Paint, Panels, and Possibilities: Graffiti, Comics, and Critical Multimodal Literacies in Educational Research

• In Event: Hip Hop in the Margins: Hip Hop, Comics, and Critical Speculative Pedagogies

Abstract

This paper examines the pedagogical and research possibilities that emerge at the intersections of graffiti writing, comic arts, and hip hop culture as critical sites of multimodal literacy development in a composition classroom space. Drawing on a culturally sustaining pedagogical framework (Paris & Alim, 2017) and informed by hip-hop-based education (Hill, 2009; Love, 2019), I argue that these expressive forms offer vital aesthetic, cognitive, and philosophical resources for reimagining literacy instruction and educational research.
Drawing from educational spaces where youth engage in public-facing, multimodal composition, this paper will explore how graffiti and comics function not merely as forms of aesthetic expression or disposable and perhaps unsanctioned entertainment, but as literate practices deeply embedded in histories of resistance, identity formation, and civic expression (Hull & Schultz, 2002; Vasudevan, 2014). I foreground how these visual-textual forms are mobilized in educational research to reframe literacy as multimodal, community-rooted, and critically engaged (Albers, 2006; Morrell, 2004).
To that end, this paper is organized around three central inquiries:
How do the visual and rhythmic aesthetics of graffiti, comics, and hip-hop constitute alternative literacies grounded in community, resistance, and play?
What cognitive processes are activated through multimodal composition practices rooted in tagging, paneling, and freestyling?
How do these literacies embody alternative epistemologies, what Wynter (2003) terms “counterhuman” knowledge practices, that challenge colonial paradigms of knowing and being in education?
Through empirical studies, community-based design research, and speculative pedagogies, the panel showcases classrooms and maker-spaces where young people remix elements of graffiti and comics to author counter-narratives, challenge dominant discourses, and enact civic agency. The work of artists such as Lady Pink, REVOK, and Black Kirby (Stacey Robinson & John Jennings) are engaged alongside the scholarly contributions of Vasudevan (2010), Ladson-Billings (1995), and García & O'Donnell-Allen (2015), demonstrating how racially and culturally marginalized youth use multimodal literacies to navigate, subvert, and reimagine social worlds.
The visual aesthetics and the spatial poetics of graffiti tags and murals, alongside the rhythmic structure of the hip-hop cypher reveal distinct yet overlapping approaches to meaning-making and critique. These practices call into question traditional, text-centric literacy models and make visible students’ capacity for what Alim (2006) calls “meta-linguistic dexterity.”
This paper contends that educational research must not only include these multimodal literacies but also allow itself to be reshaped by their radical propositions. In a moment when curriculum is under political siege, especially in its engagements with race, art, and youth culture, graffiti and comics offer not escape but insurgent frameworks for learning, being, and imagining otherwise.

Author

• Michael B. Dando, St. Cloud State University