Moench, Candice

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Michigan Reading Journal Volume 50 Issue 2 Article 6 2018 Freedom to be me… Art, Literacy, and Identity Exploration through the Eyes of Urban Adolescent Girls Candice Moench Dickinson State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/mrj Recommended Citation Moench, Candice (2018) "Freedom to be me… Art, Literacy, and Identity Exploration through the Eyes of Urban Adolescent Girls," Michigan Reading Journal: Vol. 50 : Iss. 2 , Article 6. Available at: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/mrj/vol50/iss2/6 This Voices from the Region is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@GVSU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Michigan Reading Journal by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks@GVSU. For more information, please contact scholarworks@gvsu.edu. Winter 2018, Vol. 50, No. 2 27Freedom to be me…Art, Literacy, and Identity Exploration through the Eyes of Urban Adolescent Girlsby Candice Moench, Ed.D.Candice MoenchOriginally, I am from Michigan, and I earned my mas-ter’s degree and doctorate at Wayne State University. Growing up in the white suburbs of Dearborn Heights and attending a Catholic High School, I did not have the opportunity to engage with people of color who lived and worked on the perimeter of my neighbor-hood. My childhood was impacted by the Detroit Riots of 1967 in which I learned to fear and dislike people of color. It was commonplace in my family household to hear derogatory words for African American people.In my second year at Eastern Michigan University I decided to become an urban educator; so I packed my belongings and moved to a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago to continue my elementary education degree at the University of Illinois at Circle.  Many years later, I knew I wanted to make a difference in the lives of high-poverty, African American girls, so I wrote my dis-sertation on an experience that disrupted me emotion-ally, intellectually, and spirituality; an experience built on an honest and authentic relationship with eight girls that walked in a pair of shoes unlike my own. This article is based on that experience.On a cold winter afternoon, I drove for the first time to the city’s GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgen-der, and queer) youth center and began the process of recruiting African American girls for this research study. An overwhelming feeling of awareness of my whiteness slowly crept over me. I felt uncomfortable with the privileges afforded to me by society as a white, middle-class woman. I drove through a community swallowed by inner city blight, where barred windows, chained doors, and crumbling walls hide signs of life. I was an outsider looking in. I did not know it at the time, but I was on my way to disrupting my own ideas about power, whiteness, and privilege. This article draws from research conducted in a rented office space, filled with art supplies, books, and large working tables, which became the safe space for eight, 17-20-years-of-age, African American, urban, adoles-cent girls who self-identified as lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. I wove multiliteracies into the context of an out-of-school book club, because this thinking posi-tioned the girls as authors and artists, meaning makers intent on representing their understanding of their social worlds. The girls engaged in a variety of literacy activities including book discussions, literature circles, writing in writer’s notebooks, composing poetry, and visual arts such as creating collage and identity masks to construct and reconstruct alternative interpretations of their identities. The book club transformed into a living platform for the girls to approach the issues of  physical mutilation, racism, suicide, loss of murdered family members, “bein white,” and male growth hormones. During the twelve-week study, the participants and the researcher shared meals, life experiences, and shared their own sense of self as well as a growing awareness of the transformative effects literacy engagement provides for any student that may exist on the fringes of school or society.Multimodal literacy serves as a pathway for student empowerment as well as an eye-opening discussion for educators who are seeking to support their students Michigan Reading Journal28in exploring and negotiating a wide range of identity issues through literacy. Students need a safe space to “live through” what is being fostered during reading and writing without fear of repercussions because their ideas do not conform to the dominate ideas of school or society. As one girl said in this study, “No one has ever asked me to tell my story.” How many times as educators do we inspire students to move through the processes of inquiry, critique, raising possibilities, acting on possibilities and culminating in self-transformation?  As designers, the adolescent girls brought their expe-riences, life stories, and bits of the world to the mean-ing-making process of literacy in the form of visual materials such as paint, ripped paper, and magazine pages; as well as a laundry list of reading strategies such as Post-It-Note coding, visual audit trails, and graphic organizers. I taught and engaged with the girls in reading strategies to support their understanding of the text and to facilitate deeper group discussions. The girls did not have background knowledge or prior experience participating in group discussions or sharing their personal writing with an audience. I was reminded many times during this study that reading and writ-ing are both discursive processes, and having the girls make their way into this foreign literacy setting differed according to literacy abilities, comfort levels, and social positioning among the group.As Freire posits, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not in static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation (1970, p. 64). The safe literacy space of the rented office—outside the bounds of school and home—allowed the girls to collectively reconsider new identities, create new alliances, and begin the work of self-transformation (Evans & Boyte, 1992). The girls used conversations about the urban characters and events from the two book club novels, London Reign by A. C. Brit (2007) and The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah (2006) to analyze how their own every-day experiences constructed their identities as African American LBT girls, sisters, partners, daughters, and friends.The use of multiliteracies as tools enabled the girls to recast the meaning from the novels, to their own written language and to another sign system such as a poem, collage or an identity mask (Cowan & Albers, 2006). This control by the LBT adolescents, as they remade themselves, enhanced their developing awareness of personal agency to enact change in their lives, such as attending college, stopping substance abuse, or mending relationships with their mothers. All eight girls believed that their sexual orientation did not need to be fixed as compared to the factors that gnawed at their psyches such as homelessness, poverty, and physical violence.This is