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Stephanie R. Jones, an associate professor in the department of educational theory and practice, co-authors a graphic/sequential art piece published in a special issue of Harvard Educational Review this month. Her collaborator, Jim F. Woglom, is a doctoral student in Art Education. They are currently working on a book-length graphic manuscript.

“Researchers do a lot of talking and writing about arts-based research, and I wanted to try to ‘walk the walk’ by producing scholarship through the comics/sequential art medium rather than perpetuate the discourse that we ‘should’ value multiple ways of making sense of data and of the broader world,” said Jones. “Our comics work has already opened up a new audience for us — lots of teachers love it because it literally illustrates practice and theory rather than simply explaining it through linear text, and they claim they can ‘get’ the point through the combination of images and text. I have also experienced the powerful possibilities that comics opens up for data analysis and scholarship that aren’t available to me through language alone — producing multiple signs and signifiers simultaneously is certainly a huge benefit when I am trying to demonstrate the complexity of places, people, practice, theory, etc.”

Jones teaches courses on ethnography and place-based teaching, feminist theory and pedagogy, social class and poverty, early childhood education, and literacy. Her scholarship on the intersections of literacy, social class, gender, and identity has been published in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Teacher Education, Gender and Education, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Teaching Education, Language Arts, and Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, among others.  She is the author of Girls, Social Class and Literacy: What Teachers Can Do to Make a Difference, and she is working with Woglom to transform a three-year study of feminist pedagogy in teacher education into a graphic book.