Curricular Haints and The African American Storytelling Tradition: Method, Mirror, and Map of Ancestral Resistance

• In Event: Wellness, Healing, Joy, and Resistance at the Intersections of Racial, Gender, and Sexual Identities

Abstract

This study affirms African American Storytelling as a rigorous Methodology for educational research, particularly for American Descendants of Slavery(ADOS) and multilingual students. Using the metaphor of curricular haints—residual specters of assimilation and linguistic violence— it draws on journal entries, oral histories, and memory writing. Grounded in Ubuntu and nommo, it engages ancestral interpretation and spiritual reflexivity to resist dominant paradigms. Storytelling emerges as a method of recovery, empowerment, and epistemic justice. Amid bans on Ethnic Studies and CRT, this work reframes African American storytelling as both method and metaphor. Speaking directly to SIG-G’s call for decolonial inquiry, it offers critical insights for reimagining education through ancestral wisdom dialogue on resistance and methodological innovation.

Author

• Lisa Marie Westbrooks, Wayne State University