to build students’ confidence, creativity, and self-expression through the arts; affirm their literacy skills and identities through expansive literacies; and create communities of healthy well-being and belonging through mentorship. This is all especially geared toward students of color and first-generation college students whose identities and well-being are often stripped during their schooling experiences.

With a new undergraduate course she’s teaching, called Postcolonial Identities in the Arts, Education and Society, Afolalu is also learning and exploring alongside UW students so that more future leaders, educators and people in general can continue to think in expansive ways about identity, literacy and the arts to impact change in schools and beyond.

Most importantly, I encourage my students to step into a position of agency to speak back to harmful colonial narratives and experiences that have negatively impacted their families, their communities and their schooling experiences.

“This multi-sited course takes a historical look at the role of colonization in identity constructions and narratives for communities of color,” she says. “We visit local Seattle art spaces, explore visual art collections by artists of color, and engage with the larger Seattle community to bring the course topics to life. Most importantly, I encourage my students to step into a position of agency to speak back to harmful colonial narratives and experiences that have negatively impacted their families, their communities and their schooling experiences. Seattle is truly a gem for understanding how communities of color have taken postcolonial approaches to re-author their identities and narratives.”

At the heart of Afolalu’s inquiry is how we see ourselves and others and how this perspective impacts our overall well-being, especially our joy individually and as a society, from the time we are in school and beyond. Afolalu tells a personal story from when she was 11 years old that encapsulates this idea about when her father brought her grandmother to the United States.

Although she was multilingual and spoke Edo and Nigerian Pidgin, at that time, Afolalu had characterized her grandmother as “unable to speak English.” This characterization stemmed from deficit depictions of Africans in popular media and in her school curricula. Later, through her lived experiences and graduate studies, she would come to see the rich linguistic repertoire that her grandmother brought with her. Though her grandmother is no longer here with us, Afolalu now describes her as multi-lingual, with a rich multitude of literacies to learn from, love and embrace.

Contact

Charleen Wilcox

Director for Marketing & Communications

wilcoxc@uw.edu

Sitting at the Feet of the Elders: Building futures for the next generation

Anonymous — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 03:45:10 +0000

Sitting at the Feet of the Elders: Building futures for the next generation

November 23, 2022

Doctoral candidate and Banks Center graduate assistant Alayna Eagle Shield.

��ߺ��’s Banks Center for Educational Justice research assistants Alayna Eagle Shield, Jazmen Moore and Doua Kha are anchored by their fierce dedication to their communities. They carry this dedication across their work as they seek to disrupt a society built on racism by centering healing and equity-driven scholarship that creates possibilities for a more just world.

The three women all came to do their doctoral work at the Banks Center because of its graduate program and a connection they made with its director, Dr. Django Paris.

"He's really doing nation-building work within and amongst other nations of community and people," says Eagle Shield. She would know.

“My great grandma was taken in a wagon to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania,” says Eagle Shield, a Standing Rock Sioux Tribe citizen, and mother of four. “She witnessed when Sitting Bull was killed."

Doctoral candidate and Banks Center graduate assistant Jazmen Moore photographed near a mural by Indigenous artists Roger Fernandes and Toma Villa in Miller Hall.

Despite the dominant culture’s systematic and violent actions to exterminate and force assimilation on her people, Eagle Shield’s ancestors persevered through cultural wisdom and by continuing to seek connections.

"There was a leader in our community, Sitting Bull's nephew, One Bull,” Eagle Shield explains. “One Bull knew plants, animals, water ways and other tribes. He had a strong disposition, firm foundation of Lakota language, values and morals.” Her father, John Eagle Shield, a knowledge keeper and leader in their community, valued and emulated One Bull’s worldview and ability to make relatives wherever he went, and passed those values on to the young people in his life, especially his own children.

As she grew up, found her life partner, and eventually had children, Eagle Shield lived on the reservation, learned from the teachings passed down from her great grandmother to her father, and continued the work of keeping her culture and language alive. She enrolled her children in a Lakota immersion school.

“In my search to further my education and enact the teachings of Lala (grandpa) One Bull,” she says, “my dad encouraged me to travel the world and make lots of relatives along the way.”

