ABSTRACT
Ashley Perez’s Out of Darkness provides a storyline that allows students to deepen their understanding of societal and institutional formations of dehumanization in fiction and reality. Using this novel as the focal text, we argue that readers’ entry into and understanding of characters’ simmering hatred and violence rely on their experiences with real world social divisions, especially racism and sexism, along with their capacity to recognize how authors reconstruct hate and exclusion in storyworlds. Employing Alan Palmer’s theory of “social minds,” we consider how teachers might construct a practice of critical engagement that facilitates students’ attention to textual details, while also accounting for their experiences crossing back and forth between the social divisions in their worlds and historical storyworlds. We describe a dramatic inquiry approach that involves a process of close reading and reconstructions of text excerpts that results in a “carpet” of words; this is followed by walking across and reading the words to elicit the sounds, images, relationships, intentions, histories, and futures that form the social mind in storyworlds and everyday worlds.
