Comic Book Conversations as Pedagogies of Possibilities in Urban Spaces

The researchers in this qualitative case study explored the dialogic experiences of elementary school students during Comic Book Club meetings held in their local community resource center. The researchers wanted to know what experiences of dialogism were manifested in children's conversations about reading, writing, and comic creation and what concepts of dialogism were evident in those experiences. The interview and observation data and artifacts suggest that co-construction of meaning and intertextuality played important roles in the dialogic experiences of the participants. Children's co-construction of meaning and intertextuality also demonstrated engaged embodiment due to children's spontaneous enactment of dance and dramatization in the Comic Book Club sessions. The authors believe that the creation of an open ontological dialogic space enabled this liberatory embodiment of children's mental and physical capacities. They recommend that educators and researchers work to create dialogic spaces in schools and community centers to counter the numbing effects of antidialogic pedagogies that are prevalent in schools.