Peer Reviewed Articles by Gholnecsar "Gholdy" Muhammad
At a time when schools are destroying the minds and spirits of Black and Brown students, as educa... more At a time when schools are destroying the minds and spirits of Black and Brown students, as educators, we must work differently to make sure our children's souls are not claimed by those who refuse to acknowledge their brilliance. The purpose of this essay is to explore the educational activism and scholarship of three Black women educators in an effort to help readers understand how and why they should inform our teacher education and teaching practices today. The authors highlight the lives of Anna influential women whose work and theories have shaped the field of teacher education. Through a brief historical analysis of their scholarship and practice, the authors examine how these women ignited educational progress for Black children. This piece is written to honor their lives, center their theories on education, and bring them out of obscurity.
Media culture is exploitative and damaging. It reinforces both racist and sexist stereotypes, whi... more Media culture is exploitative and damaging. It reinforces both racist and sexist stereotypes, which places Black young women's unique racialized gender in a position to be overidentified in derogatory ways. The bodies of Black young women, as an example, are labeled with social stigmas that make them identifiable to society at large as deficient. Furthermore, their lives have been devalued and dehumanized in the public eye as their stories are often left untold, falsely reported, or overlooked in the wider media landscape. Using qualitative interview methods, we examine the current state of Black girlhood and womanhood and the racism that pervades their lives in the United States. With this backdrop, we also investigate the ways in which Black young women have responded with their writings when we, as Black women researchers, created spaces for them to use language to fight back and resist assaults against their humanity. Specifically, we illustrate the historical literacy practice of (re)claiming print authority through writing and how Black young women used their pens as a means to claim authority of language in ways to assert their voices, ideals, and truths. We conclude with a discussion of how educators can advance print authority within learning spaces for identity meaning making and empowerment so that Black girls and young women have an expressed voice in our current social and political context.
Price-Dennis, D., Muhammad, G. E., Womack, E., McArthur, S.A. & Haddix, M. (2017). The multiple identities and literacies of Black girlhood: A conversation about creating spaces for Black girl voices. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 13(2), 1-18. In light of the current assaults on Black girls in and out of schools across the nation, K-12 edu... more In light of the current assaults on Black girls in and out of schools across the nation, K-12 educators need to understand a more complete vision of the identities these girls create for themselves and the literacies and practices needed to best teach them. In this article a collective of Black female scholars addresses how gender construction and the literacy experiences of Black adolescent females are supported by their interactions with and engagements in community-and school-based programs that center on the literacy needs and interests of Black adolescent females. The authors draw on their collective yet individual experiences as Black women scholars and teachers to share ways to transform the identity development of Black adolescent females within and beyond official school contexts. Implications are provided for educators in creating legitimate spaces for Black girls to express their voices, perspectives and ways engage in multiple acts of literacies.
This article highlights how two researchers started Critical Community Conversations (CCC) with a... more This article highlights how two researchers started Critical Community Conversations (CCC) with a school community in an effort to learn from one another and build solidarity. The intent was for CCC to focus on some of the most
pressing issues facing our nation, state, and local neighborhoods, with a special lens on racism.
Writing alongside 12 African American Muslim girls, we led a summer literacy program in an effort... more Writing alongside 12 African American Muslim girls, we led a summer literacy program in an effort to understand how Black Muslim adolescent girls write about their identities and ideas. The 4-week literacy program was designed to engage and support Black Muslim girls, aged 12-17 years old, in reading, writing, and understanding the multiple contexts that inform their worlds. The girls received writing instruction connected to their experiences and identities in an environment that afforded them time to represent their situated worlds of being Black, Muslim, and girls in the United States. In this qualitative inquiry, we investigated the following research question: How would Black Muslim girls write to encourage a future generation to navigate multiple identities? The participants penned letters to a future generation of African American Muslim girls. Drawing upon methods of thematic analysis, we found that themes of sisterhood and unity, shattering misrepresentations, empowerment, strength through faith, knowledge (education), and speaking up and fighting for rights emerged. These themes indicate the messages Muslim girls write are indicative of the multiple identities they navigate and speaks to how they would encourage youth who share their complex racialized-gender religious identities, as well as the need to open the conversation on Black education to center both Black girls and Black Muslim girls.
