Stephanie Toliver

Stephanie Toliver
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · College of Education

Doctor of Philosophy | Language and Literacy Education
Assistant Professor of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

About

39
Publications
14,156
Reads
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343
Citations
Introduction
S.R. Toliver is an assistant professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her scholarship centers the freedom dreams of Black youth and honors the historical legacy that Black imaginations have had and will have on activism and social change.
Additional affiliations
August 2018 - present
University of Georgia
Position
  • Graduate Teaching Assistant
Description
  • I teach a fall seminar course for pre-service English educators that focuses on social justice in the ELA classroom.
August 2015 - June 2016
Miller Grove High School
Position
  • English Teacher
January 2011 - June 2015
Leon High School
Position
  • English Teacher
Education
August 2016 - May 2020
University of Georgia
Field of study
  • Language and Literacy Education
January 2013 - April 2015
Florida State University
Field of study
  • Curriculum & Instruction
August 2006 - April 2011
Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University
Field of study
  • English Education

Publications

Publications (39)
Article
Full-text available
Popular culture aids in the conditioning of U.S. society, assisting in the determination of who is esteemed as literate and who is disgraced with illiteracy. Unfortunately, pop culture depictions of black male literacy often reify the stereotype that black males are less literate than their peers. Although a real issue presents itself in the opport...
Article
Full-text available
In this article, the author conducts a meta-analysis of 12 studies in which researchers analyze Black girl representations in fiction literature. The studies are used to investigate which fiction books scholars use in their research with Black girls and what influences the researchers to make their book selections. The author uses information glean...
Article
The science fiction concept of alterity is the author’s attempt to depict a level of difference that expands the reader’s spheres of knowledge. An ironic example of this concept is represented in Suzanne Collins’ depiction of Rue in the first Hunger Games novel, where Rue, a young Black girl, is characterized as innocent and childlike, a depiction...
Article
Full-text available
In this article, I provide preliminary findings from my survey study about Black women's reading histories of science fiction. The article is in the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Inc. Summer Newsletter.
Article
Full-text available
In this article, we argue that the humanity and mattering of Black people have always lived in Black girlhood, but the potentiality of Black girlhood as a creative space for designing Black approaches in educational research has yet to be fully realized. Therefore, we (re)turn to Black girlhood frameworks and theories in our contribution to Black a...
Article
A motherboard is the main circuit board in a computer, the connectivity point that ensures communication between important circuits and provides space for peripheral components to connect. As the central hub, the moth-erboard is the backbone, the point where power and data are distributed to the technological mechanisms that need it. Without the mo...
Article
This article utilizes speculative and visual storytelling alongside interdisci-plinary research on artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic oppression to engage in a thought experiment on how literacy studies might refuse the oppressionist logics currently undermining the possibilities of AI in literacy education. As technological advancements...
Article
Background In the wake of COVID-19 and protests against racial violence, scholars of education, alongside educational organizations, called for innovative responses to address racial injustice, but one solution was consistently mentioned across educational spaces: the need for educators to reimagine education in a postpandemic/endemic world. And ye...
Article
Studies centralizing youth responses to literature have changed the landscape of literacy classrooms and continue to shape literature instruction. Still, there is limited scholarship that explores the intricate ways in which Black girls respond to literature which inhibits curricular possibilities for Black girls in literacy spaces. Considering th...
Article
Recent political excursions into classroom text selections by local and national politicians and pundits have made teaching canonical texts more appealing to many school districts and teachers. In this study, we used conceptions of Derridean hospitality alongside monster theory to examine what common canonical texts teach students about who is welc...
Article
The authors reflect on their own past classroom text selections and practices to illustrate their unintentional complicity in upholding whiteness within their classrooms.
Article
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to further theorize BlackCrit to include a deeper focus on the framing idea of Black liberatory fantasy via Afrofuturism. Design/methodology/approach To develop the theoretical connections, the author revisits their previous scholarship on Black girls’ Afrofuturist storytelling practices to elucidate how the gi...
Chapter
In this chapter, Toliver explains how her dissertation led her to the coining of Endarkened Storywork, a research storytelling format that builds on Endarkened Feminist Epistemologies, Indigenous Storywork, and Afrofuturism. To detail the history of the terms’ creation, she highlights familial storytelling influences that asked her to grasp at the...
Article