We’re All Related

In 2016, the world came to Eagle Shield’s doorstep as she joined the water is life movement when the pipeline was being built north of the Standing Rock Reservation. That’s where she met Rae Paris, a UW associate professor of creative writing and Banks Center affiliate faculty member, and Banks Center director Django Paris. Eventually, they would encourage her to apply to the Banks Center’s program.

Up until then, Eagle Shield knew little about Black communities or other communities outside of her own people. Fellow doctoral students Kha and Moore would be among new members of Eagle Shield’s chosen family, coming to the program with their own wisdom and drive for connection.

I was searching for community, a mentor, a village, not just an advisor, and I found it.

"I'm the first in my family to go to graduate school," says Kha. "Because of my interests in organizing with queer and trans Hmong youth, Django reached out personally. He said, ‘I think you’d be an amazing fit for this program, and I want to support you on this journey.’” That was the first time a faculty member that Kha didn’t know had validated her as a person and a scholar. "I was searching for community, a mentor, a village, not just an advisor, and I found it."

Moore experienced that kind of support as an undergraduate at Michigan State University when she took a creative writing class with Rae Paris. "She saw me and what I was trying to write about Black girls and women, silence and navigating traumatic experiences," says Moore. "She became a mentor and believed in me becoming an educator. Because my work aligned with her husband’s work, she connected me to Django early on." Their mentorship would eventually lead Moore to the ��ߺ��.

In the Beginning

Eagle Shield and Moore photographed in Miller Hall.

Originally founded by James Banks in the 1990’s as the Center for Multicultural Education, the Banks Center opened its doors in 2018. The Banks Center’s origin story intertwines with the stories of Eagle Shield, Moore and Kha.

Since opening and even and especially during a global pandemic, its director, programs, faculty, and undergraduate and graduate students are continually evolving and influencing one another and the wider world. Examples of this work-in-progress include the Tulalip Culturally Sustaining Education Project, the Distinguished Summer Scholars and Artists series and the Black Student and Faculty Mentoring Collaborative.

"What we've been trying to do in the Banks Center's work and across these three projects is to join the work of Black and Indigenous communities," says Paris. "That includes families, tribes, neighborhoods, the land, from the youngest to elders, artists, scholars, to join folks in understanding the connection between the past work and the work in front of us."

What we've been trying to do in the Banks Center's work and across these three projects is to join the work of Black and Indigenous communities.

After beginning in the winter of 2020, the Tulalip Culturally Sustaining Education Project shifted from in-person to online during the COVID-19 pandemic. The work involves learning alongside the culturally sustaining educational work of partners Chelsea Craig, the assistant principal at Quil Ceda Tulalip Elementary and a Leadership for Learning doctoral student, and Dr. Anthony Craig, an affiliate faculty member at the Banks Center and the Leadership for Learning director.

“Even working remotely, one of my favorite things is being in community and seeing how family can be an amazing support system," says Kha.

This healing work of resistance and sustenance the Tulalip people have forged in and beyond educational settings also resonates for Moore. "We have been learning how they have sustained Tulalip lifeways over time," she says. "As an educator, I see Chelsea navigating her position as an administrator of a local elementary school, and I think about the harm done in our state-sanctioned schools and ask, are they redeemable and how do we sustain our young people within schools in the meantime?”

The answers do not come from any one person. "They are teaching the children, and the children are teaching them," says Kha. "They've also invited the elders. I've been fortunate enough to be in the presence of Grandma Patti (Patti Gobin), hear the stories of her struggles, and see she still has hope for the current and future generations to reclaim what they've lost."

Doctoral candidate and Banks Center graduate assistant Doua Kha photographed in the center.

More than hope is the promise of combined intergenerational vision and wisdom. “I've always loved sitting at the feet of the elders and learning,” Kha says. “It's even more powerful when elders are willing to sit at the feet of young people and recognize that they aren't just future leaders but are leaders now."

The Distinguished Summer Scholars Program offers another way for students to experience new and inspiring perspectives and potential pathways. "It's always exciting to learn who is coming," says Moore. "The first summer of 2019, the course with Sandy Grande and Leslie Williams was pivotal in my whole graduate trajectory. The second summer with Alexis Pauline Gumbs, I learned about practice versus performance. Schools want students to perform and show up in neat narrow boxes, but what happens when you stop performing and start cultivating a practice for living and being?"

