Youth and Community Artists Embodying Stories and Claiming School Spaces

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Fostering Well-Being and Learning: Exploring Playful Writing and Community-Centered Literacy Engagement (Table 18)

Abstract

We present findings from a twenty-week, multi-media storytelling project with eighteen seventh grade multi-racial and multi-ethnic youth, facilitated by university- and community-based adults in the school library. Drawing on an ethnographic data set, we analyze the ways two groups of storytellers and artists created locally-situated superhero stories as they 1) displaced historically formed school spaces with artistic purposes, 2) discovered and valued new relationships, and 3) recognized themselves and others as knowledge producers. Informed by theories of embodied discourse analysis (Blommaert & Huang, 2009) and critical imagination (Holland et al, 1998; Stetsenko, 2017), we argue that youth and artists’ story and artmaking inspired youth to form new spatial, material, and embodied ways of claiming joyful, purposeful literacy education.

Authors

• Patricia Enciso, The Ohio State University

• Beth Krone, Kennesaw State University