Open Collections

Hamilton, Caroline

University of British Columbia

As critical geographers and mobilities scholars argue, the potential to access and participate in everyday spaces is conditional and unevenly distributed, entwined with issues of social justice and citizenship. Questions of access and engagement are especially salient to studies with adolescents, who, within Western frameworks, occupy a political and cultural space subject to distinct spatial regulations and exclusions. Literature classrooms offer promising sites in which adolescent students might critically interrogate these spatial practices and understandings. To date, however, few literature education and literacy scholars have adopted spatial frameworks in their research with young adult (YA) texts and young people. In this qualitative, classroom-based case study, I extend discussions of place and identity in YA literature to explore how Grade 10 students employed methods of spatial literary analysis to reflect on their everyday mobilities and lived citizenships alongside those of adolescent protagonists. Framing their reflections as critical spatial stories, I illuminate how three focal students (re)mapped their movements and engagements across fluid spaces of home, school, and public spheres. Drawing on critical research in geography, mobilities studies, and literacy education, I consider how spatial literary engagement might expand opportunities for young people to articulate and (re)imagine the ways they engage in and transform their everyday communities. This study presents implications for adolescent literacy and literature education practices and pedagogies. As I argue, the critical spatial stories that emerged from focal students’ work illustrate the power of the literature classroom as a site wherein students might disrupt unjust geographical imaginations of young people and reenvision their engagements across local and global, private and public worlds.

Text

2024-03-21

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87610

Language and Literacy Education

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/