ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study of a meaningful and replicable creative exercise that fuses artistic expression and storytelling with common First-Year Composition lessons on rhetorical appeals, audience awareness, concision, and multimodality. The seemingly simple and familiar genre of the children’s picture book is presented to STEM students to help facilitate explorations of their own ideas, beliefs, and humanistic impulses regarding their future majors. Students examine how representation in children’s books combine with class, race, and access to limit society’s vision of who can become (in the words of our institution’s fight song) a “helluva Georgia Tech engineer” (or astrophysicist, architect, etc.). This research is framed within a course dedicated to examining the historical transformation of “scientific” discourses about race, gender, nationality, physical and mental health, and the professionalization of the sciences to inform contemporary discussions about inclusiveness within the STEM industries the students will one day join.
