References

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American Association of University Women Educational Foundation. (1999). Voices of a generation: Teenage girls on sex, school, and self. Washington, DC: Author.

Benitez, M. (1996). The circle of sistahs. Reclaiming Children and Youth, 5 (2), 81-86.

Blake, B. E. (1995). Broken silences: Writing and the construction of "cultural texts" by urban, preadolescent girls. Journal of Educational Thought, 29 (2), 165-180.

Blake, B. E. (1997). She say, he say: Urban girls write their lives. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Christensen, L. (2000). Reading, writing, and rising up: Teaching about social justice and the power of the written word. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools Ltd.

Ewald, W. (2000). Secret games: Collaborative works with children, 1969-1999. New York: Scalo.

Ewald, W. (2001). I wanna take me a picture: Teaching photography and writing to children. Boston: Beacon Press.

Finders, M. (1997). Just girls : Hidden literacies and life in junior high. New York: Teachers College Press.

Fine, M. & Macpherson, P. (1992). Over dinner: Feminism and adolescent female bodies. In M. Fine, Disruptive voices: The possibilities of feminist research (pp. 175-203). Ann Arbor,MI: University of Michigan Press.

Fine, M. & Zane, N. (1991). Bein' wrapped too tight: When low-income women drop out of high school. Women's Studies Quarterly, 1 & 2, 77-99.

Freire, P. (1987). The importance of the act of reading. In P. Freire & D. Macedo (Eds.), Literacy: Reading the word and the world (pp. 29-36). S. Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey.

Henry, A. (1998). "Speaking up" and "speaking out": Examining "voice" in a reading/writing program with adolescent African Caribbean girls. Journal of Literacy Research, 30 (2), 233-252.

Hubbard, R. S., Barbieri, M. & Power, B. M. (1998). "We want to be known": Learning from adolescent girls. York, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers.

Hull, G. & Schultz, K. (2002). Connecting schools with out-of-school worlds: Insights from recent research on literacy in non-school settings. In G. Hull & K. Schultz (Eds.), School's out!: Bridging out-of-school literacies with classroom practice (pp. 32-57). New York: Teachers College Press.

Judon, Q., Cohen-Dan, J., Leonard, T., Stinson, S., Colston, T., Cohen, J. & Brown, D. (2001). Speaking out loud: Girls seeking selfhood. In J. J. Shultz, & A. Cook-Sather (Eds.), In our own words: Students' perspectives on school (pp. 39-56). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.

Landay, E., Meehan, M., Newman, A. L., Wooton, K., & King, D. W. (2001). "Postcards from America": Linking classroom and community in an ESL class. English Journal, 90 (5), 66-74.

Neilsen, L. (1998). Playing for real: Performative texts and adolescent identities. In D. Alvermann et al. (Eds.), Reconceptualizing the literacies in adolescents' lives (pp. 3-26). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Neumaier, D. (1995). Introduction. In D. Neumaier (Ed.), Reframings: New American feminist photographies (pp. 1-12). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

O'Brien, D. G. (1998). Multiple literacies in a high-school program for "at-risk" adolescents. In D. Alvermann et al. (Eds.), Reconceptualizing the literacies in adolescents' lives (pp. 27-
50). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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their social worlds. Visual Sociology, 14, 4-19.

Pastor, J., McCormick, J., and Fine, M. (1996). Makin' homes: An urban girl thing. In B. J. R. Leadbeater & N. Way (Eds.), Urban girls: Resisting stereotypes, creating identities (pp.
15-34). New York: New York University Press.

Phelps, S. T. (1998). Adolescents and their multiple literacies. In D. Alvermann et al. (Eds.),
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and moral struggle. English Journal, 88 (5), 28-36.

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Poetry

Forman, R. (1997). Graduate school. Renaissance. Boston: Beacon Press.

Forman, R. (1993). Poetry should ride the bus. We are the young musicians. Boston: Beacon
Press.

Jordan, J. (1989). A short note to my very critical and well-beloved friends and comrades. Naming our destiny: New and selected poems. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press.

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Rethinking Schools Ltd.

Sanchez, S. (1999). Song no. 2. Shake loose my skin: New and selected poems. Boston: Beacon Press.

