Reimagining Professional Development through Comic Conventions: Developing Teachers’ Noticings Through Spaces of Aesthetic Education

• In Event: Aesthetics & Literacies across Educational Spaces

Abstract

Diverse intergenerational communities of fans, including teachers, gather at comic conventions to celebrate multimodal and digital texts they love (Woo et al., 2020). Educational research rarely examines how extracurricular and pop-cultural gatherings might positively intersect with classroom pedagogies. This research examines teachers’ literacy learning around the largest comic convention in the U.S.: San Diego Comic Con (SDCC). Troubling contexts of teacher education and professional development (e.g. Author, 2020), our work assumes that educators learn across sites, and that their life-wide expertise (e.g. Barron & Bell, 2016), represent repertoires of teaching practice. Many educators participate in playful literacies like fan conventions; however, despite our best efforts (e.g. Authors, 2022), we know less about teacher interest. Educational research discusses student interest extensively (e.g. Renninger et al., 2019), but not how teacher interest may be a factor in interest development.

In addition to participants in fan gatherings, teachers can also be theorized as fans of texts within literary communities (Authors, 2025). However, there is still much to examine about how teachers can draw from their dual positionalities as literary experts and fans to design learning that hybridizes these practices for youth.

Greene (1986) describes goals for aesthetic education spaces, including to “deliberately [cultivate] consciousness of craft, standard, and style” (p. 57). We theorize comic conventions as aesthetic spaces where people gather together to reflect on the popular arts, interacting with and interpreting artistic and literary texts together in embodied ways. We posit that teachers can begin to notice (Van Es & Sherin, 2021) the potential for transliteracies (e.g. resonance, uptake) across fan and literary communities that share texts and interpretive aesthetic practices (Stornaiuolo, et al., 2017).

This study examines how three ELA teachers enrolled in the SDCC Teacher Studio approached the convention, and their own fandoms, as aesthetic resources for classroom design. The goals of this co-designed space include supporting new kinds of teacher noticing, shifting from cognitive-focused noticings to noticings around aesthetics and literary effect. Data include field notes of professional learning before and after the convention, multimodal teacher microblogs during SDCC, recordings of planning sessions, and drafts of classroom materials. Analysis techniques include bidirectional artifact analysis (Author & Colleague, 2013) of classroom materials as well as application of transliteracies tools such as resonance and uptake to trace how teacher noticings at Comic Con contributed to subsequent instructional designs (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017).

We found that microblogging activities supported teachers in moving beyond traditional conceptions of SDCC as a professional development venue for gathering information and text recommendations (e.g. NCTE’s “Build Your Stack”). Teachers experience how fans do useful and interesting transformative work in fandom spaces like SDCC including aesthetic practices around cosplay, fan art, and the like. We found that working across these interpretive communities sparks student and teacher interest in ways that may shift pedagogical practices toward forming aesthetic educational spaces for youth to develop and hone aesthetic practices together, such as supporting costume-making or trading cards for mythical creatures.

Authors

• Karis Michelle Jones, Baylor University

• Alecia Marie Magnifico, University of New Hampshire

• Emily Ward Schindler, The Comic-Con Museum

• Maggie Bryant, Baylor University