Storytelling as Resistance

 

Everybody has a story to tell. Unfortunately, not every story is told. This is the thesis of Jerica Coffey’s article “Storytelling as Resistance.” Coffey illustrates this point through a story of her own: conducting a nonfiction narrative writing project in her classroom. Her goal is for students to tell an untold story of their community. Coffey begins with reading the novel Random Family, in which a white journalist writes about Puerto Rican women in the Bronx. The author writes about many tragedies that the women face without context or analysis, making it possible to blame the women for what happens to them. Coffey included this resource as a mentor text to demonstrate “the problems that arise when people outside our communities control our stories,” (300). Students critically examined how this text was not representative of the women’s lives, and how that upholds dominant power structures. This is because “everything we read, watch, or hear is a construct with underlying power dynamics. Who has the power to tell the story matters,” (Coffey 310). 

After analyzing Random Family, Coffey’s students began their projects. The discussion started with posing the question of how often they have the power to tell their own stories about their communities, to which her students replied “Never,” (Coffey 311). Her goal was for students to interview people within their communities to create their own first-person narratives. Her students pushed back on the many rules about the interviews, such as the requirement to interview adults over 30, but Coffey writes that “Intergenerational storytelling held special importance in a Black and Brown community with a history of tension, misunderstanding, and violence,” (317). They discussed the Community Cultural Wealth, or “the range of knowledge, skills, abilities, and contacts possessed, passed down, and used by communities of color to survive and resist oppression,” (Coffey 312) and used this framework to craft their stories. At the end, they presented their work to their communities. Many people were moved by this, as they felt that they were finally seen. Coffey’s work highlights the importance of telling the story of your community because as a member, you will be able to accurately represent its heart. 

Further interesting resource I found about how storytelling in the film Sinners is a form of resistance: https://alvalues.org/storytelling-as-resistance-what-sinners-teaches-us-about-power-and-justice-in-the-south/ 

Canva Tutorial

Canva is a great, free tool for creating digital graphics. I mainly use it for creating invitations to events and cutesy artifacts for teaching like slides and assignment formats. Here is a tutorial: 

1) Open up Canva. You may need to make an account before continuing to "Home." Fun fact-- you get Canva pro free if you are an educator YAY! Use your school email :)

Here you can see what projects you have been working on as well as browse new templates. Let's look through templates - my favorite.

2) As you can see, there are lots of different templates you can use for a variety of purposes. Since most of us are in education, let's look at the education presentations folder.

3) Click customize this template to edit it. You can also star it for later.

4)  Education presentation that you can edit and modify to your liking. You can change the words, colors, sizing, graphics, and bring in even new items from your own computer files or the website's.

5) You can share your work with others to work on at the same time, just like Google Docs. This is really helpful. In this corner you can also save the project in any format you'd like. Your progress automatically saves to your account, again like Google Docs.

Overall, Canva is an accessible and collaborative resource that you can use for a multitude of reasons. This overview was very general in the usage of Canva, but you can get into the nitty gritty with other mediums here, like video editing! The world is your oyster 

Final Project Ideas

 I'm still not really sure what I want to do for my final project. Something I have been interested in is increasing discussion about a text amongst students, where the output is their original thinking in the form of questions, critiques, and comments. I want them to actively think about what they are reading and have opinions about it to share. Perhaps a way to bring technology into this would be to utilize Canvas discussion posts or blogs, as students could complete this work prior to or during class. My reservations with assigning this piece as homework would be that 1) I'd need to establish a homework culture and routine, which I plan on doing anyways next year and 2) Not all of my students have access to reliable internet or technology at home. I think the benefit of these types of assignments are that students can prepare for a class discussion by collecting their thoughts, and students can even respond to one another and gain inspiration before class time. I'd like to find a way to implement this sort of strategy because I also think it would be helpful for MLL students, as they can use scaffolds and translation services in an easier manner with online discussions prior to an in-person discussion. If I wanted to keep it as homework, I could carve out some time during class and then offer time before/after school for students, but I know that some students have other obligations that would make this difficult. I don't want any assignment to create a barrier for students because the purpose of this is the opposite. 

