Storytelling as Resistance

By Jerica Coffey

Representation and Reality

Coffey describes how he begins his writing unit with Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc as a representation that retelling the stories of people is important when you are considering who us telling the story. This text which discusses several generations of Puerto Rican women living in the Bronx and their encounters with crime and navigating raising their families. The political aspect of this book is that it "perpuates a pervasive myth that people living in poverty have conflict with the law due to bad personal choices" (Coffey, 300). 

Coffey's reasons for teaching nonfiction narrative writing:

1. It requires meshing different writing styles to produce a theme or argument. 

2. It helps students understand that nonfiction writing is storytelling. 

"The stories we hear and tell shape and define the say we relate to one another" (Coffey, 301).

With this in mind he then explains to his students how he wants to honor the voices of those who do not have control of their own story and to consider how it changes when you take the responsibility to give voices to these silenced and marginalized communities.

 

Pulling Apart Random Family

Coffey equips his students with the tools to analyze text as they dissect the voices represented and silenced from the mentor text he uses. 

Conventions he wants them to notice are:

1. Descriptive detail

2. Framing dialogue

3. Careful word choice

4. Imagery

5. Showing vs. Telling

Community Cultural Wealth

Text by Tara Yosso writer of Critical Race Counterstories Along the Chicana/Chicano Educatiobak Pipeline is utilized to help student navigate how to find wealth and positive representation in the experiences we have. 

"The range of knowledge, skills, abilities, and contacts possessed, passed down, and used by communities of color to survive and resist oppression" (Coffey, 304). 

Definitions to help students comprehension of what community cultural wealth looks like realistically:

This in turn helps the students create carefully crafted interview questions that they will ask someone from their chosen community. Scaffolding the questions helps the student craft strong questions and follow-up questions to document the community stories. These interviews were then transcribed and further analyzed by the students to discover what the theme of the interviews were. The students looked for places where ideas were repeated and then asked to go back to the Community Cultural Wealth to identify examples of resilience and resistance in the person's life and where the Community Cultural Wealth was at play (Coffey, 308). After this process, the students were able to write narratives that authentically captures the stories of the communities at hand and they are shared with the community.

Through this lesson, students are able to explore and practice defining for ourselves what stories matter and how these stories get told (Coffey, 310).

This work in the classroom is very important in helping students feel seen and heard in the curriculum. While there is effort in diversifying the texts used in the classroom, equipping students with the critical thinking skills of identifying who's voice is being heard and who's voice is silences or misrepresented can be very powerful in increasing their cognitive thinking of various texts. It also allows for them to engage with analyzing stories they're being told to discover the impact of voices in a story. This form of amplifying voices, especially of those in marginalized groups can help students with their own representation and understanding of why it matters.