Part 1: Centering Family Literacies and Community Expertise

Sherita [0:07 - 1:45]: I so often think about my approaches to community literacy as turning the ways we talk about expertise on its head — really reframing that in ways that allow students to see themselves as experts. Particularly first-year students who are so often told or are coming in with this adopted narrative that they're not good writers, or that they don't know how to do these things, or that they are ill-prepared, or that they are trying to get by. But recognizing even their own stories as a type of expertise that they have and being able to tell that. Or, their knowledge of certain skillsets or practices that they do in their day to day. And recognizing that transforms, I think in very special ways, students' relationships to their literacy practices by seeing that they have some type of expertise in it. To then be able to recognize not only their own but their peers' — and also the ways that knowledge is happening outside the classroom, in other spaces. Not just those who have a doctorate, but the person they talk to every day at the grocery store or when they go get their coffee. Recognizing all the ways that knowledge is formed, shared, and produced starts with a type of self-evaluation and self-reflection about our own self-doubts and self-deprecating stories about our relationship to literacy.

Beverly [1:45 - 2:59]: We all think about our family's relationship to literacy — my maternal grandmother couldn't read or write — but I remember my mother teaching her how to sign her name, and that was a really big thing when she learned how to sign her name. But, I would argue that my grandmother was a Biblical scholar. She knew the Bible, and she engaged in the kinds of practices like I mentioned with Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways with Words — she talks about raising a hymn. When I went to church with my grandmother, someone would read a line, the congregation would sing it, then they'd read the next line, and the congregation would sing again. You could see how communal practices came into play. My grandmother was really engaged in these communal literacy practices even though she herself couldn't read — and she only learned to sign her name when she was in her late sixties or seventies.

Sherita [3:00 - 4:00]: My earliest memories of my relationship to literacy center on my grandfather, who is known on the Eastern Shore as "the produce man." He left school in either second or third grade and built an entrepreneurial empire around produce on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It's so funny how produce has shown up in our lives because when my mom was working at the commissary, she worked, and I worked on a produce farm for many years. Thinking about the types of knowledge-sharing, idea exchange, communication, and community-building that happen in spaces so often overlooked or seen as just the day-to-day — I first saw that happening in my family, in spaces where education in the formal sense wasn't necessarily present, but it was very much in the day to day sense.

Laura [4:01 - 5:13]: Being able to read your (Beverly’s) work and seeing this — church was a weekly practice that I witnessed, that I was taught, that I eventually learned — just looking at some of the different literacy practices in church. My father is a pastor, and I thought to myself, especially as Black folks, there are things, traditions and things that we do every day that count as literacy, but no one has really taken the time to study it and unpack it and put it within the frame of literacy studies. So what might that look like? And to be able to see that kind of work really inspired me to do that kind of work, and it's something that I try to inspire my students to do. They get really curious and really excited about being able to study communities, and particularly their own communities, and to be able to see value in their own communities — not as a means to an end, but as the end itself.

Beverly [5:14 - 6:03]: For me, I think about community being at the center of literacy practices — for not only my family, but the larger Black communities. I don't think about Black community as singular, but as multiple Black communities. Literacy is almost always communal. When I think about people gathering around text, they're sharing knowledge around literate text, they're sharing their literacy practices to be used for the betterment of the group — whether it's an immediate group or a larger group. And I think we start to see how that happens from family, to a geographic neighborhood, to eventually a global level.

Part 2: Affirming (Il)Legible Literacies

Sherita [0:08 - 1:07]: It's interesting to me the way that we talk about multiliteracies, the ways that we talk about composing as accounting for all different forms of doing, and how sometimes those definitions challenge public understandings of literacy and composing and writing. Our desire is to do community literacy work, to have these conversations, to be able to help folks understand broader notions of literacy that they already hold and are already practicing — but then thinking about the ways that formal education, or just some of the communities that they might have grown up in or been around, have defined it in very specific and rigid ways. So how do we begin to navigate that in ways that are meaningful but also not reductive of their experiences and knowledge.

Laura [1:08 - 1:53]: I think that we use literacy in our own ways for our own purposes, and the issue that happens is if someone else doesn't see it as legible, then they don't see it. They feel that this particular group is behind, or that they are without a literacy practice that we can read and say, oh, that's literacy. But that's the beauty of studying community literacies, because you just really get an opportunity to see how rich, how purposeful, how valuable literacy practices are for particular communities.

