Chanti Burnette (Animo South Los Angeles High School), Kimberlee Kelley (Animo Leadership High School), and Timothy Ojetunde (Green Dot Public Schools) share pedagogical theories and practical examples of embedding comic books and popular culture into high school curricula in order to build collaboration within the classroom through a collectivist culture of literacy. These diverse educators explore using popular narratives to empower students with more nuanced perceptions of themselves and the world around them as they gain critical skills in multimodal text analysis. Moderated by Peter Carlson (Green Dot Public Schools).