In Pursuit of Joy

In Pursuit of Joy by Katie Sluiter

It is a great pleasure to have Katie contributing once again. Over the years she has contributed posts, weekend picks, and has been an avid support of this blog space. Without a question, she has been busy. She and her family just finished building and moving into a new house all during the final year of her PhD work. Happily Katie is now Dr. Sluiter-- Way to go! 

Katie Sluiter has taught ELA for over twenty years in West Michigan where she lives with her family and her English bulldog. She has her PhD in English Education from Western Michigan University and currently teaches 8th-grade ELA. ​

Last month I completed my doctoral work and successfully defended my dissertation which, in part, focused on teaching the Holocaust in my eighth grade ELA classes using Gholdy Muhammad’s framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy. Of the five pursuits Muhammad includes, the pursuit of joy was the one my students clung to the most. Since COVID, my students have routinely commented on the desire to read books with more “happiness”. Admittedly, our eighth grade curriculum includes four anchor texts that explore heavy topics: Ghost Boy by Jewell Parker Rhodes, Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy, The Giver by Lois Lowry, and Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson.

​In the fall of 2022, I participated in a two-day workshop with Gholdy Muhammad when her book Unearthing Joy was on the cusp of release. Muhammad states in her book that to follow the pursuit of joy, “[t]eachers and leaders must understand how to connect beauty, aesthetics, wellness, wholeness, solutions to problems, and/or happiness to their curricular, instructional, and leadership practices'' (50). This is exactly what my students have been asking for.
 
During her workshop, Muhammad took the time to sit with me and talk about how to include the pursuit of joy in our Ghost Boys unit, and from there I have begun to incorporate the pursuit of joy throughout the school year.
 
The following is a glimpse at some of the ways we have started intentionally pursuing joy in one of our novel units in our eighth grade ELA classes.

Jewell Parker Rhodes’s novel Ghost Boys tell the story of 12-year old Jerome who gets shot by a white police officer while playing with a toy gun in a Chicago neighborhood. Inspired by Tamir Rice, Rhodes begins the novel with the shooting and has Jerome tell his story as a ghost who can only communicate with one living person: his shooter’s 12-year old daughter, Sarah. By also including the story of Emmett Till, Ghost Boys explores violence against Black boys in America for a middle grade audience.

Gholdy Muhammad and I quickly decided to elevate Black Boy Joy and Black Girl Magic during this unit as a way for students to explore their own joy and magic regardless of their race identity. We begin the school year with this book, so we are already doing lots of identity story-telling via poems and other writing. It was an easy transition to create prompts for writing and discussion that asked students to talk about what sort of joy or magic they bring to their world.
 
I also moved to Black Boy Joy and Black Girl Magic specifically by giving each student a sticky note and having them jot down a word or two that tells what they think of when they hear one or both terms. About a quarter of our student population identifies as Black and an additional percentage identify as mixed race with one Black parent. Many responses were personal: sticky notes with “Me!”, “my family”, “my friends”, “my little brother”, etc. written on them. Non Black-identifying students also gave positive responses: “my best friend”, “Lizzo!”, “Black kids who are happy and doing cool things”, and “their awesome hairstyles!”

We went on to list things that are associated with joyous Black culture (without falling into stereotypes): hiphop, dancing, fashion, hair styles, Juneteenth, food, etc. Students then looked back at their own writing to find specific examples of the joy in their own youth culture.
 
Students referred back to joy with all the young characters in the book: Jerome and Emmet Till for Black Boy Joy and Jerome’s sister Kim for Black Girl Magic, but also Sarah (the white cop’s daughter) and Carlos (his friend who he learns about el Dia de los Muertos from).
 
This allows us to look at the violence against Black boys as something that is extinguishing joy and magic from our collective culture of the United States. Students are able to think about our own reality in our small, urban school district and what might contribute to the destruction of their joy and magic.

We do not end the unit in despair, however. Jerome’s friend Carlos decides to memorialize Jerome via a Dia de los Muertos celebration bringing together his and Jerome’s families. Sarah decides to begin a website about Jerome and other Black boys who have been killed by bias-influenced violence. Both of these bring a sense of healing and joy to Jerome.
 
Joy in the face of violence and despair leads us into the idea of informed action and how they might identify similar issues of joy destruction and form ways to enact change.
 
We still have a lot of work ahead of us to completely reframe our curriculum to align with Muhammad’s five pursuits (identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy), but just shifting our focus from the destructive results of human injustices to the actual joy-filled humans is a healthy start for us and most especially for our 8th graders.

Works Cited
 
Muhammad, Gholdy. Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and
            Historically Responsive Literacy. Scholastic, 2021.
Muhammad, Gholdy. Unearthing Joy: A Guide to Culturally and Historically Responsive
            Teaching and Learning. Scholastic, 2023.
Rhodes, Jewell Parker. Ghost Boys. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2018.