Text Sets, Black Life, Police Brutality and the Last Six Years by Wanda Brooks & Susan Browne

About ten months ago, I was soliciting guest contributors for 2021. I shared a google document and had asked people to sign up on a first come basis. Thankfully, the slots where filling up. To my great joy, I noticed that Wanda Brooks had signed up for a spot. I have admired Wanda's work for a long time. We are thrilled to host Wanda and her colleague, Susan Browne. I hope you enjoy and appreciate their post.

Text Sets, Black Life, Police Brutality and the Last Six Years by Wanda Brooks & Susan Browne

As teacher educators responsible for English methods courses, we’ve always exposed our pre-service teachers to compelling and timely text sets/collections made up of middle grades and young adult novels. We hope these texts sets help them and us to better understand the times in which we are living. Certainly, in this era of so much uncertainty around Black life, we see an increased poignancy around the novels we select to to teach.
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The power within text sets as pedagogical tools was cemented for us while facilitating a book club several years ago (in 2015) with youth from Philadelphia who read the following collection: Zora & Me (by Victoria Bond & T.R. Simon), One Crazy Summer (by Rita Williams-Garcia) and Hush (by Jacqueline Woodson). We also taught ELA/English pedagogy via this text set to our pre-service teachers by using the lens of composite counter-stories. The three novels depict noteworthy personal, historic and sociopolitical moments when the Black female protagonists are first exposed to racialized violence. All the stories chronicle the killing of a Black male by a white man who is either a police officer or private citizen who takes the law into his own hands. We did not know at the time how impactful or prophetic our text collection would become. Unfortunately, as we started the final novel in mid-April, a 25-year-old young man named Freddie Gray was killed by police in Baltimore, MD. His death eventually deemed a homicide. https://newsone.com/playlist/black-men-boy-who-were-killed-by-police/item/87. 

Immediately following this incident, the youth in our book club made honest and difficult connections between the novels we were reading and the unfolding events not far away in Baltimore. Our pre-service teachers, likewise, asked tons of questions and shared developing insights about the text collection and the senseless death of a young man just a few years older than many of them. We never imagined, (6 years ago) that a relentless and continued succession of police involved killings would occur and incite an unpreceded uprising in the summer of 2020 for the sanctity of Black life.
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Since we created this initial text collection, countless other Black men, women and youth have lost their lives: Ahmaud Arbery, (randomly followed and shot while jogging), Breonna Taylor and Atatiana Jefferson (both shot by police within their own homes), and the now well-known George Floyd (callously kneed to death for the world to see) to name a few. More recently, we grieved the murders of Daunte Wright (victim of an accidental police misfire) and Walter Wright Jr. (shot while experiencing a mental health episode). (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/25/how-many-people-have-police-killed-since-george-floyd).  

Due to the past few years, our commitment to using text sets with pre-service teachers and middle/high school students definitely deepened and expanded. We’ve added several more recently published books to our collection that all depict police brutality and Black death such as:  Dear Martin (by Nic Stone), How it Went Down (by Kekla Magoon), All American Boys (by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely), The Hate U Give (by Angie Thomas), The Day Tajon Got Shot (by the Teen Writers of Beacon House) and Tyler Johnson was Here (by Jay Coles).

As a composite and collective, these novels make visible a distinct pattern of antiblackness that exists as a form of violence against Black people not only in the past but currently. We anticipate that text sets comprised of these compelling novels will allow educators to carry out timely discussions about the hideous acts of racism that occur - day after day. And last, we hope that text sets with these sorts of novels might inspire ideas and depict lessons for today’s youth who, in the face of acts of hate, will resist, reimagine, and build the type of futures they desire for themselves.  If you want to read more about our efforts, please see the following articles or feel free to reach out to either of us via the comment feature or through the contact information at our universities.

References:
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Brooks, W. & Browne, S. & Meirson, T. (2018). Reading, sharing and experiencing literary/lived narratives about contemporary racism. Urban Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085918789733 

Tulino, D., Krishnamurthy, S. & Browne, S. (2019). Resisting anti-blackness through counternarratives. English Journal, 109(2), 32-38.

Wanda M. Brooks is a Professor of Literacy Education in the College of Education at Temple University.  She teaches courses related to literacy theories, research and instruction as well as qualitative research methods.  Her research examines African American/Black literature for youth and middle grades readers’ literary understandings. Before taking a university level faculty position, she taught middle grades language arts in several east coast public schools.

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Susan Browne, Ed.D. is an associate professor in the Department of Language, Literacy and Sociocultural Education at Rowan University. Dr. Browne teaches undergraduate and graduate reading courses. She serves as a research advisor to Master’s and Ed.D. candidates and teaches in the College of Education Center for Access, Equity and Success (CASE) Ph.D. Program. Dr. Browne’s research interests and publications are in the areas of critical pedagogy, urban education, multicultural literature and reader response. ​

Until next time.