Schools want students to perform and show up in neat narrow boxes, but what happens when you stop performing and start cultivating a practice for living and being?

"Django does an amazing job of finding people doing liberating work and challenging norms," says Kha. "In 2020, when everything was online, the course reminded students, Black, Indigenous, and students of color, that writing doesn't have to be for others. It can be for you and your community. The best thing was that it challenged you to find yourself in community and center that."

"I'm a huge fan of the summer series," says Eagle Shield. "I had no idea what to expect. When I started my Ph.D. program in 2019, I did a summer class first. The Black and Indigenous Theories of Education Liberation and Resurgence course was the most beautiful opening class I had ever taken. It set the bar for what could be. There was a peeling and healing that I had to do. I hope the series continues forever."

In its first year, the Black Student and Faculty Mentoring Collaborative gives an additional avenue for collective growth under the leadership of Rae and Django Paris and with support from the UW Black Opportunity Fund.

"We spent this year moving with care and compassion," says Moore. "We're still in a pandemic, and people are still carrying a lot." She describes how they partnered with undergraduate student Navon Morgan (director of the UW Black Student Commission) to identify interested undergraduate students and paired them with faculty members.

The stipends and honorariums went toward different projects, artistic processes and professional development work. "We gave people a wide berth in how they wanted to spend their time in the pairings, and people are still sharing what took place. It will be great to see where we take it next year," she says.

Toward a Shared Destination

Kha photographed outside of the office space she shares with Eagle Shield and Moore inside the Banks Center.

These Banks Center efforts also inform and intersect with individual student scholarship. In the case of Moore, her dissertation grew out of a preliminary research study she conducted in 2020 related to a park project that enlisted local teens, all Black girls, to help advocate for it being rebuilt. Since then, the teens have claimed the park project’s Teen Advisory Team and the relationships they have built with each other as a place of liberation and healing. Starting in 2021, Moore has been learning and working with some of these same teens on her dissertation. The study explores how the refusals and participation in chosen, consent-based learning spaces by Black girls disrupts systemic anti-Black racism within the context of U.S. schools.

Because of her research, Moore was recently awarded a National Academy of Education Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship as part of the 2022 cohort of scholars developing new knowledge to support policy, practice and public engagement.

She describes what she witnessed in the park project teen advisory team meetings and how that influenced her thinking. “The girls talked about their experience in their local high schools, where most students are white,” says Moore. “School felt unwelcoming, and they were unpacking. In my research, I'm thinking about chosen learning spaces, consent-based learning, Black and Indigenous theories of consent and refusal, enacting refusals or advocating for something different, and that's a big shift from where I started."

Kha, a Gates Millennium Scholar (GMS) who served as the outreach coordinator from 2017 to 2020 for the GMS Alumni LGBTQ+ Network, doing national advocacy and programming work, is looking into traditional K-12 spaces where queer and trans Hmong youth lead the way. "I used to look at these students in a deficit way," she says. "The Banks Center has challenged me to look at things differently. After seeing how other communities are taking up space and passing down traditions, I'm seeing when these students are doing liberator’s work, rebelling and organizing. It's changed how I see myself too."

Eagle Shield also describes a transformative journey. After getting invited to the American Education Research Association annual meeting to receive an award, she asked Paris for guidance. "I was so nervous after the camp in opposition to the pipeline closed. I had never been an academic,” she says. "He said to do what feels right, that I was part of this movement." Ideas shared at the conference would later result in her collaboration on the published book, Protecting the Promise: Indigenous Education Between Mothers and Their Children.

While there, Eagle Shield also had a realization. “One of the things that came to me at the AERA session was that Native and Black peoples need to become relatives again," she says.

In this moment of pandemic and climate catastrophe and emboldened white supremacy, we are among the communities and voices needed to enact a possible future for all people.

This coming together is at the heart of the Banks Center’s work of joining the leadership of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific Islander communities. Paris describes it like this, "In this moment of pandemic and climate catastrophe and emboldened white supremacy, we are among the communities and voices needed to enact a possible future for all people."

He acknowledges that while it may sound like a grand statement, it's happening. "It's time for society, including institutions of higher ed and pre-k-12 schools to follow this leadership as we research, teach and learn together. The answers are in our communities."

Contact

Charleen Wilcox

Director for Marketing & Communications

wilcoxc@uw.edu