Designing their own curriculum: How youth co-constructed a dance team that opposed traditional student–school relationships

Abstract

This article draws from a two-year ethnography at an urban public high school to analyze how high school students came together around a shared love for dance to create a youth-led affinity space. The high school students, Black youth in their freshman year of high school, navigated the complexities of creating a dance team and collaboratively composing dances, which in this article are theorized as multimodal texts. The analysis reveals how the student dancers practiced vulnerability, engaged in play as radical praxis, and were seen as creative cultural producers within school. While youth of color live rich literate and culturally productive lives, their literacies are often obscured or devalued within school. Curriculum and pedagogies tend to prescribe specific ways of making meaning that limit how youth can express themselves by dictating language, literacies, and body movement. Thus, this article illustrates how youth-led spaces can create opportunities to nurture youth’s literate identities and reimagine relationships with each other and school.