Black Girl Joy (Un)Interrupted: Recognizing and Nurturing Black Girls' Community-Building Capabilities in the Early Grades

Black girls’ schooling experiences and capabilities are understudied. Their brilliance eludes neoliberal early childhood contexts characterized by control, standardization, hyper-individualism, and antiblackness. This article builds on Black Girlhood frameworks and Engaged Pedagogy to center 11 Black girls in three Texas PreK classrooms. In a secondary analysis of video-data from two large-scale video-cued ethnographies, we documented their capabilities, versatility, and consistency in building community with their classmates for interdisciplinary knowledge-making and enjoyment. Our findings reveal that context impacted how Black girls’ endeavors were received and which capabilities they could fully embody and share. We identify community, play, and joy as essential emancipatory avenues for learning.