Cultivating Response-Ability in Secondary Literary Education: Staying with the Trouble with/in Lisen Adbåge’s Picturebook Furan

Abstract

While research has highlighted the potential of picturebooks in upper secondary education, empirical research is still limited. This article explores what the picturebook Furan by Lisen Adbåge produces in the secondary literature classroom by engaging with Donna Haraway’s [2016] concept of “staying with the trouble”. From a vantage point of postfoundational inquiry, we ask how the theoretical concept can unfold the encounters in-between the students and the picturebook. The data consists of video recordings of three upper secondary classrooms, and in the analysis, we follow Maggie Maclure’s [2013] approach of “data that glows”. Instances that glow are when the students struggled to make sense of the picturebook, either staying with the trouble or avoiding it. The analysis shows how the picturebook produces string figuring, sympoietic thinking and crafting in the literature classroom, enabling students to start cultivating response-ability as a way of responding to troubled times. The article explores what postfoundational theories like Haraway’s can bring about in literary education.