Communities as Counterstorytelling (Con)Texts: The Role of Educational Institutions in the Development of Critical Literacy and Transformative Action

• In Event: Moving Critical Literacies Forward: A New Look at Praxis Across Contexts

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
This paper seeks to explore the role of communities and community-based institutions in fostering critical literacy among urban youth. Moreover, we aim to elaborate how schools can promote critical literacy and function as counter-storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, 2001) institutions where students are encouraged to critically examine society and provided with structured opportunities to enact change within their communities.
Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Critical literacy involves the analysis and critique of the social structures that create inequality and the texts that embed these power relations, as well as the active engagement in the reconstruction of these social structures and their corresponding textual representations. In communities that have historically been minoritized, this engagement with social critique and reconstruction is necessary as people attempt to navigate disparities and create better lives for their families.
In our view, counter-storytelling institutions are spaces where people constantly renegotiate the representations of their experiences and work towards debunking master-narratives based on deficit-oriented views of marginalized peoples. In that sense, the institutions act as texts that contradict mainstream notions about low-income urban communities of color by reframing their experiences within an analysis of the social dynamics that create inequality and through their engagement with transformative action.
Methods and Data sources
In this paper, we will elaborate our theory of critical literacy/counter-storytelling institutions using examples from qualitative and ethnographic research conducted among urban Latino/a youth enrolled in alternative educational programs. Data sources include interview transcripts, field notes and video transcripts from observations of classrooms and community events, and artifacts, such as photographs and student-generated texts.
Results and/or substantiated conclusions
We will discuss specific ways that institutions serve as contexts for counter-storytelling and particular practices that can be utilized to insert students into the educational process and facilitate the development of critical literacy. These include curricula that challenge the master-narratives embedded in disciplinary knowledge, discursive practices that encourage and support reflection, the collection and display of texts and other objects that support people’s creation of counter-stories, the utilization of the community as a textual resource, and structured opportunities to produce texts that re-humanize communities by reinserting them in history in their own terms.
Scholarly significance of the study or work
Schools have traditionally offered little opportunities for students to critically analyze the socio-political histories and cultural life and practices of their communities and to actively participate in the process of reading, and rewriting, their world (Freire, 1970). Worse yet, many schools have viewed low-income communities of color as hindrances to academic success, rather than as resources and sites for the development of skills and knowledge. While funds of knowledge theories (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) have attempted to ameliorate this deficit orientation, there still remains much work to be done towards developing our understanding of how communities can serve as contexts for not just the acquisition of knowledge but also for the development of critical literacy frameworks and skills.

Authors

• Laura Ruth Johnson, Northern Illinois University

• Enid Marie Rosario-Ramos, University of Michigan