Re-Imagining Community and School through Youth and Artists’ Critical Superhero Storytelling

Abstract

In this article, we describe the methods and pedagogy that guided a superhero storytelling project, located in a midwestern middle school library, where youth were invited to work with a university-based research team and community-based artists who actively displaced historically formed practices of surveillance and silencing in the service of amplifying youth artistry and knowledge production. We recognize that school practices in many schools, by virtue of their complicity with hierarchical and evaluative mandates, undermine open and exploratory forms of youth expression. The arts-based project we describe, informed by a ten-year history of small-scale storytelling projects in the same school, offers a theoretical and related pedagogical framework for working with community-based artists to re-imagine and remake oppressive relational, epistemological, and material practices in school spaces. At the center of our report are two groups of youth and the artists and educators who supported them as they invented superheroes and activated the imaginative potential of their local community spaces for their storytelling.