Crafting Critical Stories: Toward Pedagogies and Methodologies of Collaboration, Inclusion, and Voice(449 Counterpoints)

Critical storytelling, a rich form of culturally relevant, critical pedagogy, has gained great urgency in a world of standardization. Crafting Critical Stories asks how social justice scholars and educators narrate, craft, and explore critical stories as a tool for culturally relevant, critical pedagogy. From the elementary to college classroom, this anthology explores how different genres of critical storytelling - oral history, digital storytelling, testimonio, and critical family history - have been used to examine structures of oppression and to illuminate counter-narratives written with and by members of marginalized communities. The book highlights the complexity of culturally relevant, social justice education as pedagogues across the fields of education, sociology, communications, ethnic studies, and history grapple with the complexities of representation, methodology, and the meaning/impact of employing critical storytelling tools in the classroom and community.

About the Author :
Judith Flores Carmona (PhD, University of Utah) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and in the Honors College at New Mexico State University. Her work has appeared in Race Ethnicity and Education, Equity and Excellence in Education, and Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social. Kristen V. Luschen (PhD, Syracuse University) is Associate Professor of Education Studies and a founding faculty member of the Critical Studies of Childhood, Youth and Learning Program at Hampshire College. Her work has appeared in several edited books and in the journals Educational Studies and Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning.

Review :
«Crafting Critical Stories brings together interdisciplinary scholarship that highlights both the exciting possibilities and the challenges that are present when we incorporate personal, familial, or communal stories to teach, learn, and transform our sociopolitical world. Indeed, this volume demonstrates that critical storytelling comes in many forms and is an essential pedagogical and methodological tool across numerous informal and formal educational contexts. Collectively, the authors demonstrate the ways in which stories can allow us to draw upon knowledge that is often marginalized while simultaneously disrupting normative ways of thinking, teaching, and being. Thank you, Judith Flores Carmona and Kristen V. Luschen, for putting together an amazing must-read book that makes a significant contribution to how we understand the methods and practice of storytelling for social justice!» (Dolores Delgado Bernal, Professor of Education and Ethnic Studies, University of Utah) «Crafting Critical Stories: Toward Pedagogies and Methodologies of Collaboration, Inclusion, and Voice, edited by Judith Flores Carmona and Kristen V. Luschen, is a powerful story itself of how the art of storymaking, storytelling, and story-listening is critical to education and educational research and policy. Together, the chapters take readers into many different communities and spaces where critical stories are crafted in the practices of teaching, learning, and research. We hear powerful voices in diverse K-12 and university classrooms, in research sites, in oral histories, digital stories, and testimonios. We hear stories of race, class, gender, language, sexuality, citizenship, ethnicity, and place. We learn about diverse ways of knowing and being. This edited collection brilliantly demonstrates how stories are simultaneously method and pedagogy, theory and praxis. Educators and researchers who pick up this book will no doubt be touched by the depth and breadth of its critical stories and their necessity for creating a more just world. I could not put this book down as each chapter drew me into the power of story as the foundation of education.» (Sofia Villenas, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Education, Cornell University)