STILE will be piloted during the 2023-2024 academic year in Fort Worth, Texas, with expansion plans at future sites. While serving as a safe space for Black girls, STILE seeks to co-create a rhetoric that insists on the importance of Black girlhood, Black girl literacies, and Black girl brilliance. Black feminists including bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Brittney Cooper, and Mikki Kendall all discuss multiple interlocking systems of oppression that Black women and girls must simultaneously navigate.

Battling numerous “isms” that further oppress Black women and girls often make their advancements efforts impossible. Intervening in a tradition that punishes Black girls at higher rates than their white counterparts in school settings means offering new “-isms” to combat the oppressor. Because STILE embraces multiple literacy expressions, girls can use their various embodied literacies as forms of self-expression to help articulate and define a Black girl rhetoric. Using STILE’s curriculum as one that invites reflection and participation, Black girls will become more STIL-ISH to (I)mplement new (S)ystems that resist (H)egemony.