Vol.:(0123456789) The Urban Review https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-020-00564-0 1 3 “This is America”: Examining Artifactual Literacies as Austere Love Across Contexts of Schools and Everyday Use Joanne E. Marciano 1  · Vaughn W. M. Watson 1 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 Abstract In this paper, we consider how teachers and teacher educators may foreground rela- tionships, experiences, pasts, and possibilities to more fully recognize and extend already-present literacy practices of youth of color as strengths from which more equitable curriculum and teaching opportunities may be designed and enacted. We assert theoretical perspectives of artifactual literacies within and across a contextual rendering of the popularized narrative of Donald Glover’s “This is America,” and conceptual meanings as expressions of poet Robert Hayden’s austere love, put, in unanticipated ways, to everyday use. We wrote analytic narrative vignettes and used analytic memoing to examine the interplay of three artifacts—these shawls, these curriculum binders, and this keychain—through the theoretical lensing of artifac- tual literacies. Recommendations for teachers, teacher educators, and educational researchers are discussed. Keywords Urban education · Literacy · Youth · Artifactual literacies · Teacher education Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fres blaze. No one ever thanked him. […] What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely ofces? – Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” * Joanne E. Marciano marcian2@msu.edu 1 Department of Teacher Education, College of Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA