‘Can I Come in Here?’ Winston’s Discovery of Edge-of-school Spaces and Meaningful Literacy Engagement

Abstract

Literacy classrooms are places of tension in the shaping of literate identities for Black male students because of classroom and cultural mismatch, racialized literacy beliefs and deficit views of Black male literacy achievement. However, research on connections between students’ out-of-school literacy and academic literacy participation tells a strikingly contrasting story because efforts are made to connect literacy to the lived experiences, popular culture, and the personal literacy development of students to what happens in the classroom. Understanding the roles of literacy and space – specifically how Black male youth navigate, contend with, and participate in these spaces – is integral to transforming literacy learning and development for Black male youth within school walls. This paper uses Foucault’s theory of other spaces in order to examine one boy’s discovery of four edge-of-school spaces – spaces that he discovered for meaningful literacy engagement.

Keywords:

• Black boys
• middle school
• literacy engagement
• other space
• edge-of-school spaces

Notes

1. Howard (2008) uses the ‘counterstory’ in the tradition of Critical Race Theory.