Here is a good resource on the value of discussion boards in online learning: https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/newsroom/education/value-of-discussion-boards

Another idea I came up with while typing is half-formed, but I'd love to use more media in class to accompany what we are reading. I'd also love if students did research and presentations on this. I want to teach the skills of media literacy, research, and presenting. A problem I could see with the media is if it not a part of the curriculum. 

Lastly, something I attempted but never fully completed last year was an email writing project with students. The goal was to teach students how to write professional emails, and for them to write one to their chosen person (family, guardian, coach, etc) every two weeks during class to update them about their life, their goals, their school, etc. It is a space for them to reflect, build a relationship, and practice a professional skill. I would like to do this again, but reformed and better thought out, next year. So I could see this being an interesting project to work on as well.

AI... Oh boy

     

This post will be a bit vulnerable for me. AI was becoming a major part of education and daily life during my senior year of college last year. Many of my friends used it consistently in school, and I had a few times, especially near the end of my college experience. It was when AI created a fake quote about a text that I first realized it was not helping me. Further, I learned about the negative consequences of using generative AI regularly, on the environment and vulnerable communities, but also on one's brain. The research is still new. When entering the classroom space as an English teacher, I knew that this would be a problem. I also knew that AI detectors are fallible. On the first few essay assignments, if any assignment resembled AI, insofar as the style didn't match the student's, the quotes were hallucinated, the content was factually incorrect about the text, and/or there were levels of words and grammar that the student could not explain, I found myself getting angry. I think the desire to catch a student "cheating" with AI was a moment of confirmation bias, and in a way, it was a way to make me feel less bad about my own usage. In senior year, I was not using AI as a tool, though some of my college professors encouraged it, but rather as a way to take the lazy way out of the assignment. I expected that some of my students would do the same. And perhaps it was my own expectation of them to do this that they did. It is in this vein that I understand Galland and Rettinger's argument about how the root cause of cheating is more of a problem than the cheating itself, and that my role as an educator is not to catch a student cheating, but instead inspire them to want to learn and not cheat. In regard to Ferlazzo's argument, I still have resistance to naming generative AI as a tool because of my own experience and lack of understanding of it. Even further, I would feel like a fraud if I used AI but don't let my students. I have allowed them to similarly use writing assistance with Grammarly, that I believe uses AI, but I am not resolved on whether this actually helps their writing skills. I think my overall resistance to AI right now really comes from fear. I don't want to let AI into our classroom because I am afraid it will stunt students' learning. I just want to do the best things for them, and I don't know if AI is that. When we switched to mostly paper assignments and reading, students' learning and engagement went up astronomically. I don't know how AI fits into that picture. I also don't want my students to get into the habit of allowing something or someone else to think for them. That is a matter of not just their future success but also their safety as democratic citizens. If anything, I try to teach them the importance of critical thinking and practicing literacy skills. I do not necessarily think that AI is the opposite of these things, but I do not currently have the bandwidth nor training to teach them about how to use AI as a tool responsibly to augment their learning and thinking. This may also reveal my own beliefs. I think that students are capable of this discernment, but I think that they need some guidance for how to use tech like this responsibly, especially as I know that I do as well. As I write this, I am learning that I may be more open to inviting AI as a tool into class for students than I initially thought, but I do not feel ready to facilitate that. I still feel hesitant about using it as an educator, even though I understand where Ferlazzo is coming from. I am sure it makes things easier, but I don't know if easier is better to me. It's not like I'm atoning for my AI usage in the past currently, but I learned a lot from my own motivations when using it, and I think I unfairly apply those to everyone. Below is a picture from a slide deck I used when discussing Plato's Allegory of the Cave, in which we discussed how there can be modern constructions of the "cave" when allowing other sources to think for you. We had a rich discussion in class.