This article explores the notion of connoisseurship as a framework for learning about adolescents’ lives and literacies and developing relationships in literacy classrooms. Drawing upon data from a two‐year qualitative study of the collaborative inquiries of a community of student English teachers, the author examines inquiry projects written for an English methods course in which two student teachers, Alex and Jared, construct counternarratives about the promise of students who had been positioned as problems within their schools. These examples illustrate how becoming connoisseurs of adolescents’ distinctiveness and abilities can be a basis for developing counterpractices in literacy classrooms, opening spaces of possibility for otherwise struggling students to begin to reorient their negative trajectories in school. Among other implications, this work suggests the positive consequences of teachers’ attentiveness to students’ literacy practices, and the importance of teachers cultivating more relational stances toward students.
Purpose
This paper features artwork and artists’ statements by middle school students who participated in a research collaboration that involved co-authoring critical literacy curriculum for Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus: A Survivors Tale (1986) with teacher candidates from the University of Toronto.
Design/methodology/approach
Youth explored personal and social justice issues through writing and artwork produced in response to Maus. In the process, they navigated what historian Dominick LaCapra (1998) has referred to as the “delicate relationship between empathy and critical distance” (pp. 4-5), between closely identifying with the agonizing experiences Spiegelman documents and using their inquiries to cultivate more critical positionalities and assume activist stances on historical and contemporary social justice issues.
Findings
As they describe in their brief statements included alongside their artwork, creating these projects allowed youth to bear witness to a terrible moment in human history and to envision how they can make a difference in their own communities.
Originality/value
This work suggests how the arts can be mobilized in critical literacy as a vehicle to interrogate difficult historical moments and multifaceted identity issues.
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