The rampant murder of Black women and girls in the United States proves that this place is not safe for them. In fact, it is questionable whether any space currently known can be safe when antiblackness and misogynoir are interwoven into the fabric of our world. For this reason, researchers must explore the unbound landscapes Black girls create for...
Article
Constructing school spaces where Black girls feel comfortable enough to be their full selves is essential in a system that consistently shows them that they do not matter. Cultivating these spaces, however, requires educators to understand that Black girls’ identities are multiple and varied, that Black girls can be anything. Still, some identity p...
Article
This paper uses an assignment given to the authors' preservice teachers to address and push back against common arguments used to uphold canonical text selection in secondary ELA classrooms. Using the metaphor of canon defense as empire building first made by Toni Morrison in the canon debates of the 1980s, the authors examine the weaknesses in arg...
Article
Janelle Monae's, Dirty Computer, tackles issues like feminism, racism, sexuality, Black womanhood, self-assurance, and growth. Each song on the album is presented from a first-person point of view, offering a unique insight into a story that shares an intimate portrait of what it means to embrace authentic Black womanhood. Monae's lyrical storytell...
Article
All activism is science fiction, for envisioning a world without oppression requires the active creation of socially just societies formed from innovative ideas and visionary possibilities. Black girls have historically engaged in science fiction by using their voices and written words to construct socially just worlds in hopes that their dreams of...
Article
Purpose – This paper aims to identify how white preservice teachers’ inability to imagine an equitable space for Black and Brown children contributes to the ubiquity of whiteness in English education. Further, the authors contend that the preservice teachers’ responses mirror how the larger field of English education fails to imagine Black and Brow...
Chapter
This volume explains how analyzing textual elements that aren't part of the text but connected to it can be used with K—16 students to improve comprehension, engagement, critical thinking, and media literacy. Beginning with an introduction that briefly explains Genette's theory of paratext and discusses the functions of epitext theory, this book co...
Article
Full-text available
Afrofuturism often acts as an experiential portal that guides readers to reflect on the current state of the world, to hypothesize about the trajectory of society, and to challenge any possible future that continues the subjugation of Black people. As a genre that is concerned with the elevation and liberation of Black people, Afrofuturism aligns w...
Article
The genre of science fiction has often been hostile to readers who are not white, middle class, heterosexual men. Though the genre has historically ignored Dark Others; however, they are never completely omitted from the story, as they are often characterized as the creature, the alien, or the monster. In this way, the futuristic windows and mirror...
Article
Drawing on Black feminist/womanist storytelling and the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space, this article showcases how one Black girl uses speculative fiction as testimony and counterstory, calling for readers to bear witness to her experiences and inviting witnesses to respond to the negative experiences she faces as a Black girl in the Uni...
Article
In this article, I discuss how a group of Black girls and I built community I’m an after school book club through communal read alouds.
Chapter
In this chapter I aim to unsettle the hypercanon by introducing various YADF texts with young women of color featured as the protagonists. Specifically, I conduct a comparative analysis of books that represent young women who are Asian, biracial, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx. Yet, instead of focusing solely on the differences inherent in these tex...
Chapter
This chapter engages in a much needed exploration of the popular sub-genre of dystopian texts with female main characters. An intersectional examination of female protagonists of color provides readers with a valuable resource to introducing diverse texts to readers and classrooms. By disrupting the hypercanon of YA dystopian texts that focus large...
Article
In this article, I explore the topic of speculative antiblackness through interviews with two respected authors and colleagues—Ebony Thomas, author of the recent book The Dark Fantastic: Race and Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games, and Zetta Elliott, author of Dragons in a Bag and Ship of Souls.
Article
Much of the language at academic conferences is purely metaphorical, so it is important to understand the cultural–historical significance of the metaphors used in constructing organizational gatherings, especially the metaphor invoked by the town hall meeting. Town halls/meetings were spaces where members gathered for democratic rule in a particul...
Article
CaShawn Thompson's hashtag, #BlackGirlMagic, has transformed into a movement over the past five years. The hashtag focuses on celebrating the beauty, influence, and strength of Black women and girls. However, Thompson's term sits in a space of tension, where contradictory interpretations create boundaries around what Black girl celebration means as...
Article
When a student in a community-based writing program asked to write science fiction, rather than a personal essay, he prompted the staff to expand the scope of the program’s curriculum.

Questions

Question (1)
Question
I am interested in using Boyatzis' thematic analysis, but I have not seen any research that uses thematic analysis or other specific qual methods on surveys.
For clarification, I have 310 survey responses from Black women about their reading of a specific genre of literature. I don't believe the data can be reduced only to numbers.

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