ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how elementary students in urban classrooms use their bodies to revise and transform dominant cultural story lines. It presents the process of examining what it means to use critical literacy for both students and teaching artists in the children’s theatre company’s neighborhood bridges program. Placing critical literacy as central to its philosophy of learning, an important goal of the program is to develop in children the capacity to analyze and challenge dominant social and cultural story lines as they create new story lines through imaginative retellings and reenactments. The chapter deals with Embodied Critical Literacy foucuses on how creative play in conjunction with various tools of narration make explicit some of the assumptions that remain invisible via the use of language alone. In all of the Teaching artists (TA) facilitation of embodied critical literacy, elements of geosemiotics were central in that the facilitating processes quite explicitly indexed signs and invited their possible and multiple meanings.
