Racial Literacies and Trauma: Examining Partner Intimacy, Grief among Black Boys, & Liberatory Pedagogy

This study analyzes the secondary effects of neighborhood gun violence on the adolescent friends of victims and their schooling experiences. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in one urban all-boys school, I argue that grief is a central dimension in the social lives of Black boys after the deaths of friends, though it frequently goes unseen by their teachers and school administrators. In this paper, I show the tangible impacts of loss and grief on students’ academic and disciplinary records and their ideas about the future, as well as ways school adults could better intervene.

The initial purpose of this research sought to explore the following: What does it mean and what does it look, function, and feel like for an educational activist of color to fight for the liberation of others, but to also fight for the liberation of themselves? I also questioned and explored how one shares the spirit, metaphysics, and operationalization of liberatory pedagogy without jeopardizing its proliferation in spaces of plausible and probable oppression. In this article, found poetry developed from participants’ responses and surfaced as a cryptographic method that coded the kinetics of liberatory pedagogy across disciplines. In this research.

This paper focuses on the dynamics between partnered co-researchers who are collaborators on an ongoing project that seeks to improve the racial literacy (Stevenson, 2014) of educators in a charter management organization (CMO). Using the conceptual framings of racial literacy and relational ethics (Ellis, 2007), we explore the role of partner intimacy in intimate research. In our preliminary findings, we recognize the tension between professional expertise and partner dynamics, the role of each partner’s racial trauma in both the personal and professional partnership, and the unique boundaries that are required for partnered racial literacy co-facilitators.