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Dancing with Bboy: Tracing Embodied and Emergent Speculative Storytelling

Fri, April 25, 11:40am to 1:10pm MDT (11:40am to 1:10pm MDT), The Colorado Convention Center, Floor: Meeting Room Level, Room 709

Abstract

This paper describes the work of one student, Aidan, in a superhero storytelling project in a public middle school in a large midwestern city. In this project, 18 seventh graders read Spiderman: Miles Morales (Bendis & Pinchelli, 2012) and then worked in small self-selected groups to design superhero stories set in their communities. This was the third iteration of superhero storytelling our research team conducted in collaboration with two ELA teachers, and in this iteration, we additionally invited community artists in to work alongside youth authors as they designed artistic products to represent their stories. In total, youth created 9 superhero stories which they represented across 5 different artistic mediums (including watercolor, film, costumes, and music) and presented to an audience of their peers, family and friends.

We began this project by asking what might happen when youth’s superhero stories jumped off the page in this way and took on three-dimensionality through the artistic products they created. We focus on Aidan particularly in this paper because he was always literally jumping with the space of our project, and his breakdancing superhero, Bboy, (and the dance he created to tell his story) demonstrates thow movement and motion might contribute to speculative storytelling work.

Using frames from theories of transliteracies (Stornaiuolo et al, 2017; Smith et al, 2018), we analyze an ethnographic (Blommaert & Jie, 2010) data set which includes recordings of the 20 sessions we spent working with Aidan s in this project, mid point and exit interviews, and copies/photos/videos of his story his dance routine. Transliteracies theories attend to the (often underrecognized) way literacy practices move and change across contexts, and we specifically use the translieracies tools of “emergence,” “resonance” and “uptake” to highlight the speculative work Aidan’s conducted during his construction of Bboy’s story. We highlight 3 events that illustrate exactly how Aidan’s embodied movement and play function in both the fictional world he constructed and the real world of the school library where we conducted our project. In the first event, Aidan performed the role of Spiderman for his peers, transforming the space of the school library in emergent, unexpected ways. In the second, Aidan described resonances between Bboy and his own in-motion identity in school spaces. And in the third, Aidan organized a performance of the Bboy story that invited uptake from his peers.

Across these three events, we argue that embodied motion and play was key to Aidan’s speculative storytelling, and we suggest that writing projects should broadly make space for this material, three-dimensional composing. In his embodied, in-motion narration, Aidan was able to speculate beyond the constraints of both school spaces and traditional narrative writing tasks, storytelling in ways that he described as feeling both “fun” and “free.”

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