The Best at What They Do: Examining Pedagogic Models and Approaches in Superhero Comics

• In Event: More Than/Other Than Human Educations: Mentors, Hormone Monsters, Elves, Androids, Gods, and Us

Abstract

This paper offers a critical analysis of various pedagogic approaches offered by popular superhero comic books, particularly in the Marvel titles Daredevil, X-Men, and Shuri in order to illuminate how conceptions of teaching and learning are both reflected, normalized, and made publicly legible. Taking up a critical pedagogy framework (Apple, Darder, Giroux, Ladson- Billings, Wynter), this paper uses different conceptions of the comic book teacher (Stick, Professor X, and the Elephant’s Trunk) to analyze the often tacit, popular understandings of the cultural, political, and ideological purpose(s) of education as well as the role of the teacher in achieving them.

Through an examination of the pedagogic approaches and the underlying philosophies that these texts offer, I invite teachers to grapple with these unspoken or invisibilized understandings of students, teaching, and power dynamics in the classroom. To that end I engage questions regarding the socio-cultural repercussions effected by these popular understandings, particularly how dominant ideologies shape notions of whose knowledge is of the most worth and the very notion of what it means to be educated. I conclude with a call for educators to consider pedagogic approaches that imagine possibilities that invite the creation of educational environments that afford opportunities for agency, equity, and liberation.

Author

• Michael B Dando, St Cloud State University