Revealing Haints: Utilizing the Black Storytelling Tradition Casting Them Out With Theater of the Oppressed

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Seventeen
  In Roundtable Session: The Beauty of Black Diversity: Explorations of Language, Race, and Gender, Untold (Table 2)

Abstract

Utilizing the Black Storytelling Tradition, my empirical teacher knowledge and my grandparents’ empirical knowledge as an American Descendant of American Slavery (ADOS) teacher, I share a vignette of stories that demonstrate how haints shaped the navigation of my language and cultural identity. Contiguously, I examine how my emergent bilingual students experienced similar struggles in school and how they define their own haints that undermine their linguistic and cultural confidence. Subsequently, as a middle school teacher, I employed Theater of the Oppressed (TO) (Boal, 1979/1984) to resist haints that haunt our schools. Lastly, I explore TO as a resistance movement to reclaim and recover linguistic and cultural identities.

Author

• Lisa Marie Westbrooks, Wayne State University
  Presenting Author