X-Men and Children’s Literacy (2020)

Martin, J. (2020, May 18). The young and superpowered in isolation: Revisiting Anne Dyson’s ‘Writing Superheroes’.

• Explores connections between education scholar Anne Dyson’s ethnographic study in Writing Superheroes (1997) and a developmental approach to understanding social and moral concepts.

• Contends that such connections have potential implications for understanding children’s engagement with superheroes like X-Men.

“Dyson’s (1997) examination of the way children use superhero cartoons in their literacy practices to actively engage in their social worlds has implications for the potential use of superhero cartoons like X-Men to stimulate children’s sociomoral thinking. If we assume that children are capable of attending to various features of social interactions in ways that conceptually alter the meaning of events (Smetana & Jambon, 2018; Turiel, Killen, & Helwig, 1987; Wainryb, 2006), then cartoons like X-Men—with its myriad characters and multifaceted portrayals of harm (violence) and fairness (discrimination) issues—may be uniquely suited for such an endeavor.”