“This is America”: Examining Artifactual Literacies as Austere Love Across Contexts of Schools and Everyday Use

Abstract

In this paper, we consider how teachers and teacher educators may foreground relationships, experiences, pasts, and possibilities to more fully recognize and extend already-present literacy practices of youth of color as strengths from which more equitable curriculum and teaching opportunities may be designed and enacted. We assert theoretical perspectives of artifactual literacies within and across a contextual rendering of the popularized narrative of Donald Glover’s “This is America,” and conceptual meanings as expressions of poet Robert Hayden’s austere love, put, in unanticipated ways, to everyday use. We wrote analytic narrative vignettes and used analytic memoing to examine the interplay of three artifacts—these shawls, these curriculum binders, and this keychain—through the theoretical lensing of artifactual literacies. Recommendations for teachers, teacher educators, and educational researchers are discussed.