“This Is Manist”: Counterscripts as Catalysts for Change in the English Curriculum

Abstract

When Ana, a student in Miss Jerome’s American Literature course, watched a makeup tutorial instead of completing her assigned work, it became a critical incident highlighting how one educator used student counterscripts to critically center students’ ways of knowing and ways of being in the English curriculum. Using culturally sustaining pedagogies as a framework, the instructional practices reflect resistance to western, Eurocentric literacy standards and school standards of professionalism that reify white supremacy. By centering orality through multi-party discourse and literary theory, ultimately the youth in Miss Jerome’s classroom learned literacies to make agentive decisions about their own bodily autonomy.

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms

2 This is a restorying of my field notes since I did not record the interaction.