Black Joy, Love, and Resistance

In recent years, critical multimodal research suggests that students can explore issues around social justice, race, racism, and Whiteness (Aguilera & Lopez, 2020; Love, 2014; Matias & Grosland, 2016; Rolón-Dow, 2011; Turner & Griffen, 2020). Digital storytelling, a multimodal tool, can be used as a critical approach for students to work in solidarity to question, interrogate, and dismantle anti-Blackness and anti-racist ideology, which benefits all students (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001).

This chapter explores how a Black teacher and I, a Black teacher-researcher, used justice-oriented solidarity (JOS) to carve out Black space (Paris, 2017) in an 11th grade English classroom. Thus, Black students created digital stories. I highlight how students critically reflected on and interrogated each other about love, joy, pain, and trauma that affect Black bodies to center Blackness. I also discuss how the students engaged in critical consciousnessraising where they “challenged the underlying assumptions that work in the internal and external worlds to privilege some while disprivileging others” (Willis et al., 2008, p. 5). Building on having a critically conscious perspective, I show how a Black teacher and I fostered a Black space where students engaged in what I termed critically conscious talk ([CCT], Baker-Bell, 2020; Jackson, 2019). CCT served as catalysis in students’ storytelling in which they “interrogat[ed] the everyday social realities of power, representation, and identity” (Aguilera & Lopez, 2020, p. 583), and their narrative served as the basis of the written script for their digital story (Robin, 2008).

I show how students’ digital stories depict visual anti-Blackness and Blackness, representing their critically conscious conceptions of living a full Black life. I use visual discourse analysis to analyze and interpret the students’ visual representations and their narrative because it “offers a way of thinking about meaning in which language and visual texts work in concert, and which language is not the primary source through which meaning is mediated and represented” (Albers, 2014, p. 87). I also employ counterstorytelling as a lens because “counterstories challenge dominant narratives of race, equal opportunity, and responsibility, and thereby advance movements toward justice” (Kinloch et al., 2020, p. 387). By employing both visual discourse analysis and counterstorytelling of the students’ digital stories, I show the importance of teachers incorporating critical multimodal practices that help students understand the interconnectedness of race, racism, and anti-Blackness to ultimately center Blackness (Dumas & ross, 2016; Baker-Bell, 2019; Johnson, 2018; Jackson, 2020).

This chapter shows a Black teacher and a Black teacher-researcher’s antiracist approach to teaching, learning, and a commitment to work in solidarity to support Black students’ critical consciousness-raising to center Blackness. By providing a Black space where Black joy, love, and resistance are at the nexus of Black students’ critical consciousness-raising, Black students’ lived experiences can be supported and affirmed. Finally, critical digital storytelling is “digital hope used to combat” (Matias & Grosland, 2016, p. 162) antiBlackness and anti-Black racism.