The Impact of Analyzing Young Adult Literature for Racial Identity / Social Justice Orientation with Interdisciplinary Students

Savitz, Rachelle S.; Roberts, Leslie; Stockwell, Daniel

doi:10.1080/10790195.2022.2044933

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…Teacher candidate responses to young adult literature and comics Using children's and young adult literature to prepare teacher candidates as transformative intellectuals is a growing practice in teacher education programs and literacy methods coursework (Flores et al, 2019;Savitz et al, 2022). This practice is not without challenges.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Responding to representations of fatphobia in prose and comics

Amato

2024

ETPC

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore teacher candidates’ response to young adult literature (prose and comics) featuring fat identified protagonists. The paper considers the textual and embodied resources readers use and reject when imagining and interpreting a character’s body. This paper explores how readers’ meaning making was influenced when reading prose versus comics. This paper adds to a corpus of scholarship about the relationships between young adult literature, comics, bodies and reader response theory. Design/methodology/approach At the time of the study, participants were enrolled in a teacher education program at a Midwestern University, meeting monthly for a voluntary book club dedicated to reading and discussing young adult literature. To examine readers’ responses to comics and prose featuring fat-identified protagonists, the author used descriptive qualitative methodologies to conduct a thematic analysis of meeting transcripts, written participant reflections and researcher memos. Analysis was grounded in theories of reader response, critical fat studies and multimodality. Findings Analyses indicated many readers reject textual clues indicating a character’s body size and weight were different from their own. Readers read their bodies into the stories, regarding them as self-help narratives instead of radical counternarratives. Some readers were not able to read against their assumptions of thinness (and whiteness) until prompted by the researcher and other participants. Originality/value Although many reader response scholars have demonstrated readers’ tendencies toward personal identification in the face of racial and class differences, there is less research regarding classroom practices around the entanglement of physical bodies, body image and texts. Analyzing reader’s responses to the constructions of fat bodies in prose versus comics may help English Language Arts (ELA) educators and students identify and deconstruct ideologies of thin-thinking and fatphobia. This study, which demonstrates thin readers’ tendencies to overidentify with protagonists, suggests ELA classrooms might encourage readers to engage in critical literacies that support them in reading both with and against their identities.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Using children’s and young adult literature to prepare teacher candidates as transformative intellectuals is a growing practice in teacher education programs and literacy methods coursework (Flores et al. , 2019; Savitz et al. , 2022).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Responding to representations of fatphobia in prose and comics

Amato

2024

ETPC

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

The Impact of Analyzing Young Adult Literature for Racial Identity / Social Justice Orientation with Interdisciplinary Students

Cited by 1 publication

References 39 publications

Responding to representations of fatphobia in prose and comics

Responding to representations of fatphobia in prose and comics

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