Chapter 7: Metaphorical Creativity for Social Justice: Challenging “Stock Stories” with Poetry, Music, and Film

Stories and other verbal arts can be effectively introduced in the foreign language classroom to vividly demonstrate to learners the power of metaphor to enhance communication (Bell, 2020; Lakoff & Johnson, 2017). This chapter proposes a pedagogical model for using various forms of popular culture in combination with commercial textbooks and authentic materials, exploring effective ways to draw connections with social justice issues to develop skills in recognizing and challenging hegemonic discourses. Works of art that at first appear to be rooted in a single issue often turn out to be more intersectionally complex upon closer examination. As various dominant discourses commonly employ similar rhetorical strategies to perpetuate their ideologies when mobilizing resistance to challengers to the status quo, it is hoped that the proposed model may find wide applicability due to the ease with which it can be mapped onto multiple structures of inequity in any lesson plan.