But Wait, There’s More! Exploring Counternarratives in a 5th Grade Black History Unit

• In Event: Culturally Sustaining Early Literacy Pedagogies and Our Futures: Dynamic Stories and Practices from PK-6 Communities

Abstract

Purpose: History textbooks have long been oriented around dominant historical narratives, which are often presented as factual or neutral accounts of major events. We explore how Ms. Davis (Author4, pseudonym for review) and her students engaged with counternarratives (Solórzano & Yosso, 2001) throughout a unit on African American history. Specifically, we share how Ms. Davis and one student, Sutton, used counternarratives to uplift the story of Claudette Colvin, a lesser-known hero from the Civil Rights era.


Theoretical Framework: We framed this analysis with culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris, 2012), an approach to teaching and learning that goes beyond celebrating children’s cultures as relevant or useful for teaching dominant practices, and seeks to honor and support them in service of educational justice. We focus specifically on how Ms. Davis historicized content and instruction to connect learning to the histories of racial, ethnic, and linguistic communities, neighborhoods and cities, and the larger states and nation states (Nash et al., 2022) by using counternarratives--stories that contest dominant ways of understanding historical and contemporary injustices and highlight the experiences of marginalized people (Solórzano & Yosso, 2001).

Methods & Data Sources: This analysis is part of a broader 16-week participatory case study (Reilly, 2010) of one unit of instruction in a 5th grade history class. We collected data through participant observation (Spradley, 2016) of social studies lessons (n=19), semi-structured interviews with students (n=5), and collection of artifacts, including student work samples (e.g., artwork, writing, posters) and pedagogical resources (e.g., lesson slideshows). We analyzed data through multiple collaborative cycles of qualitative memoing and coding (Saldaña, 2015), including descriptive (e.g., injustice), process (e.g., noticing details), and in vivo (e.g., “tell me more”) coding. We collapsed our initial 75 codes into 23 categories, and put these categories into conversation with theory and literature to generate findings.


Findings: Ms. Davis presented counterstories in her history curriculum, sometimes using the phrase “But wait, there’s more!”--popularized through television infomercials--to complicate and contest dominant understandings of history. We focus specifically on how she shared the counternarrative of Claudette Colvin by using stories and art. Then, we highlight how Sutton took up this counternarrative in his own history project, ultimately creating a visual representation of both Parks and Colvin’s contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. In an interview, Sutton told us that he wanted to educate his audience of his peers and other students about a lesser-known civil rights hero because, as he put it, “Most everyone doesn’t know about Claudette Colvin…”


Significance: This study builds on literature suggesting that counternarratives can be a powerful teaching tool (Miller et al., 2020), connecting them explicitly with culturally sustaining pedagogies in an elementary school context. It also addresses tensions in this work (e.g., students’ tendency to use simply replace dominant narratives with counternarratives), suggesting that teachers might work intentionally to be sure that counternarratives help to complexify history curricula.

Authors

• Mia Hicks, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Tracey Bullington, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Emily Machado, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Kristin Pellerin, Madison Metropolitan School District

• Carly McClennahan, University of Wisconsin - Madison