Sustaining Narratives of Hope: Literacy, Multimodality, and the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School

It was a cold evening in February 2013, four years after we had begun our research on how a multimodal writing pedagogy that focused on community issues might help us better understand the place of hope and community in the teaching of English. One of us (Cavallaro) found herself chatting online, via Google Chat, with Naomi Garcia, a former high school student in the Chicago community of Paseo Boricua, near Humboldt Park, and a coauthor of this article. After reading and responding to several drafts, Garcia expressed delight, saying that she “loved everything that was written . . . . I got chills, I smiled, [and] I cried.” Moreover, she noted, it was an “eye-opener” to see the “self [she] used to be.” Through reading about and viewing images of her past self, Garcia was able to observe how much had changed for her since she had leftthe Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School (PACHS). Now, although she tries to write regularly, maintaining an active presence on social media sites such as Facebook, she is nevertheless writing less than she did when she was in high school, in Elaine Vazquez’s English class. She had wanted to go to college immediately after high school, but financial difficulties prevented this from being an option for her.This glimpse into Garcia’s life highlights some of the challenges faced by students who are struggling to find a path to higher education. No matter how innovative their language arts curriculum-and Garcia’s urban school was quite innovative-it cannot miraculously help them transcend material circumstances. Still, following literacy researchers and scholars in narrative inquiry (Dyson & Genishi, 1994; Schaafsma & Vinz, 2011), we contend that the stories we tell and our ways of seeing a situation matter; they cannot erase material conditions, but they can help us see the world differently and, sometimes, can lead to social action. As Shirley Brice Heath (1994) notes, “The role of story as a way of explaining and of prompting others to new perceptions makes special sense for those who see their experiences as somehow marginal, as lying outside the mainstream of their associates” (p. 215). Stories offer even greater potential when they are able to circulate to those who may not know the storyteller or his or her community or who may have been overwhelmed by other narratives.For educators who work in urban schools, the capacity to see possibilities is often hampered by the dominance of the repetitive narratives circulating in the media that reduce the lives of students to problems and sometimes to statistics, such as the dropout rate or low test scores. Teachers, too, can come to see students as problems based on such narratives. We cannot ignore the issues involved; however, they can mask the richness, particularities, and possibilities of urban students and communities. Too often, a statistic can stand for the whole story, functioning almost as a proxy that limits our attention to the workings of community. As Flores-Gonzalez, Rodriguez, and Rodriguez-Muniz (2006) explain, the making of stories is a political matter with consequences for our perceptions of those represented. In describing how the residents of the Chicago community of Humboldt Park have been portrayed in the media, they say:Since the 1970s, the young residents of Humboldt Park have been criminalized by the media as gang bangers, dropouts, and teenage mothers. The local high school has been called a “Teenage Cabrini Green,” after the infamous Chicago public housing project, and its students have been labeled as “predators.” (pp. 175-176)Lost in such media accounts are expressions of hope and visions for change.While the material struggles faced by students such as Garcia cannot be denied, the stories we tell about community are consequential. In her award-winning study of the lives and literacies of Harlem youth, Valerie Kinloch (2010) calls for a new literate tradition and a pedagogy that “offers youth opportunities to assign alternative meanings” to a variety of places, from the classroom to the community