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I’m Valerie Kinloch. I am a professor in the College of Education here at Ohio State
University. I’m actually a professor of literacy studies focusing on adolescent literacy,
developments, and the sociocultural practices of adolescents in urban contexts. I was a
faculty at Teacher’s College Columbia University inside of the English Education program. While
I was there I also worked in New York City’s Harlem community. And in that capacity as
a researcher and a visiting teacher at two high schools, I was really interested in exploring
the literacy lives of urban adolescents, primarily grade students, who considered their writing
practices to not be on grade level and who were also more invested in the literacy practices
within their surrounding communities and not the literacy practices within their high school
classrooms or the literacy practices that were being taught to them by their teachers.
And so I’m, I worked with countless students around this question of, So what does it mean
to be a literate citizen, particularly in the United States? And from that question
we came up with this question of What does it mean to be a literate citizen inside of
an urban community? And that particular urban community being Harlem, um, was undergoing
so many changes associated with gentrification and the reappropriation of public space that
we became more interested in looking at how literacy as a social construct, as a social
practice, um, is everywhere at all times and how young people engage in literacy practices
and youth activism in order to mobilize other people to address the changes happening in
their urban community. When I was a researcher inside one of the high schools in Harlem,
working with a new teacher, I became really attracted to the idea of how youth document
the changes happening within their communities. And talking about how they document the changes,
I started having conversations with, um, a junior level ELA classroom of students around
writing practices, around how do we make sense of changes within our school contexts but
also within the out-of-school communities where they live, in ways that stimulate our
writing and our imaginative thinking skills, in ways that, you know, allowed us to begin
to investigate the differences within an urban community in comparison to a suburban community
or a rural community. And so that, um, actually led to numerous conversations that I had with,
um, two students in particular. Phillip, who is currently a twenty-year-old African American
male, who has always lived in Harlem. Khaleeq, who is nineteen -- he’ll be twenty sometime
later this year -- African American male student who lives on the outskirts of Harlem but he
considers himself a Harlemite. So Phillip and Khaleeq were really interested in looking
at how Harlem is this historic African American community. You know, it’s this community
that’s considered to be a mecca of black culture and black practices of literacy, whether
that’s embodied in the literary works that came from the Harlem Renaissance, jazz music,
um, just the various struggles of African American people in the context of the United
States, but localized in Harlem. Historically, why does gentrification happen in urban communities,
although it’s happening everywhere across the United States, why Harlem in particular?
And how do we talk about gentrification by talking about the sociocultural practices,
the literacy practices, the community practices, and the practices around survival that so
many, if not all, residents in Harlem have been engaging in and talking about and trying
to figure out for themselves around issues of access and privilege in society? And so
that’s our project essentially. So they became interested in looking at their community
practices. And their community practices became connected to their desire to understand what
this thing called gentrification is. What is gentrification? Why does it happen within
an urban community like Harlem? And what are people actually doing to mobilize other people
to take action either against gentrification or in question of what gentrification really
does to the people who live in Harlem and who’ve been living there for over twenty,
twenty-five years. We documented the changes happening in Harlem through digital literacy.
We take it to the streets. We take our cameras, our video cameras. We take our digital cameras.
We take our audio equipment. And we go in the streets of Harlem, we walk the streets
and we do video walkthroughs of the community. And an example of a video walkthrough in this
particular context is Phillip, for example, being really interested in knowing why this
new pharmacy is opening up on his corner, or on his block. And why the prices are so
much more expensive than the local bodegas. And, so Phillip took about three or four of
us on a video walkthrough of his community. And in his walkthrough he has a digital camera.
He’s walking us through his neighborhood. He’s taking snapshots, he’s recording
his images of community, he’s actually documenting the work he’s documenting the signs of newness
in comparison to the signs of oldness, and he’s telling us a story. He’s narrating
his story of what Harlem is, in the midst of the gentrification that’s happening.
And Khaleeq would ask questions about, so what is really going on? How do we talk about
these changes? How do we talk about the things that are happening in this community by looking
at what we are capturing on this video tape? By looking at the digital stories that young
people can tell about their communities. And these are the stories that tend to not get
told inside of our classrooms, inside of our schools, and as a matter of fact, inside of
our communities writ large.
[Phillip] I like the brownstones but you know, you gotta be technical about who’s livin
in them. Brownstone’s is beautiful! No lie. Nice trees and everything. But you I don’t
even think I ever seen black people come out one of these brownstones. Ever.
[Valerie] What were you about to say, Khaleeq? [Khaleeq] Oh. I said we could go on in. I
never seen a brownstone where they have like a, black door right there.
[Valerie] Oh, wow, I didn’t even notice that before.
[Phillip] Mmm-hmm. [Valerie] Wow.
[Khaleeq] I bet that’s where they were. [Phillip] The funny thing is y’all people
look at us with the camera. [Valerie] Yeah they do.
[Phillip] People look at me and Khaleeq when we take pictures. And they just be like they
just look. [Valerie] They, um, they just be like what?
[Phillip] They just look. Like, lady right there looking across at us like, what they
doin with this camera? Construction worker right here lookin at us. They like, what’re
they doin? Conversation tell you what we doin. No lie. We takin pictures of the old and new
buildings. What you think we talkin bout? I’m not even gonna answer you, just look,
just ask us what we doin. That’s the whole point of this project. You ask. Ask for me
to tell you. You know, Excuse me. Young man, why you takin pictures? Are you a photographer?
Naw. I’m not a photographer. Lemme explain to you. Some people I explain to, some people
just don’t give a damn. [Valerie] So. One of the big questions is,
I’m walkin around with you, and I’ve yet to really see any new buildings or anything
that would be considered a part of gentrification. [Khaleeq, pointing at building] That’s one
of them. [Valerie] All right. So what do you think
that’s gonna be? [Khaleeq] I think that’s gonna be a corporate
building. [Valerie] It looks like it’s gonna have
about I think that’s over twenty floors, don t you?
[Khaleeq] Twenty, twenty-five floors. [Valerie] So do you think that’s going to
harm the community in terms of changing how the community looks, or yeah?
[Khaleeq] Cause I know it’s going to be like for high you know, for, people that like,
um, like high class, and when they start bringing like revenues to those, to those lots, it’s
going to change everything. They’re going to move some people out because more and more
people going to see this as a desirable place. [Valerie] And so when people start seeing
it as a desirable place, then you think that makes way for displacement?
[Khaleeq] Yeah. [Valerie] So then where you think the people
gonna go who lived here better? [Khaleeq] I don’t know. Maybe Upper Harlem
or Englewood, something like that, Bronx, I’m not sure. Cause I know cause I know
that New York is going through a whole change, so
[Valerie] It’s extremely significant that we have access to technology. It’s extremely
significant that, you know, the ways in which we’re asking our questions, we are engaging
in responses to those questions by being able to create a multimedia project. By being able
to say that literacy is not just something that we gain by sitting in a classroom but
it’s also something that we do by participating in our communities in ways where we digitally
document the stories that are always and forever around us. These stories are not new stories.