Counternarratives from the Margins: School Stories in Children’s Voices

Abstract

This chapter recognizes and challenges a dominant narrative that children’s academic/school stories are limited to what can be calculated, charted, and ranked. It suggests that we instead attend to children’s testimonies and counterstorytelling of their own academic/school stories in order to disrupt the essentializing and deficit narratives that children are taught to believe and name as their own. In this project, counter-storytelling frames the testimonies of children as curriculum. Counterstorytelling is a methodological component of Critical Race Theory (CRT) that challenges dominant narratives and truths by centering the voices and lived experiences of marginalized groups—in this case, children—whose stories of how they experience and co-create their school lives have been suppressed. From the children’s counternarratives emerge qualities of experience that reflect social patterns of what Marx terms “estranged labor” in the context of schooled/capitalist modes of production. The chapter concludes with examples of lived/living curriculum emerging from rich counternarratives that represent children’s knowledges and wonderings and deep intelligences.