ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the ways in which secondary literacy educators and researchers engaged with the short stories in Danticat’s Krik? Krak! in a South Florida summer literacy program for local middle-school Haitian youth. This chapter will focus on the ways the program integrated holistic literacy approaches and critical literacy.
The chapter will first contextualize the philosophical and theoretical influences that founded this culturally based summer reading program. Next, it will demonstrate how these influences translated into critical literacy pedagogies and specific teaching methods used to engage students in difficult topics. Attention is given to how the students read and examined Danticat’s “Children of the Sea,” “1937,” and “Night Women.” The chapter will then focus on how the program’s weekly themes worked to support the scholarship, meaning-making, and critical reflections of students while engaging with Danticat’s work. Lastly, the chapter justifies the significance of exposing Haitian and Haitian American youth to the works of Danticat. We argue the importance of using her literature as a tool to activate critical self-reflections that are couched in the sociocultural realities of white supremacist patriarchy and help provide counter-narrative discourses that culturally affirm and empower young Haitian students.
