“I get it that you're worried about my school, but this is my education.” Connected literacies and critical pedagogies in anti-racist youth organizing

Abstract

In the past half a decade, many youth in urban high schools have witnessed the raised racial and political consciousness of a nation on screens, in schools, and on the streets. Many students of color have already seen or felt school or state-sanctioned surveillance, violence, and segregation. Some white students in urban schools have begun to see their worlds differently and to ask how they, too, are implicated. In newly formed solidarities, urban youth have raised their voices to talk, to walk, to march, to meet, and to thrive in the streets, working collectively—and sometimes separately—towards a just future. Using an alternative format, this dissertation is structured as three separate but related papers. The first paper works to define youth activist pedagogies. The second paper explores the literacies of youth activists through the frames of connected literacies; freedom, struggle, and dialogism; and whiteness as property (Harris, 1993). The third paper examines youth-adult relationships and responsive participant observation within engaged research. As a whole, this dissertation examines the connected literacies and critical pedagogies of youth activists in urban schools, a unique group whose knowledges and activities are largely unknown or underutilized by teachers and schools. Through a two-year, youth-informed critical ethnographic study, informed by asset-based and participatory action research, I documented pedagogical and literacy activities of youth across interracial anti-racist youth groups in two urban high schools in the upper Midwest United States. The overall research questions of the study asked: How did interracial anti-racist youth groups frame literacies and learning; how did they learn; and how were literacies and learning connected to liberation? This study was youth-informed and connected across school, community, and digital space. I refused the dominant deficit discourses of urban education and youth, in order to see the strengths that were not only possible, but that already existed in youth knowledge, inquiry, and capacity. Interracial youth activists, led by BIPOC youth, mobilized throughout a major urban area, learning and leading in overlapping racial justice, arts, education, and Black liberation networks and activities. Critical race theories helped to illuminate the ways that activist youth pressed against racism while submerged within it. Across all three papers, and despite challenges, youth activists created ripple effects of consciousness raising and social change throughout themselves, their schools, and the city. Implications of this research suggest pedagogies, practices, and positioning to amplify youth-centered education in literacies for liberation.