ABSTRACT
In this chapter the authors review trends in recent scholarship in critical literacies and classroom engagement with the arts to call for future research and practice toward “critical arts-literacies.” The authors highlight classroom-based studies that foreground artful pedagogies that leverage abduction, imagination, and emotion to promote critical literacies learning and social transformation. Although classroom engagement with the arts has been critiqued for being conceptually diluted, lacking academic “rigor,” and reproducing meanings already available in other modes, the authors argue for researching and teaching with abduction, imagination, and emotion across modalities to guide classroom practice and to foster ways of meaning-making with the arts that disrupt hegemonic practices in pedagogy and research.
