Critical Storytelling

The poems, personal and visual narratives in this edited book, Critical Storytelling: Multilingual Immigrants in the United States, are symbolic of the resilient, transformative experiences lived by multilingual immigrants in the United States.

In this volume of Critical Storytelling, marginalized, excluded, and oppressed undergraduate authors share insights from their liminality, encourage readers to connect their own perspectives and experiences, and pose important questions to about inciting change for the future.

What is the impact of a doctoral program that specifically seeks to decenter whiteness and specifically interrogate white supremacy? The critical storytelling perspectives in this project illuminate themes centered on Whiteness and the academy. They provide honest narratives about the processes and benefits of unhooking from Whiteness (Hayes & Hartlep, 2013). This book shares the stories of scholars from the first several cohorts of one Urban Education focused doctoral program and contextualizes the very real and very different experiences individuals face in the academy. Each author contributes their perspectives about a single program, how it has shaped them, how it has moved them forward, and how it has enabled their own work toward dismantling white supremacy. When read together these stories offer insight into the intentionally of the program itself and the commonalities that unite the student experience. This is important because efforts to create just and decolonized spaces, inside and outside of the academy requires that each space, each particular program, turn examination efforts inward and seek to understand as many individual experiences as possible and provide space to center and elevate the counternarratives of individual doctoral experiences.

Critical Storytelling in Uncritical Times shares the stories of undergraduate students and educators in U.S. higher education. Storytellers in this volume grapple with issues of bullying, stigma surrounding mental health, cultural barriers, gender inequity, and other forms of struggle in educational settings. The disciplinary backgrounds of the authors are diverse, including Psychology, English, Communication Studies, Business, and Educational Foundations. The authors write stories about their role(s) in resisting (or failing to resist) oppressive conditions in schooling, and their contributions draw attention to critical problems in 21st century. This anthology was planned, written, and edited by students and four faculty members. The stories shared in each chapter were completely at the discretion of the contributor. By making themselves vulnerable, participants investigated stories of personal and social import. This book engages a community of critical voices in an age where critical storytelling has never mattered more. “Critical Storytellling in Uncritical Times is a pulsating work of self and social discovery, where autoethnographic accounts of high school students, pre-service teachers and teachers are assembled into a ‘cut and mix,’ a flux-and-change ethnographic prism that enables readers to view students as educators and educators and future educators as students. It is a book that shows how alliances for social justice can be formed that transcend race, class, age, gender, sexuality and social capital. All of us in the teaching profession would do well to read this book together with their students.” – Peter McLaren, Distinguished Professor, Chapman University

The poems, personal and visual narratives in this edited book, Critical Storytelling: Multilingual Immigrants in the United States, are symbolic of the resilient, transformative experiences lived by multilingual immigrants in the United States.

This collection of critical stories emerges as a timely confession from marginalized imagined communities at the physical and metaphorical Mexican-American border.

Critical Storytelling in Urban Education shares poems and stories written by college students attending Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.

Embraces the fierce urgency of the year 2020. Authors bravely offer their perspectives to us—their stories ring out beyond the written page.