Expanding Upon Critical Storytelling to Inform Intersectional Disability Futures

• In Event: Disabled Youth’s Cultural Ways of Being, Knowing, and Doing in Education: Implications and Strategies

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes:
This chapter focuses on critical storytelling, a methodology to disrupt and transform deficit-oriented, Western colonial master narratives about marginalized peoples, including intersectional disabled youth or IDY. Critical storytelling is a flexible methodological approach to sharing stories that center marginalized students’ voices (Hartlep et al., 2019, 2020, 2021). Its purpose is to disrupt racialized perceptions of difference, center IDY’s onto-epistemologies, and problematize categorical definitions of disability for the purpose of centering IDY’s desired futures.

Perspective(s)/Framework:
Critical storytelling is a method through which marginalized students’ personal narratives are shared. Though it embraces all marginalized students’ experiences as they navigate white dominant systems, it does not specifically focus on disability. This paper explicitly centers disability as a primary identity marker along with other important marginalized identities by drawing and synthesizing from four different methodologies created/embraced by marginalized peoples: Indigenous storywork (Archibald, 2008), testimonio (Cruz, 2012), Critical Race Theory’s (CRT) counter-stories (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) (including DisCrit counter-stories, Connor et al., 2016), and cripistemologies (Johnson & McRuer, 2014). By expanding upon critical storytelling’s foundational understandings, the author demonstrates concrete strategies for how to center IDY’s storytelling and knowledge-making in educational settings.

Methods:
To center IDY’s storytelling, I expanded upon Hartlep and colleagues’ work that was limited in its framing of disabled youth and was unclear about specific methods for educators to use in the classroom when engaging students in storytelling activities. I drew from Drs. Luis Urrieta and Beth Hatt’s (2019) work that identified Indigenous storywork, testimonio, and CRT counter-stories as well-established, methodological approaches to assist marginalized peoples to narrate their lives. I also analyzed cripistemologies, disability centered onto-epistemologies, to inform the overall paper to better conceptualize the intersectional relationship between race and disability in consideration of IDY’s desired futures in education. Using a deductive analysis approach to review over fifty articles related to these four methodologies, I identified six salient themes (described later).

Data Sources:
Data sources consisted of over fifty peer-reviewed articles with over 90% written by marginalized scholars and practitioners, including disabled scholars of Color. Articles centering storytelling in different forms were considered, prioritizing Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Disability youth perspectives and their intersections.

Results:
Deductive analysis of articles pertaining to Indigenous storywork, testimonio, CRT counter-stories, and cripistemologies to expand upon critical storytelling as a viable method to engage IDY, yielded important considerations. Namely six major themes emerged as ways to reimagine current and future classroom practice. Summarized briefly, these include: Time (crip time and pacing), Space (crip spaces of solidarity), People (ancestral acknowledgment), Content (multiple ways to express story), Context (stewardship vs. ownership), and Form (consideration of counter-story types).

Significance:
Critical storytelling within curricular and instructional classroom activities that center IDY provides an innovative and meaningful pathway for students to meet learning standards. Critical storytelling when enhanced by categorical conceptualizations of time, space, people, content, context and form, can serve as a heuristic to disrupt current school practices rooted in Western bodymind normativity and position IDY as critical narrators of possibility and hope for their desired futures.

Author

• Cristina C. Santamaria Graff, Indiana University - Indianapolis