University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 Comics as a Medium dor Inquiry: Urban Students (Re-)Designing Critical Social Worlds David Eric Low University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Education Commons Recommended Citation Low, David Eric, "Comics as a Medium dor Inquiry: Urban Students (Re-)Designing Critical Social Worlds" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1090. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1090 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1090 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Comics as a Medium dor Inquiry: Urban Students (Re-)Designing Critical Social Worlds Abstract Literacy scholars have argued that curricular remediation marginalizes the dynamic meaning-making practices of urban youth and ignores contemporary definitions of literacy as multimodal, socially situated, and tied to people's identities as members of cultural communities. For this reason, it is imperative that school-based literacy research unsettle status quos by foregrounding the sophisticated practices that urban students enact as a result, and in spite of, the marginalization they manage in educational settings. A hopeful site for honoring the knowledge of urban students is the nexus of alternative learning spaces that have taken on increased significance in ouths'y lives. Many of these spaces focus on young people's engagements with new literacies, multimodalities, the arts, and popular media, taking the stance that students' interests are inherently intellectual. The Cabrini Comics Inquiry Community (CCIC), located in a K-8 Catholic school in South Philadelphia, is one such space. The CCIC was the site of a practitioner research study from February 2012 to June 2014. For parts of three school years, students met weekly to read, write, design, and discuss graphica. As a practitioner researcher, the author extended pedagogic invitations for students to engage with the comics medium, and employed ethnographic tools to study learning outcomes. By examining how a group of urban students 1.) co-constructed the space of an afterschool inquiry community and 2.) mobilized the comics medium to (per)form cultural identities and engage in critical inquiries, this dissertation contributes to theories of critical multimodal/multicultural literacy education. The author surfaces ways in which students used the affordances of the comics medium to 1.) contest the silencing of race in their school, 2.) re-narrate themselves and their cultural backgrounds through resource orientations, and 3.) complicate gender discourses. (The verbal-visual form of comics has particular affordances for students to engage in acts of conscientious disruption outside the traditional literacy curriculum.) In all, this dissertation presents an argument for honoring urban students' literate and cultural knowledge through their critical multimodal engagements. Through a blend of practitioner research and ethnographic tools, this work endeavors to challenge generalizations made about urban students and their literate lives. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Education First Advisor H. Gerald Campano Keywords Comics, Graphic Novels, Literacy, Popular Culture, Practitioner Research, Urban Education Subject Categories Education This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1090 248 COMICS AS A MEDIUM FOR INQUIRY: URBAN STUDENTS (RE-)DESIGNING CRITICAL SOCIAL WORLDS David Eric Low A DISSERTATION in Education Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2015 Supervisor of Dissertation: ____________________________________________ H. Gerald Campano, Associate Professor of Education Graduate Group Chairperson: ____________________________________________________________ Stanton E. F. Wortham, Judy & Howard Berkowitz Professor of Education Dissertation Committee: H. Gerald Campano, Associate Professor of Education Vivian L. Gadsden, William T. Carter Professor of Child Development and Education Ebony E. Thomas, Assistant Professor of Education ii COMICS AS A MEDIUM FOR INQUIRY: URBAN STUDENTS (RE-)DESIGNING CRITICAL SOCIAL WORLDS COPYRIGHT 2015 David Eric Low iii DEDICATION I dedicate this dissertation to the students of St. Cabrini who invited me into their school, their library, and their literacy lives. Without the desire of these young people to build “a community of artists and writers,” this work would not exist. Indeed, it would have no reason to. