Secret Identities in the Classroom: Negotiating Conceptions of Identity With Comics and Bilingual Grade 4 Students

• In Event: 29.025 - Visual Pedagogies and Methodologies: Forwarding Critical Thinking and Action

Abstract

This study describes ways the medium of comics was employed as an arts-based knowledge-mobilization activity to engage bilingual students with authorship, identity exploration, and creative process. I will discuss the methodology and methods employed to explore relationships between bilingual children’s conceptions of identity through the visual language and medium of comics. This presentation aims to provide scholarly and artful analysis of student comics in the context of authorship, which can be key to creating and sustaining strong and empathetic identity. My use of an arts-based research methodology in bilingual student authorship through comics aims to offer an alternative way of mobilizing research knowledge, as well as to provoke artful representations in articulating the complexity of identity-building and authorship.

Author

• Julian Lawrence, Emily Carr University of Art + Design