In this essay, the authors present experiences as writers (poets), thinkers, and activists to exp... more In this essay, the authors present experiences as writers (poets), thinkers, and activists to explicate the literary genre of slam poetry and its affordances as an artistic resistance toward the end of identity, agency, and activism. These areas of development are critical for youth because they are beginning to be navigated and established during adolescence. As youth engage in individual identity formation and define their values in relation to the world around them, slam has the potential to act as a vehicle for that exploration. Through the shar- ing of a dialogic exchange about slam poetry, the authors discuss the purpose and power of language and provide considerations for ways in which this out- of-school literacy act can be transferred into classroom spaces with youth. This work is timely; the need for youth to make sense of their worlds is an urgent compulsion and English language arts instruction needs a major shift to focus on criticality as much as schools currently focus on skills and proficiencies.
Haddix, M., McArthur, S. A., Muhammad, G. E., Price-Dennis, D. & Sealey-Ruiz, Y. (2016). At the Kitchen Table: Black Women English Educators Speaking Our Truths. English Education, 48(4), 380-395. In this Provocateur Piece, the authors featured in the themed issue re-create a virtual kitchen t... more In this Provocateur Piece, the authors featured in the themed issue re-create a virtual kitchen table talk where they dialogue across their respective work as English teacher educators and scholars who foreground Black feminist/womanist epistemologies in their personal, social, and professional lives. They discuss what it means to be Black women, mothers, sisters, and daughters who do work with Black girls in K–12 educational settings and Black women in teacher education. Why is it critical that all educators acknowledge Black girls’ literacies in their work? How are Black girls’ literacies honored in our work? What does it mean for us as Black women educators to do this work? How does it enrich our lives? What are the challenges? The piece ends with an open letter to Black girls as an affirming call for their reclaiming and redefining of their literate selves.
In light of the current assaults on Black girls and misaligned instructional practices in and out... more In light of the current assaults on Black girls and misaligned instructional practices in and outside of schools across the nation, English educators need to understand a more complete vision of the identities girls create for themselves, and the literacies and practices needed to best teach them. This article provides a review of literature of Black girl literacies by examining historical, theoretical, and empirical research conducted across the past several decades. These literatures are organized into themes and threads that help to illustrate the pedagogies for English educators of Black girls. The authors provide implications for literacy practice, policy, and research that center Black girls' ways of knowing and suggest a Black girls' literacies framework as an impetus for English teaching and teacher education.
The purpose of this study is to understand how Black adolescent girls make sense of and challenge... more The purpose of this study is to understand how Black adolescent girls make sense of and challenge public conceptions and representations of Black girlhood today through the use of multimodal literacy-examining traditional forms of writings (hence the term, "penning") as well as non-print texts that include image, video, Prezi, and Pinterest, the latter of which functions as an online pin board (hence the term, "pinning"). Drawing from our two qualitative inquiries with adolescent girls ages 13-19 years old, the researchers examined what young Black women do with texts as they take up representations of their public selves in their real worlds outside of school contexts by examining the following research questions: (1) What representations do Black adolescent girls pen/pin against? (2) How do Black adolescent girls (re)pen/pin representations of self? Findings show that the girls penned/pinned against ideals related to physical beauty, sexualizing, and education.