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Contemporary American women writers. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

¹ - High Tech High Philadelphia Charter School opened in the Fall of 2001. The school's mission is to "develop urban youth's academic, critical thinking, technical, and emotional intelligence skills to meet the world-class standards required for success in post-secondary education and the knowledge-based economy." To accomplish this mission, the school is designed to promote "high expectations for every student, a mastery-based grading and graduation structure, a project-based, technology-infused curriculum, and modern management practices." See the school's website, http://www.hthphila.org/, for additional information. Sistahs is a non-credit bearing course offered outside the official school curriculum. (back)

² - This practitioner inquiry study is informed by literacy theories, feminist praxis (particularly Black feminism), critical race theory, and photography theories. It is being conducted within an interpretivist paradigm informed by the methodologies associated with practitioner inquiry, feminist research, and image-based research. I am envisioning the pedagogical and research aims of the study to be complementary. While my intent is to explore the creation and nature of this educational setting, I also seek to explore how the multiple creative engagements pursued and produced in the course and outside of it suggest the range and variation of the young women's literacy practices and their perspectives on gender, race, and sisterhood. (back)

³ - Even though I draw on the research literatures associated with both in-school and out-of-school literacy practices, exploring the space in-between the two is key to my on-going sense-making within the study. Sistahs seems to occupy a hybrid space between in-school and out-of-school given its elective nature and given how much of the work is premised on the photographic and literacy explorations the students conduct out-of-school. While the insights emerging from New Literacy Studies have broadened conceptions of literacy outside of schooled practices, many literacy researchers, theorists, and practitioners located within and concerned about schools caution against setting up a dichotomy between in-school and out-of-school literacy practices. Instead, they choose to draw upon the New Literacy Studies field to broaden conceptions of literacy within schools themselves, recognizing, for example, adolescents' multiple literacies across contexts (Finders, 1997; O'Brien, 1998; Phelps, 1998) and students' engagements with multiple texts, including popular culture, required school reading, fashion, music, among others (Neilsen, 1998). While recognizing and being troubled by a political climate in which literacy instruction in schools is nonetheless becoming more and more regimented and definitions of literacy are becoming more and more narrow, Hull & Schultz (2002) contend that:

…there is no better time for literacy theorists and researchers, now practiced in detailing successful literate practices that occur out of school, to put their energies toward investigating potential relationships, collaborations, and helpful divisions of labor between schools and formal classrooms and the informal learning that flourishes in a range of settings. (p. 53) (back)

⁴ - I locate this study within the growing calls by feminist educators to cultivate spaces of collectivity and sisterhood that are activist in nature and that recognize young women as critical agents of their own and others' transformation (AAUW, 1999; Blake, 1995, 1997; Benitez, 1996; Fine & Zane, 1991; Henry, 1998; Hubbard, Barbieri, & Power, 1998; Pastor, McCormick, & Fine, 1996; Schultz, 1999;Waff, 1994; Weiler, 2000). As Weiler (2000) argues, "For girls who belong to oppressed groups, it is important to develop and encourage this sense of cultural and collective identity if they are to successfully challenge their social subordination both as females and as members of a racial and ethnic minority" (p. 209). Schools, Weiler continues, need to "more actively promote the development of the girls' sense of collective or social identity as women" (p. 209). Fine & Zane (1991) echo this call, writing that young urban women "need a safe and intimate space to pursue new ideas, evolving notions of self, and desire to be educated" (pp. 90-91). Young women themselves, particularly young women who have responded to invitations to join cross-generational discussion and research groups (AAUW, 1999; Fine and Macpherson, 1992; Schultz, 1999; Waff, 1994), action research programs (Judon, Cohen-Dan, Leonard, Stinson, Colston, Cohen, & Brown, 2001), and learning communities (Henry, 1998; Schaafsma, Tendero, & Tendero, 1999) - all focused on issues related to young women - are themselves now calling for the enlargement and enrichment of these spaces.
        I also locate my work and research as a response to the dearth of studies that explore the educational experiences of young women of color in schools, and the even fewer that explore their literacy practices in and outside of school. I echo Blake's (1995) concern that young women of color are "critically under-represented" (p. 136) in the field of adolescent studies and literacy research and that this severely limits the field's knowledge base for instruction and research. I also resonate with Henry's (1998) critique of reader response and New Literacy Studies for lacking theoretical frameworks attuned to the "interplay of gender and race/culture" in literacy education (p. 238) and her call for research in which "the social meanings of race and gender are components of this new literacy education" (p. 238). Furthermore, like Way (1995, 1998) I locate myself in opposition to the myriad of studies of urban adolescence in education, social work, and psychology that operate out of deficit and deviancy models. These studies seem to reinforce images of urban young women of color as living in the midst of crisis and despair by employing standardized, quantitative methods that leave little room for respondents to reveal the complexities and subtleties of their lives, literacies, and experiences. (back)

⁵ - Over the course of this academic year, I have been most intrigued by the ways in which the young women have shaped the context of Sistahs as a community of writers, despite some students' initial resistance to my description of the course as one in which we would write and despite the range of ways in which individual students described their relationship to writing during our first meeting. When we began writing and sharing the writing amazing things began happening in the room. The words created an electricity, a connection between the young women. In the moment when a poem by June Jordan inspired Madonna to write a fiercely poetic meditation on voice, national identity, and womanhood, and in the moment when she read that poem aloud to the group to the Sistahs who nodded, cried, and responded "that's deep," and in the moment when Natasha was inspired to write what she called her own "deep poem," the young women seemed to create a kind of sisterhood crafted from the voices, images, and experiences of their sister-poets. Writing, as I see it, has become a catalyst for sisterhood. (back)

