Playfully Critical: Democratizing Research Through Collaborative Multimodal Inquiry

• In Event: 25.081 - Reframing, Reshaping, Repositioning: Critical Approaches to Literacy and Transformation

Abstract

This presentation explores the creation of arts projects that eighth-grade students developed in response to their inquiries into Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir Maus (1986). These projects were created in partnership with teacher candidates as part of a larger participatory action research study (Cammarota, 2011). Findings demonstrate how student researchers navigated a range of emotional engagements in the process of working through (LaCapra, 1998) historical traumas. Their use of creative inquiry surfaced their grief and hope in ways that challenged expectations of what counts as “research” and demonstrated the capacity of multimodal critical literacy (Janks, 2010) to democratize the classroom as well as the research process.

Authors

• Rob Simon, University of Toronto

• Sarah Evis, Toronto District School Board 

• benjamin lee hicks, University of Toronto

• Ty Walkland, University of Toronto

• Ben Gallagher, University of Toronto

• Doug Friesen, University of Toronto