Trading War Stories: A Community Cultural Wealth Counter-Storytelling Project

Topics & Concepts: Community Cultural Wealth, Aspirational Capital, Navigational Capital, Social Capital, Linguistic Capital, Familial Capital, Resistant Capital, Dominant/Counter-Narrative, Racialization, Representation, Deficit Thinking

The following Unit Overview is an excerpt from the unit narrative linked above:

Nigerian author Chimamanda Adicie says the following about the power of stories: “Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.”

Adichie’s words capture the heart of what I want students to understand in this unit. Part of decolonizing our curriculum is bringing the stories, realities, struggles and resiliency of oppressed peoples from the margins to the center in our classrooms. Not just for the sake of replacing one world view with another, but rather in the interest of changing the very conditions that marginalize our people’s stories in the first place. I created this unit, with inspiration from educators Stephanie Cariaga and Clifford Lee, to address the extent to which my students, all black and brown youth from South Los Angeles, internalize negative beliefs about themselves and our community put forth by the dominant culture. 

By the end of the unit, I want my students to understand that for colonized people, literacy will always be a manifestation of our resilience, hope and freedom. It is a subversive action that we have pursued in direct response to our oppression. To this end, students engage in researching and writing the stories of people in their communities whose experiences would normally never be studied in school much less written about or shared more broadly in our society. At the end of the unit, students are also tasked with organizing an event for the community where they share their research and reclaim the narrative about who they are. This unit was practiced in a 12th grade English classroom, but it can easily be adapted to several content areas and grade levels. 

The specific goals of the unit are as follows: 

• • • Examine and challenge many of the deficit views my students have internalized about their community 

    • Deconstruct and reconstruct notions of race, poverty and representation 

    • Develop students’ capacity for conducting research, i.e., developing interview questions using a theoretical frame, conducting interviews, transcribing notes, analyzing “data” for themes 

    • Learn the conventions of narrative journalism i.e., writing with descriptive detail, framing dialogue, word choice, imagery, showing vs telling

Notes on Materials Included: 

• The unit narrative written by Jerica Coffey provides an inspiring and comprehensive description of how she taught as a teacher in South L.A. All major learning activities and concepts are detailed in the narrative. It could easily be adapted to the Oakland context. 

• Student-facing materials are not linked in the folder. Teachers interested in adapting this unit for their classroom can contact Jerica Coffey directly about accessing the materials.