⁶ - While we read Forman's poem in the conference room where we gather around "one large table," Yasmein gasped at the lines, "feel comfortable with the sound of your voice/in a small room ten people one large table," exclaiming, "she's talking about us!" As we discussed other lines that had meaning to us, Yasmein further commented on the line, "hearts speak to one another," and Madonna pointed to the line, "then speak what you know without translation," adding her own word to capture what she saw as the line's meaning: "raw." After contemplating the poem for a few more minutes, I asked them to consider the final line of the poem. I noted that as the instructor of this course, I view my role as creating a context in which they can speak to each other and discover what they "already know" and what they learn in this space. In the course, I try to create a context in which we look at photographs and listen to narratives in a way that positions the image maker/teller not as an artist/writer whom we would judge by virtue of her aesthetic accomplishments; instead, we look at her images and listen to her as an educator and story-teller of her own life. (back)

⁷ - See Ewald, W. (2001). I wanna take me a picture: Teaching photography and writing to children. Boston: Beacon Press and Ewald, W. (2000). Secret games: Collaborative works with children, 1969-1999. New York: Scalo.
          My pedagogy is deeply informed by Ewald's work and the work of other practitioners who put cameras in the hands of young people, who open themselves up to insights embedded in students' images as vital windows into their complex lives and visions, and who recognize that artistic and pedagogical practices incorporating the visual can inspire an often provocative and generative place for literacy. Other educators have recognized the potential of photography to make vital connections between students' home worlds and school and to serve as a vital inspiration for enhanced literacy learning and expression. Allen et al. (2002) reflect on the insights gained when, in order to develop more culturally responsive pedagogies and to develop "cultural lenses" into diverse children's lives, teacher researchers invited children to photograph and write about their lives. As they write, "We wanted to explore who our children were alongside them, as they reflected on their multiple identities inside and outside of school" (p. 314). As a result of this process, teachers noted that they "re-envisioned" children as their photographs suggested the multiple learning opportunities they engaged in out-of-school and their close relationships with family members. In addition, teachers also began to "re-envision" family members as the photography projects provided rich insights into parents' interactions with their children, provided a forum for parents to write to their children about their photographs, and served as an essential source of connection during parent-teacher conferences. These kinds of "re-envisionments" of both students' and their family members' prompted a radical realignment of many parent-teacher-student relations as students' and their families' values, resources, and talents were shared and brought into the classroom as a source of learning and connection. Interested in how urban elementary students read environmental print and how they might use this knowledge in school literacy learning, Orellana & Hernández (1999) took children on neighborhood walks to photograph and discuss literacy artifacts in their community. Guided by the question, "How do their readings illuminate their understandings of their social worlds? (p. 612), the research revealed that students actively engaged in reading texts in their environment and that the photographs they took of the neighborhoods and the writing that accompanied them enabled the teacher researchers to discover the children's "rich experiential knowledge" (p. 617) of which they had more limited access to previously. Finally, through Brown University's Arts/Literacy Project, a teacher, professional photographer, university students, and a theatre professional engaged ESL students in reflecting on their immigration experiences through photography, creative writing, and performance. Through the "Postcards from America" project, Landay et al. (2001) note that the students were able to "develop skills and habits of mind to convey meaning through - and recover meaning from - a range of symbol systems" (p. 68). In the process of writing about their photographs, exhibiting their work, and performing tableaux based on the themes generated in their work, they taught each other, teachers, parents, and community members about their experiences, interpretations, and visions. (back)

⁸ - My choice to conduct photographic and literacy work with young women in particular is informed by feminist approaches to the visual. Although certainly not a monolith, feminist photographers, as Neumaier (1995) contends, "share the recognition that images embody, are indivisible from politics…[and] share a consciousness that historically, women have been 'framed' through the process of representation and can be 'reframed' through the same process" (p. 1). Filmmaker and cultural theorist Trinh (1991) expresses this complex pursuit of women working both within and against a system and theory of representation in which they are "framed," yet in which their visual creations suggest a radically different kind of "reframing." Trinh's identity as an Asian woman artist also suggests the ways in which the visual projects of women of color originate out of and reflect their often perilous existence in Western systems of oppression and representation - and, most notably, their challenges to these systems. She writes:

The place from which the woman artist works is always fragile, because empowerment of the self can only be achieved by emptying, reversing, and displacing power relations…She takes the plunge. She risks all or she risks nothing, because she has nothing to save. (p. 114)

I have also been influenced by the work of African American women photographers Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson. (back)