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Learning to read and write are two of the greatest accomplishments in the life of a child. The ability to create language, make meaning, and transform reality by the use of symbols provides children creative opportunities to engage the world. Language becomes the vehicle for children to locate their place in the world and to understand the social and political implications of their society. Literacy is not simply learning how to read words but, more importantly, how to "read the world" (Freire and Macedo 7). Providing children a space to locate themselves in history makes them present as agents in the struggle for self-definition and cultural identity. Their learning, then, becomes a pedagogy of empowerment and liberation.
African-American literary works have been inspired by quiltmaking (Benberry 79), and several African-American women authors of children's literature have embraced this notion of reading the world by employing the quilt tradition in their stories. The implication that quilting reveals a continuum of AfricanAmerican women's experience and creative expression is a recurrent theme in such works as Deborah Hopkinson s Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt, Faith Ringgold's Aunt Harriet's Underground Railroad in the Sky, Courtni C. Wright's Journey to Freedom, Valerie Flournoy's The Patchwork Quilt, Patricia McKissack's Mirandy and Brother Wind, and Bettye Stroud's Down Home at Miss Dessa's. These authors present the quilt in ways which conceptualize identity and redefine history, setting in place a dialectical tension between traditional learning and critical literacy.
While traditional learning encourages the dominant discourse of cultural hegemony, critical literacy redefines the parameters of knowledge and power by making a space for oppressed voices to name their experience, reclaim their history, and transform their future. The stories of Hopkinson, Ringgold, Wright Flournoy, McKissack, and Stroud contribute to literacy by advancing the tradition of the quilt as a form of resistance to structures of dominance and control. Working within the historical context of Black culture, these six authors provide a space for teaching children the history of struggle and the importance of family relationships. Houston Baker and Charlotte Pierce-Baker point out that "the patchwork quilt . . . opens a fascinating interpretive window on vernacular dimensions of lived, creative experience in the United States. Quilts, in their patched and many-colored glory offer not...