particularly important for students who identify along the GLBT spectrum because their voices and experiences are often shunned and silenced. Educators are challenged to see GLBT students not as individuals whose life experiences are separate and distinct from the students they see every day, but as students who can shed light on the multitude of hidden identities often carried into the classroom. Multimodal responses to literature allow others to come face-to-face with both painful and transformative experiences as seen by the altered collage by the participant, Meanz (a self-selected pseudonym) (Figure 1). Figure 1. The collage is entitled A Fist Full of Tears. Voices from the Region - Freedom to Be Me…Art, Literacy, and Identity Exploration Through the Eyes   of Urban Adolescent GirlsWinter 2018, Vol. 50, No. 2 29Meanz writes, “This is just the process I see myself going through when I cut myself. I cried first and it turned into cutting myself, then it turned into a broken heart, then it turned into a bruised heart.”Meanz’s artifacts demonstrated a re-voicing (Rich & Evans, 2010) of her experiences and subjectivities of pain and hurt. It is vital for educators to better under-stand the kinds of literacy practices that do not quietly position the adolescent into unauthentic living, with the intent that this understanding is a precursor to changes in curriculum and classroom practices. Multili-teracies as a tool in the secondary English language arts classroom can challenge our idea of what is “normal,” because writing and visual artifacts differ in tone, voice, and power.Based on my experiences, my first suggestion for an educator thinking of using multiliteracies as a transfor-mation tool in the classroom is to be willing to be vul-nerable to change or disruptions to your own thinking and beliefs. As an educator, you’ll serve as the medium to help students process conflicting feelings and issues. It is important to be open-minded because, in a sense, students’ stories are a violation to a structure, which promotes conformity, and the sanitation of differences. The process will also likely change you. Providing the process and setting to give students a voice and the ability to define themselves on their own terms and in a sense you will define and redefine yourself.My second suggestion is to re-imagine secondary English language arts classroom practices as permeable, and inclusive of the lives of students inside and outside of class. This is perhaps the most difficult change to make, because if classroom settings are open and safe for nourishing conversations, the students will expose parts of their lives that may be uncomfortable, dan-gerous, or even insignificant to the other students and teachers.  In the case of my research, the girls brought “dangerous memories” (Lewis, 1993) of abuse, death, rejection, and drugs to the book club. The capturing and articulating of “dangerous memories” may take significant time and patience for students to master, and facilitating the discussion requires the same from teachers.These discussions can be difficult. To facilitate discus-sion and understand the interconnectedness of literacy and the girls’ identities, I posed the following questions to help identify the girls’ socially recognizable identity or identities they were taking on or were getting others to recognize in their writing, visual artifacts, and talk: 1. What sort of identity are you building for yourself?2. What sort of identity are you building for others?3. What role does the identity you are building play in your own identity building?4. How are you positioning others, what identities are the others taking up?5. You used themes to build your identity from some-where. Where did you get some of the themes? (Gee, 2011).I used these questions to retrace the themes in the girls’ writing, visual artifacts, and talk; I believed it was the best way to do justice to the girls’ stories of transforma-tion.My third suggestion is to be mindful of selecting lit-erature which speaks not only to lives of the students, but also serves as means for them to examine how they participate in society, and how it constructs their lives and identities as literate citizens. In my experience, with these literacy practices, each girl’s voice facilitated per-sonal change and agency because the opportunity was without the fear of typical classroom practices that serve to silence, reprehend, and disavow their existence. This voice is portrayed in Jordan (a self-selected pseudonym) exemplifies this use of voice in her identity masked, entitled Bold Statement (Figure 2).  In the end, how we engage students in this process is much less important than finding credible ways to do it in secondary English language arts classrooms or in out-of-school settings, which include transitional housing sites, detention centers, churches, and youth centers. It is also important to understand that multi-literacies, as a tool in a secondary classroom, is never fixed. It is always in flux to accommodate the needs of the students and the teacher. Understanding this need for flexibility is key to success in this kind of work.Candice MoenchMichigan Reading Journal30ReferencesBritt, A.C. (2007). London Reign. Harlem, New York, NY: GhettoHeat Publications. Cowan, K., & Albers, P. (2006). Semiotic Representations: Building Com-plex Practices Through the Arts. The Reading Teacher, 60(2), 124-138.Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group.Gee, J.P. (2011). How to do discourse analysis: A toolkit. New York, NY: Routledge.Lewis, G.M. (1993). Without a word: Teaching beyond Women’s Silence. New York, NY: Routledge.Rich, E. & Evans, J. (2009). Now I am Nobody, see me for who I am: The paradox of performativity. Gender and Education, 21(1), 1-16.Soulijah, S. (2006). The coldest winter ever. New York, NY: Pocket Star.Author BiographyCandice Moench is an Associate Professor in the Education Department at Dickinson State University in Bismarck, North Dakota where she has been a faculty member since 2014. She teaches literacy courses and Educational Psychology for elementary and secondary students. Candice completed her Ed.D. at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Her academic interests include literacy, multiliteracies, gender identity, and teacher education. Personal interests include anything with sun, water, trees, and mountains. She can be reached at candice.moench@dickinsonstate.edu.Figure 2. Jordan wrote about this piece, “And then the mouth wired shut matches in with the bold statement too. It’s wired closed. I can’t speak up.  I don’t really need to speak up except for stuff like gay marriage, then I’ll speak up about it. I want GLBT equality to be accepted. And it’s me like speaking up.”Voices from the Region - Freedom to Be Me…Art, Literacy, and Identity Exploration Through the Eyes   of Urban Adolescent GirlsWinter 2018, Vol. 50, No. 2 31Michigan Reading Journal32

Freedom to be me… Art, Literacy, and Identity Exploration through the Eyes of Urban Adolescent Girls

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Freedom to be me… Art, Literacy, and Identity Exploration through the Eyes of Urban Adolescent Girls

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