Brown Girls Dreaming: Adolescent Black Girls’ Futuremaking through Multimodal Representations of Race, Gender, and Career Aspirations

Inspired by Jacqueline Woodson’s (2014) memoir, this article examines the ways Tamika and Malia, two African American adolescent girls and fraternal twins, act as Brown girl dreamers and articulate their career aspirations through multimodal compositions. Drawing on the psychological literature on youths’ career aspirations, theories related to Black Girlhood and Black Girls’ Literacies, and case study methodologies, we investigated two key questions: (1) In what ways do two Black adolescent girls represent their career dreams through drawings/sketches created in 2012 and digital dream boards designed in 2018? and (2) Across their 2018 digital career dream boards, what common visual images do two Black adolescent girls curate and interpret to imagine and/or (re)imagine their futures? We composed case studies by integrating rich data from the girls’ 2012 career dream drawings, their 2018 digital career dream boards, and transcripts from individual interviews and a 60-minute focus group interview. Our analyses of the visual images and the interview transcripts revealed that Tamika and Malia employed visual design devices to illustrate their career aspirations while honoring their identities as young Black women. Cross-case analyses further demonstrated that as futuremakers, Tamika and Malia critiqued the (under) representations of Black career women and articulated the need for multiliteracies, in the form of professional, aspirational auditory (i.e., music), and life literacies that protect and advance their own future interests and goals. We conclude with implications for how educators can (re) position Black adolescent girls as multiliterate futuremakers in secondary classrooms and center their career aspirations in English language arts curriculum.