Critical text selection of inclusive children's literature plays an essential role in fostering classroom spaces that honor the perspectives of diverse cognitive and physical ways of being, knowing, and learning.
Recent literacy research has made substantial contributions to expanding definitions of literacies beyond stringent parameters of decoding print. These inquiries have intersected with topics such as multimodality and critical literacy in general education literacy classrooms. However, students in isolated special education settings labeled with dis/abilities such as autism or intellectual disability often only receive reading instruction emphasizing functional skills and sight words. The data for this study emerged from a secondary isolated special education classroom where students identified as significantly dis/abled responded to inclusive picturebooks. Analysis is framed by the scholarship on neurological queerness. Findings illustrate how students engage in literacy practices via neuroqueer asocial actions and embodied inventions when they are presumed as competent by teachers and staff. These findings challenge deficit orientations guiding special education literacy instruction and offer implications and openings for continuing to expand who counts as literate and what counts as literacy.
Purpose
Literacy research exploring multimodal composition and justice-oriented children’s literature each have rich landscapes and histories. This paper aims to add to both of these bodies of scholarship through the emerging assemblage of Studio F, a fifth-grade classroom. The authors share poststructural analytic encounters with attention to the unexpected multimodal relationships and the justice-oriented talk and texts that emerged, as well as the classroom conditions that produce them.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors think with assemblage theory to examine the newness that emerged as one small group of students wrestled with the emerging instances of racism present in Freedom Summer by Deborah Wiles.
Findings
Together, the living arrangement of bodies, materials and discourses created openings for students’ explorations of race and racism.
Originality/value
This paper offers teachers and researchers space to rethink what is possible in the literacy classroom when the authors re-envision classrooms as vibrant assemblages, support emergent multimodal composing processes and follow students’ critical encounters toward justice-oriented literacies.
Recent literacy scholarship increasingly seeks to center and value the literacies of systematically marginalized youth in response to deficit-oriented narratives that locate oppressed communities as incompetent or delayed. Often, this reframing leans on a contextualization of literacies as culturally, historically, and socially situated acts that people do. Located alongside recent literacy research combatting racism, homophobia, transphobia, linguicism, xenophobia, and the invisibilizing of indigenous peoples, this piece reimagines the active and rich literacies produced in an isolated (i.e., self-contained) special education literacy classroom. While theoretically utilizing situated literacies, this article also directly responds to critiques of situated literacies as too human-centric, an especially relevant criticism for classrooms with students who have complex support needs. Actor-network theory, as a theoretical and methodological lens, provides entry into the analysis of human and nonhuman actors collectively producing intricate literacy events during a curricular exploration of inclusive picturebooks (i.e., texts featuring main characters with lived dis/ability experiences). Findings presented trace two literacy events animated by actors such as students, technologies, rituals, and repetitions. Implications for this research argue for future theoretical and pedagogical framings of literacies as inherently interdependent productions, not just in isolated special education classrooms but all literacy classrooms. This shift moves away from illusive discourses of independence and autonomy and toward understandings of all literacies as interdependently shaped by endless network actors.
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