Critical Storying Methodology: Toward Healing and Speculation With Cyborgs

• In Event: Arts and Innovative Methodologies

Abstract

Public and academic scholarship often obscures educators in neoliberal learning spaces like no-excuse charter schools behind statistics of academic achievement, or narrates them as harmful machines. Simultaneously, it can be methodologically challenging for critical scholars to chart the slippery systematized psychological, emotional, and material harm educators experience. Critical storying is a methodological approach that seeks to dialogically map the systemic harm these educators internalize and experience, concretize those complicated tensions through speculative fiction creation, and imagine resistance forward. This paper showcases two of six educators from a 13-month multiple case study who, through critical storying, described feeling validation, invigoration, and a desire to resist systemic harm. Critical storying provides researchers an opportunity to help educators heal from neoliberal harms.

Author

• Bianca Licata, San Francisco State University