The inclusion of critical literacy is becoming more prevalent in our curricula, however, while the value of using trauma literature in the English Language Arts classroom has been established, the explicit use of sexual assault narratives sometimes seems too risky or intimidating for educators. This case study research utilizes social constructivism, feminist, gender studies, and queer studies, trauma theory, and reader response theory as lenses for analysis. Further, a narrative methodological framework was employed to explore how reading trauma literature can influence the writing practices, specifically the digitally written responses, of grade ten adolescents. As well, the study examined the usefulness of digital writing platforms and social media as vehicles to use while incorporating such critical literacies into the classroom. The research was carried out in one western Canadian high school and across two grade ten academic English Language Arts classes. Data was collected from 25 student participants for the primary portion of the classroom study and four of those participants also participated in the focus group discussion. The findings suggest that engaging with trauma literature is certainly a valuable form of critical literacy, particularly sexual assault narratives. Students’ responses indicated that they responded angrily and aggressively to the texts presented, they voiced a need to be heard through the use of repetition, they identified the significance of mental health issues, they made personal connections with the literature as well as intertextual connections between other stories, and created significant and telling silences. Perhaps most importantly, this study found that we must continue to work towards finding best practices for teaching these texts because doing so may lead to challenging rape culture and fostering a sense of empowerment, agency, and resiliency in our learners. These qualities were particularly demonstrated through the students’ personal, critical, and creative written responses using digital literacy practices. / Graduate / 0727 Curriculum and Instruction, 0279 Language and Literature, and 0533 Secondary / amberjanellemoore@gmail.com

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Within the last three decades, contemporary North America came to reinvent a socially focused genre of literary personal narratives. These new editorial and writing projects, published in the form of collections of personal narratives, emerged as a tool for the socially voiceless to secure some measure of agency in their contemporary social and cultural situation. Projects such as the Freedom Writers’ Diary or volumes of the Voice of Witness book series fit in the process that is currently labeled social empowerment. Witnesses express a deep urge to share their story in the hope to denounce their experience of an enduring social injustice. The written word, primary a means for self-disclosure, serves to exorcise the suffering associated to this specific predicament. The narrators engage in a powerful self-investigative gesture oriented towards resilience and renewed enfranchisement in regaining control over their life and environment. At the moment of publication, however, these testimonies come to be validated as authentic examples of the injustices they disclose. These examples serve an educational purpose: raising the audience’s awareness and opening deliberative fora for these issues to be discussed and for solutions to be hammered out and eventually implemented. <p>The purpose of this dissertation is to propose a theoretical model for the subgenre of testimonials of social empowerment. With the concept of empowerment as groundwork, the model develops a textual approach framed in a psychosocial structure. I argue that testimonials may be described as examples of Jürgen Habermas’s communicative action. As speech acts aimed at reaching understanding, testimonials capitalize both on the binding and bonding aspects of illocutionary force in the hope to secure with their audience an ongoing dialogue over issues of social justice. The volumes, as unofficial public spheres, mobilize the normative and practical dynamics at work in social movements. These dynamics express as two narrative guiding threads: an aesthetic based on impact, and an ethics based on responsibility. The texts’ aesthetic develops a form of perlocutionary realism instantiating a sense of authenticity and sincerity embodied in the narrators’ voices. The resulting impact is coupled to moral concerns based on a polysemic understanding of social responsibility, on which narrators seek to build their narratives’ ethical potential. A series of case studies allowed to demonstrate that both narrative threads are realized as an appropriation of four paradigmatic forms of rhetorical ethos, each based on a specific realm of the social world: intimacy, justice, spirituality and activism.<p> / Doctorat en Langues et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished