"This Is Manist": Counterscripts as Catalysts for Change in the English Curriculum

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 25
  In Roundtable Session: Interrogating Literacy Curriculum and Instruction: The Role of Counter-Storytelling

Abstract

This paper uses a critical incident from an urban English classroom where a student's use of a multimodal counterscript led to an in class exploration of white supremacy embedded within urban school policies and its impact on racialized understandings of self. Additionally, how culturally sustaining educators, like Miss Jerome, draw from students’ counterscripts to develop a curriculum to sustain students’ languages, literacies, and valued knowledge in systems that seek to erase them. This work is part of a larger humanizing, critical ethnographic study into educators’ literacy instruction in an urban high school. The central finding displays how critically centering students’ creates meaningful, sometimes uncomfortable, and complicated conversations about the scripts youth take up; ultimately leading to student agency and autonomy.

Author

• Leah Panther, Mercer University