Type of Presentation
Individual paper/presentation
Conference Strand
Assessment
Target Audience
Higher Education
Second Target Audience
K-12
Location
Ballroom B
Relevance
The project I will be presenting is a 2,000 word blended academic essay which requires students to use 6 sources from the library, personal interviews with family members, and reflection. Using the library databases, other digital sources available through the university library, and considering information available online, students work through information literacy objectives as they consider their own family stories. Using an approach that centers their lives as part of the research process allows students to see themselves reflected in the information that they find and work with. Finding valuable and reliable sources becomes paramount, the transfer that occurs through this assignment seems to be high.
Proposal
My students have been asked to create a researched narrative about their family history (the definition of “family” is loose and includes families of choice) using personal interviews, artifacts, research and reflection. They will mix the voices of their family members with the voices of scholars and historians from the university library and databases. This is a conversation. In many ways, these are counterstories. In order to focus on using Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Alim and Paris) with this assignment, I thought about several of the tenets of CSP: “Instead of being oppressive, homogenizing forces, CSP asks us to reimagine schools as sites where diverse, heterogeneous practices are not only valued but sustained” (4). The goal is to emancipate and refocus. In removing the eye from the students, we adjust it toward the systems that have oppressed them (4). Django Paris, H. Samy Alim, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Luis Moll, Asoa Inoue, Damien Baca, April Baker-Bell, Mya Poe and many others, continue to push back with pedagogy that asks us to not just be relevant, but to be sustaining. In their introduction “Toward Writing as Social Justice: An Idea Whose Time Has Come,” in a special issue of College English, “which takes up a singular question: what would it mean to incorporate social justice into our writing assessments?” Mya Poe and Asao B. Inoue remind us that social justice considers the relationship between people and institutions or systems. They present Iris Marion Young’s four axes to map socially just writing assessment, “power, privilege, interest, and potential for action” (121). Thinking about these axes, and others important to CRT, social justice in the writing classroom looks a lot like possibilities, choice, agency, inquiry and voice. By asking my students to position their own and their families’ experiences as important, and by researching their stories (and stories like theirs) in the University of Arizona’s library, using available information from scholarly texts and databases, they find that their stories matter and they are represented in the institution, which helps to create a transformation in the relationships between students and the academy.
Short Description
In my presentations I will include examples of student work and examples of how I’ve used various pedagogical approaches, as well as results from participatory reflection and research, with my students, who have helped to refine and to reflect upon their roles as students, family members, writers, narrators, researchers and interviewers. The project is a 2,000 word blended academic essay which requires students to use 6 sources from the library, personal interviews with family members, and reflection.
Keywords
Narrative, Research, CSP, Family History, Counterstory, Social Justice, Academic Writing, Participatory Action Research, Student Voice, Inquiry Based Research
Publication Type and Release Option
Presentation (Open Access)
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Garrett Brown, Amy L., "Teaching the Researched Family Profile Essay as Meaningful Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Counterstory" (2025). Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy. 5.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gaintlit/2025/2025/5
Included in
Curriculum and Instruction Commons, Information Literacy Commons, Rhetoric and Composition Commons
Teaching the Researched Family Profile Essay as Meaningful Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Counterstory
Ballroom B
My students have been asked to create a researched narrative about their family history (the definition of “family” is loose and includes families of choice) using personal interviews, artifacts, research and reflection. They will mix the voices of their family members with the voices of scholars and historians from the university library and databases. This is a conversation. In many ways, these are counterstories. In order to focus on using Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Alim and Paris) with this assignment, I thought about several of the tenets of CSP: “Instead of being oppressive, homogenizing forces, CSP asks us to reimagine schools as sites where diverse, heterogeneous practices are not only valued but sustained” (4). The goal is to emancipate and refocus. In removing the eye from the students, we adjust it toward the systems that have oppressed them (4). Django Paris, H. Samy Alim, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Luis Moll, Asoa Inoue, Damien Baca, April Baker-Bell, Mya Poe and many others, continue to push back with pedagogy that asks us to not just be relevant, but to be sustaining. In their introduction “Toward Writing as Social Justice: An Idea Whose Time Has Come,” in a special issue of College English, “which takes up a singular question: what would it mean to incorporate social justice into our writing assessments?” Mya Poe and Asao B. Inoue remind us that social justice considers the relationship between people and institutions or systems. They present Iris Marion Young’s four axes to map socially just writing assessment, “power, privilege, interest, and potential for action” (121). Thinking about these axes, and others important to CRT, social justice in the writing classroom looks a lot like possibilities, choice, agency, inquiry and voice. By asking my students to position their own and their families’ experiences as important, and by researching their stories (and stories like theirs) in the University of Arizona’s library, using available information from scholarly texts and databases, they find that their stories matter and they are represented in the institution, which helps to create a transformation in the relationships between students and the academy.