Sherita [1:53 - 2:44]: It also makes me think — because you're talking about made legible or made visible, but also made audible — about the ways that I think about noise, and even the way that Black women's laughter is so multifaceted and complex as far as what it can communicate. I think there are just the day-to-day habits and practices in Black communities that constitute its own type of discourse, and we are just scratching the surface at this point. But it's a way of just kind of being like, I see you, in the moments where other spaces — or the spaces that we're in — don't necessarily see us.

Beverly [2:44 - 3:30]: I like that — "I see you" — because it is: I see you, I recognize you, I see what you're doing, and what you're doing is incredibly complex and important. You're theorizing, you're analyzing, you're doing all these things that for decades people said we weren't doing. It is interesting, though, to think about growing up not realizing the kind of practices that we were all embedded in, and then going to college and going to graduate school and going, oh.

Laura [3:30 - 3:31]: Yeah, some rich stuff.

Beverly [3:32 - 3:44]: And so what I want is for our communities not to have to go to graduate school to recognize and to value the practices that we are engaging in.

Laura [3:44 - 4:28]: One of our favorite parts — we talked about this — one of our favorite parts of Kathleen Blake Yancey's Reflections on Literacy was the part where she mentioned that literacy has always sort of had a public backdrop, and so scholars of literacy are always actively working to redefine, to fix, to reconstruct the narratives of what that public backdrop has done for us and our work, our participants, our students. I realized that even in my classroom practices, teaching isn't just about learning but it's also about unlearning.

Part 3: Amplifying Digital Black Community Literacies

Laura [0:08 - 0:39]: Again, we have sort of a public backdrop — we have these larger companies, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, sort of controlling these narratives around AI and artificial intelligence. But we don't always hear from the communities. How are communities thinking about this work? What are they excited about? What are their worries or concerns? But also, how have they been building into this infrastructure, this new AI digital era?

Sherita [0:40 - 1:20]: I think there are a lot of scare tactics and narratives around AI and technology that cause folks to avoid the conversations, or to have the conversations but not necessarily in the ways that folks might anticipate. And so I'm just interested in what it means to truly — like in church, to turn to your neighbor — that type of check-in with the people around you, seeing where they're at in that moment, in relationship to these issues, is just so important. It's crucial.

Laura [1:21 - 2:50]: My own work looks at Black families and technology as it relates to the tradition of Black family reunions, which has been happening for many years for some families — my own family — we just celebrated our 80th family reunion. What I love most about being able to be with these families and study these families were the various types of digital literacies that they took up when they were planning these reunions — whether they were creating websites, creating Facebook groups, creating eVites to figure out the logistics of invitations to the reunion, and making sure that they were reaching family members that were nearby but also those who were across the country. I think that when you take the time to actually study Black families and study Black communities, we are not technologically illiterate folks. We practice digital literacies in various different ways, whether it is a family group chat and being able to build on family literacies and pass down family literacies through the sharing of that kind of information, or whether it is something as traditional as a Black family reunion. There are many ways that we practice and value digital literacy and have kept up with the times.

Sherita [2:51 - 4:38]: We have this text chain thread that sometimes is muted on my phone, but in my family, sometimes my uncle or aunts will just start sending photos of grandparents or great uncles — folks that I didn't know, because my grandparents passed when I was young, or before I was born on my dad's side. The types of narratives and stories — not only about the conversations that would have happened or the practices that would have happened when family would come together, but also just the storytelling that happens alongside the images that are shared — it's like a type of digital oral history, in an interesting way. It made me think about those visuals that get associated with our own literacy communities and experiences. I think there is a type of devaluing of storytelling and narrative, because especially with the more prominent use of technology by a lot of folks, including TikTok, storytelling is showing up in ways that we haven't necessarily seen before, and it gets written off as like "Gen-Z culture" or "they're just busy on TikTok" — not valuing all the critical skills and thinking and planning and inventing and imagining that goes into constructing these skits or these narratives or these ideas.

Beverly [4:39 - 5:54]: It's making me think about how convenient it is to engage in deficit narratives about certain groups of people — and those groups tend to be people from marginalized communities — If they don't use literacies in ways that are sanctioned by the dominant group…people who are in communities outside academic spaces probably have a lot to say about the way that technologies are used in their communities, presented to them — and probably know a lot more about artificial intelligence. Some of them may not use that term, but I think they know a lot more than we think they do, than you see in public discourse. That might be the next part of the community literacy discussion and research. We have quite a bit to look forward to, but at the same time we still have some issues we've been working on for quite a while. So we got work to do.