Restorying Self-Concept: Critical Storytelling and the Emotional Imagination

• In Event: Storying Educational Possibilities: Humanizing Teaching and Learning

Abstract

The emotional imagination is where the cognitive and creative dimensions of the human psyche meet, where we conceptualize, interpret, and envision self and possibility, shaping self-understanding and the indexing of experience as memory. Understanding that emotions and thoughts are mutually reinforcing dimensions of human consciousness is vital to unlearning constraining narratives that impose deficit views of people and communities of color and to relearning more accurate and humanizing narratives within racialized schooling systems (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). Unlearning projected (de)valuations of self, community, and “other” happens through re-storying processes that build critical consciousness, agency, critical hope and love (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994).
Educational socialization conditions us to believe in storied versions of ourselves. Given structural inequity, these stories can become deficit narratives that constrain possibility. Racial literacy requires the ability to read, recast, and resolve racially stressful encounters through rewriting stereotyped narratives of self. RECAST theory offers a frame for how youth “anticipate, process, and respond when confronted by racially stressful encounters” (Anderson & Stevenson, 2019, p. 66). It suggests that through identification and naming of racially stressful moments, students and teachers can re-story themselves and each other through assets-based lenses. Storytelling enables productive resolve of racialized schooling experiences as an entry point to cultivating an agentic sense of self (hooks, 1994).
The concept of the emotional imagination imagines us forward in healthier and more agentic and humanizing ways. Emotions shape thoughts, including projections and cognitive distortions that, once identified and challenged, can be reshaped to open possibilities for humanizing teaching, learning, and schooling. Re-storying enables identification of the emotional register of experiences through unlearning that challenges deficit narratives formed through repeated biased messaging reinforced by inequitable school and life experiences (Author, 2021). Critical storytelling lives at the crossroads of teacher and student learning for humanization, equity, and liberation.
This session shares my own student story to illustrate how critical storytelling informs my pedagogical approach and the development of the emotional imagination as a framework for teachers and students to re-story limiting narratives in communities of equitable inquiry. This session illuminates ways teachers can enact critical storytelling to transform learning – their own and their students’ – into a more critically hopeful, agentic, and transformative process. I share my own critical moments of re-storying to illuminate how story-based reflexivity shapes my pedagogical approach and how enacting re-storying as critical pedagogy can help teachers and students learn how to re-frame and re-index their experiences in healthier ways. The session integrates the emotional imagination, racial literacy, and recasting racially stressful encounters through the approach of critical storytelling as a critical pedagogy of possibility.

Author

• Sharon M. Ravitch, University of Pennsylvania