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Katie Reilly, you are my partner in all pursuits. Thank you for being my light in the darkness and my laughter in the silence. And thank you, especially, for supporting me through five long years of a PhD program. I love you very much and look forward to our lifetime together. Let us prepare to travel the globe (entirely in the form of the Bunny Hop!). I am so proud of all that you have done, and all that you have ahead of you. My parents – Debra and Stuart Low – have been my steadfast advocates from the beginning. You have each provided me with examples of how to live a life of integrity and kindness without sacrificing for a moment your intellectual curiosity. Thank you for v believing in me, even when I have failed to do so myself. You mean the world to me, and I love you both without end. The members of my dissertation committee – Gerald Campano, Vivian Gadsden, and Ebony Thomas – have taught me a great deal, from the ethical implications of social science research to the finer points of securing a job in academia. I am indebted to each of you, and will do my very best to honor you by foregrounding, in my work and in my day-to-day life, Gadamer’s dialectic of “what is” and “what could be.” You each provide rich evidence that we are not called to our work solely to document the world, but to labor with others in making it a more just place. My other mentors in academia – Susan Lytle, Lawrence Sipe, Diane Waff, María Paula Ghiso, and Bethany Welch – have steered me through the doldrums of many an intellectual crisis. You have each, in some way, enabled me to see that theory is lived practice, and that knowledge made through practice is as vital as any knowledge, period. Thank you for the powerful examples you have provided me of how to live a life in inquiry. My colleagues and friends from the Reading/Writing/Literacy program at Penn GSE – Robert LeBlanc, Nora Peterman, Lan Ngo, Alicia Rusoja, and Debora Broderick – have been a supportive “band of merrymakers” throughout my doctoral studies. Your intellectual rigor and commitments to justice are matched only by your willingness to laugh long and hard at our endlessly absurd world. Thank you for pushing me to think differently and to consider angles that would make a protractor cry. The members of my writing group – Heather Hurst, Katrina Bartow Jacobs, and Jodi Duffy – are one reason that this dissertation is now complete, and that I am not cowering beneath some table with my head buried in my hands. Thank you for opening your lives to me and for allowing me to do the same. Let no one discount the power of community in individual productivity. For your willingness to “suspend your own individual needs… for the betterment of the whole” (Richardson, 1997, p. 85), I am eternally grateful. Rachel Skrlac Lo, you are the most wonderful cohort-mate and “school spouse” I could have imagined. Our doctoral programs may only last half a decade, but I am confident that our friendship and professional collaboration will last a lifetime. Thank you for providing, at various times, a sympathetic ear, a shoulder to lean on, and a swift kick in the arse. I can’t wait to see the places you’ll go, and perhaps ride your wake from time to time. Thai-Huy Nguyen, were it not for having you as an accountability partner this year, my dissertation might still be in some nebulous pre-writing phase. Thank you for motivating me and for cultivating the perfect environment in which to work. Our ratio of writing to chatter (I’m guessing 6:1) was absolutely optimal! I am excited to observe your life as a rising academic superstar. If you ever need a roadie, please let me know. vi I would also like to thank those whose names and faces are too numerous to include on my hastily-rendered globe: To the remarkable LLE support staff at Penn GSE – Lorraine Hightower, Penny Creedon, Mary Schlesinger, Suzanne Oh, and Maryetta Rowan – I thank you for making it so easy (and indeed, delightful) to be productive in my endeavors. To my friends at Penn GSE, graduate students both past and present – Jun Hwang, Jamie Schissel, Jessica Whitelaw, Rob Simon, Alyssa D’Alconzo, Melissa Kapadia-Bodi, Joanna Siegel, Karim Mostafa, Twila Ainsworth Comfort, Ambria Reed, Kristin Larsen, Phil Nichols, Grace Player, Rhiannon Maton, Mary Yee, Vanessa Irvin, Adrianne Flack, James Arrington, Jen Zwillenberg, Sara Tilles, Bethany Silva, Erin Whitney, Jason Javier-Watson, Kailey Spencer, Sofia Chaparro, Miranda Weinberg, Sherea Mosley, Sarah Hobson, Helen Anderson-Clark, Lisa Marie Middendorf, Ryan Miller, Kathleen Riley, Franco Fiorini, Robert Rivera-Amezola, Catrice Barrett, and Marina Bach – I hope you know how much I value your collegiality. Each of you has kept me going at one time or another, whether you knew it or not. Thank you for your cumulative kindnesses. To the many children and adults with whom I have worked at “St. Cabrini,” I thank you for inviting me to learn from and alongside your families. You inspire me to look for ways in which we are all united by indissoluble bonds of mutuality and compassion. And finally, to my former students at Mountain View High School in Tucson, Arizona, all I can say is that you are at the forefront of my mind whenever I need to be reminded why I am drawn to this work in the first place.