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November 7
I. Opening Writing Activity
The journal writing activity for UF this week is connected to an essay that you will have the opportunity to read in another week: "Taking It To The Streets: A Critical Literacy Approach To YA Literature In The Age of Michael Brown" by S. Patrice Jones.  You have an excerpt that you can look at now.  In the essay, Jones argues that Street Lit offers Black girls and Black adolescents a space in which abuse, tragic loss, and sexual violence are very real.  However, young people are rarely given the opportunity to have critical discussions about such issues.  Let's take on Jones's charge.  Here are our prompts:
  1. What are the instances of abuse, loss, and/or sexual violence in your text?  How does the author/characters address healing and restorative justice, if at all?
  2. Based on your answers to question #1, what are the critical discussions that we can have with Black girls about the violence that this book confronts? (In other words, what might you DO in classrooms/communities to have critical discussions beyond the book?)
  3. Think back to what we read earlier in the semester about the hyper-criminalization of Black girls and the infographics that you created.  Does anything from there resonate here?  Are there are any other readings/texts from the course that resonate here?  Talk about it.
Feel free to be as imaginative as you want.  Answer the questions in whatever ways and order that you like. Be prepared to share #2 in class as a way to cultivate activities and strategies with youth. 
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II. Small Group Time/Groups of 3 
  • 1) Select your three "roles": a) one person needs to facilitate, keep the discussion flowin, and watch the time; b) one person needs to write out the collective statement; c) one person needs to read the statement to the whole class w/ some kind of swag puhllease...

  • 2) Everyone should share their journal writings and thoughts on Cooper's essay.

  • 3) Together, write a statement (prosaic or poetic) that defines: "BLACK GIRL (LITERACY) IS A VERB."  Person B should write the statement and be prepared to submit it at the end of class (write it out or email/google-doc it to Carmen at [email protected])

III. Group Aloud Readings