Revealing the Human and the Writer: The Promise of a Humanizing Writing Pedagogy for Black Students

Recent research in writing with adolescents in out-of-school spaces provides insight into how young people learn to use writing to author their own lives. However, English language arts classrooms focus on correctness, form, and removing oneself from the texts composed in school. For Black students in particular, these expectations for writing dehumanize students, decenter their voices and contributions to intellectual discourses, and invoke deficit perspectives about their writing abilities and linguistic identities. Using a critical stance on place, literacy, and humanity in order to examine how the literacy learning and practices of ELA classrooms/schools might (de)humanize and (de)culturize Black students, this study examines the writing pedagogy of a professor who taught a semester-long creative writing class for students at West High School. Through a humanizing approach to teaching writing, the professor and students engaged in writing and being in ways that honored—as well as centered and supported—their individual, cultural, and writerly identities. This article offers ways that teachers of writing might tap into Black intellectual traditions and invite students to use writing as a way to connect to what they do and learn while at school.