Draft Chapter 4

The Nature of Knowing

Chapter summary

Spaces can be real and imagined. Spaces can tell stories and unfold histories. Spaces can be interrupted, appropriated, and transformed through artistic and literary practice.

hooks, 1990, p. 152

In this chapter I pay close attention to the ways that the boys engaged multiple modalities to textually construct stories and discursively enact a system of knowing. Upon analysis, I found two patterns that emerged across the realms of feeling known and unknown, and imagining being known differently; or the collective epistemology – “system of knowing” (Ladson-Billings, 2000, p. 257) – of knowing that was cultivated in our third space through multimodal storytelling: knowing as assumed relatability and knowing as constructed familiarity . Embedded in these patterns are critiques of the power relations in schools that, in our stories, are interwoven with conceptions of “the kind of place school is.” It is this thread that signifies the salience of our epistemology of knowing for our stories against and beyond; once again, I make note throughout this chapter of how we engaged multiple modalities to talk back to dominant schooled discourses – specifically, I look at the dominant discourses of knowing – and the ways we practiced our discursive hybridity. I explore a group conversation in which the boys name power relations as the context for storying knowing in their schooling experiences. I use the oral/aural theorizing in this conversation, that gives flesh to the ideas of feeling known and unknown, to frame the latter part of the chapter, in which I show how the boys used our space to story beyond; that is, they imagined being known differently by exploring the representational possibilities of multiple modes.