Not Just a Name: An Illustrated Praxis for Restorying Identity Through Hip-Hop

• In Event: Hip-Hop, Comics, and Speculative Education: (Re)Storying Equitable Education for the 23rd Century

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: Drawing from the identity as narrative perspective (Sfard & Prusak, 2005), I propose using restorying as a conceptual model to support learners in developing their knowledge of who they are and want to become. Throughout history, hip hop music has been leveraged as a medium for people from communities minoritized based on race, gender, class, sexual orientation, or immigration status write themselves and their stories into historical canon (Thomas, Bean-Folkes, & Coleman, 2020), ultimately reclaiming who they are on their own terms. Through illuminating how various hip hop artists have “restoried” their identities through their lyrics, I argue for design learning environments that affirm youth’s identities holistically.
Perspective(s) or theoretical framework: In order to better develop students’ critical literacies for recognizing and deconstructing the relationship between knowledge, texts, and power in society, it is important we draw from the critical lenses that youth’s communities already possess from navigating systems of power across the spaces they inhabit. Through restorying-the process of reshaping narratives to better reflect a diversity of perspectives and experiences (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016)---youth “[analyze] their lived experiences, then [synthesize and recontextualize] a multiplicity of stories in order to form new narratives” (Thomas, Bean-Folkes, & Coleman, 2020, p. 428). By analyzing identity as collections of reifying, endorsable, and significant stories about people (Sfard & Prusak, 2005), restorying can empower learners to reimagine the identities projected onto them by dominant cultural narratives and author their own sense of selves. 
Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry: Through integrating visual and verbal modes of expression, comic art provides an interdisciplinary, multimodal approach for meaning-making and thinking through ideas (Kirtley, Garcia, & Carlson, 2020). By illustrating this paper graphically as a comic, I intend to highlight how comics pedagogy through “incorporating comic art as a way of thinking” (p.13) can support researchers in conceptualizing complex topics.  
Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials: To illustrate the restorying process, I will select examples of lyrics highlighting each step from various hip hop artists in conjunction with illustrations I will produce to aesthetically represent the process.  
Warrants for arguments/point of view: With the emphasis in learning sciences research on developing learner’s disciplinary identities (Bell, Van Horne, & Cheng, 2017), it is necessary we consider what identities are already being communicated to youth — in their schools, families and communities, or popular media — and how those identities compare with who youth consider themselves to be and want to become. 
Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work: Incorporating and producing comic art to illustrate the experience of restorying presents an innovative method for not only processing the complex relationship between identity development and learning but it reveals the advantages of utilizing comics pedagogy in education research.  

Author

• Mia Shaw, New York University