Educational Lifeways as Portals: Toward Revitalizing Storying as Methodology for Healing and Building Socially Just Futures

• In Event: "As We Have Always Done": Resurgence, Resistance, and Fostering Educational Lifeways for Collective Liberation

Abstract

Objectives, Theoretical Framework and Methods

Objective One: This paper introduces “revitalizing storying” as a narrative methodology for conducting research for social justice that furthers the goals of culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017) and resurgence from Indigenous scholars (Simpson, 2017). Revitalizing storying builds upon storytelling traditions from critical race theory, Asian and Pacific Islander theorizations, and Indigenous frameworks to interpret and gather community-rooted ways of knowing, being, teaching, and learning. Recognizing how these storying traditions have often come to focus upon resistance and providing “counternarratives” to dominant scripts (Bell, 1992; Yosso, 2013), the authors offer revitalizing storying as a generative and desire-based method of storytelling that instead centers communities and what is needed to revitalize and foster their lifeways. Revitalizing storying aims to share intergenerational and emerging ways of healing and building educational futures, as a personal and collective process for assessing what it means to move toward enacting social justice.

Objective Two: One of the authors makes use of revitalizing storying to conduct research on educational lifeways among 1) Chamorro and Carolinian people in Saipan, and the other author in order to investigate 2) an educational lifeway among African, Latinx and Cantonese diasporas in the California Bay Area.

Data Sources and Findings

One author engages revitalizing storying over an extended period of time with a Carolinian elder and educator. They mutually interpret ways of healing themselves and the people of Saipan amidst ongoing imperialism, and assess how they might collectively return to and further pedagogical traditions to build educational futures for Chamorro and Carolinian children. They consider the difficulties of doing so under American occupation where youth are compelled to be educated within a U.S. school system that often delegitimizes their village model and traditions of education. Their storying together substantiates the need to sustain elders who hold privileged and sacred knowledge, which has continued to protect and sustain their communities for generations.

The second author engages revitalizing storying to conduct research with a Cantonese elder on their pedagogical lineage of martial arts, as it has been used to heal and build educational futures for the Cantonese, African and Latinx diasporas in the California Bay Area. They mutually grapple with how they have sustained this educational lifeway within a racial capitalist, settler colonial and cisheteropatriarchal landscape to foster healing and generative acts of co-conspiracy. However, at the same time, they unearth how this lineage has taken for granted the elimination of Native people, and reflect upon what this may mean for how we understand educational lifeways in places of diaspora.

Significance

The authors operate from the vantage point of Roy’s (2020) imperative to consider the COVID-19 pandemic as a “portal.” They present a narrative methodology designed for gathering and interpreting knowledge needed to build educational futures that refuse a return to the old “normal.” They significantly model how to do so considering educational lifeways that may hold broader implications for how we may move from U.S. state-sanctioned schooling, towards education that centers communities and social justice.

Authors

• Casey Philip Wong, University of California - Los Angeles

• Shena Sanchez, University of Alabama