Across theory, research, and learning standards, there is a clear call for authentic writing expe... more Across theory, research, and learning standards, there is a clear call for authentic writing experiences to increase achievement and engagement. According to theories of authenticity that stress its subjective nature, a writing task is authentic when a student perceives it as relevant to the real world-as they define the real world. Moreover, there is a need for authentic writing in classrooms that connects to increased student engagement, but the reality of writing instruction across schools in the United States remains rote and teacher-centered. These narrowed views and perspectives are further exacerbated when it comes to teaching African American youth in classrooms. Using qualitative interview data involving 12 African American students in the middle grades, the researchers examined the following questions: 1) How do African American adolescents describe their classroom writing experiences? 2) What factors do African American adolescents desire related to authenticity for writing instruction? Researchers found 24 present, desired and undesired practices expressed by participants when describing their classroom writing experiences. In this article, eight of the most prevalent factors (i.e., expression, personal connections, sharing with peers, sharing with teachers, structured writing, student and teacher choice of topics, and writing for impact) are illustrated to understand how these variables contributed to authentic writing experiences. Findings from this study suggest that more research is needed within classrooms that attempt to increase the perceived authenticity of writing tasks among African American youth.
Coupling conceptual framework of zamani with reader response theory, the researcher explored the ... more Coupling conceptual framework of zamani with reader response theory, the researcher explored the ways African American women's writings supported, nurtured, and "mentored" the writings of adolescent girls. Findings show that the mentor texts served to help the girls generate ideas for their writings, think about their identities, understand the structure and style of genres, and invoke a response from readers through the use of critical language. Understanding the purpose of literary mentors is useful for English educators in appreciating the varied utility of texts and how they can be used to advance the writings and identities of youth.
In this study, the researcher explores the role of literacy-specifically writing in the lives of ... more In this study, the researcher explores the role of literacy-specifically writing in the lives of adolescent Muslim girls who used writing as a sociopolitical tool when participating in a literacy collaborative grounded in Islamic principles and writing for social change. Previously, researchers have largely focused on the literacies of immigrant adolescent Muslims, leaving African American girls out of scholarly conversations. Employing methods of intertextual analysis grounded within a qualitative study, the researcher examined two questions: (a) What social issues do African American Muslim girls choose to write within broadside poetry? (b) How do these self-selected social issues relate to their identities? Findings show girls most frequently wrote about issues related to (a) war and violence and (b) the abuse, violence, and mistreatment of women and girls. Writing was a means to make sense of and critically shape their multiple identities, including who they are as Muslims, their community, and ethnic and gendered identities.
Volume 49 February 2015 Currently, African American girls are being depicted as overly sexual, vi... more Volume 49 February 2015 Currently, African American girls are being depicted as overly sexual, violent, or confrontational, are judged by physical features, or are invisible across mainstream media and within school classrooms. Few investigations have explored how they respond to and interpret such imposed representations. Nor, for the most part, have studies examined how girls represent themselves among a society of others pathologizing and defining who they are. This inquiry investigated self-representations in the writings of eight African American adolescent girls ages 12-17 who participated in a historically grounded literacy collaborative. Coupling sociohistorical and critical sociocultural theories, I organized and analyzed their writings through open, axial, and selective coding. Findings show that the girls wrote across platforms similar to those African American women have addressed historically, which included writing to represent self, writing to resist or counter ascribed representations, and writing toward social change. The girls wrote multiple and complex representations, which included ethnic, gender, intellectual, kinship, sexual, individual, and community representations. These findings suggest their writings served as hybrid spaces for the girls to explore, make sense of, resist, and express different manifestations of self. The representations the girls created in their writings did not fall into static notions of culture or identity. Instead, their self-representations were socially constructed and were responsive to their lives. This study extends the extant research by offering wider views of representations from the girls' voices, as well as a broadened historical lens to view their reading and writing with implications for how English language arts educators can reconceptualize the roles of writing in classrooms.
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Peer Reviewed Articles by Gholnecsar "Gholdy" Muhammad
pressing issues facing our nation, state, and local neighborhoods, with a special lens on racism.
pressing issues facing our nation, state, and local neighborhoods, with a special lens on racism.