In Search of New Suns: Critical Counternarrative Construction Through Afrofuturist Comic Creation

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: "The Only Light We've Got": Storytelling and Critical Literacies as Method and Antiracist Praxis

Abstract

Abstract
This paper chronicles an arts-based, community-oriented, critical literacy initiative with a group of middle-school children. Using an Afrofuturist Anchor Text (AAT) coupled with a Critical Afrofuturist Design Framework (Holbert, Dando & Correa, 2020), this research study explores the sociopolitical impacts of speculative Afrofuturist graphic narratives on critical literacy and identity development. This study investigates the children’s interpretations of and contributions to democracy and civic engagement in their youth development organizations and broader communities. Findings regarding the democratic principles present in both the processes and products of their work have broad implications for educators aiming for equitable learning environments.

Objectives
This study investigates:
To what extent can learners engage speculative fiction through comics as a space for critical multimodal literacy development and civic action?
How participants might mobilize speculative fiction and design through comics as a (counter)storytelling method?

Perspectives/Theoretical Framework
This project draws primarily from Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2009) and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017) and Critical Race Theory in Education (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2016) in order to investigate how counternarrative construction can decenter hegemonic understandings of knowledge creation, democracy, and contexts for more equitable education. This paper also draws upon arts-based inquiry as well as multimodal literacy development (Vasudevan, Schultz, & Bateman, 2010).

Methods, Techniques or Modes of Inquiry
This study employed thematic analysis (Clarke & Braun, 2013) along with critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2013) to trace how self-reported social, academic, and cultural identities were existent, (re)created and navigated in an arts-based educational project environment. Data was analyzed axially and selectively (Strauss & Corbin, 2014).

Data Sources
Over two weeks, 60 middle school art students attending public school in a mid-size, central Minnesota city conceived, ideated, sketched, and designed original comic art works. Their focus was twofold: first, developing visual rhetoric skills, and second considering their identities, experiences, their participatory identities as citizen-scholars. Field observations were taken throughout (video and photo data). Student created artifacts were collected pre, during, and post project along with qualitative surveys regarding self-reported identity and preferences.

Scholarly Significance
It is through an expansion of these interpretive strategies and perspectives which learners bring to these texts, that students can become more proficient in their critically-oriented, analytic processes, and ability to critique and resist ideological status quo(s) and capacity to create new futures of their own devising. This involves embracing new potentials for reconfiguring student agency by providing opportunities for students to reshape and rethink resources in ways that are aligned with their needs and interests (Kress, 2004).

Ultimately, this study invites scholars to engage in considering “Transformed Practice[s]” (New London Group, 1995, p. 89) that engage counternarratives as a model of speculative inquiry, critical generativity as praxis, and civic engagement as a fundamental goal toward imagining and realizing educational equity. By mobilizing community-resourced knowledge in both the design and analysis of comics education, we aim to honor participants' worldviews and advance our understanding of culturally sustaining, equitable learning.

Author

• Michael B. Dando, St Cloud State University