What are Counternarratives?

This project is based on the work of other researchers and theorists, specifically the idea of counternarratives. 

To understand counternarratives, we need to understand master narratives (also called dominant narratives, stock stories, and majoritarian stories). Master narratives determine what is generally believed to be a normal experience of the world. They are created by systems of power and privilege (Andrews, 2002). This means that people with privileged identities (such as whiteness, straightness, cisgenderness, ablebodiness etc.) are seen as "normal", while people of marginalized identities are depicted as biologically or culturally deficient (Solorzano & Yosso, 2001). 

Master narratives justify and normalize discrimination and erasure and cause psychological and emotional damage to the people they misrepresent (Andrews, 2002).

What master narratives of LGBTQ+ people in schools have you heard? How do these stories make you feel?

Many harmful narratives use a deficit approach to view people with marginalized identities. This means focusing exclusively on what a person or group lacks and how they suffer as opposed to also uplifting their strengths. 

In her ground-breaking 2005 essay "Whose culture has capital?", Dr. Tara Yosso laid out the framework of Community Cultural Wealth. She argued that we should see students of color from an asset-based framework, focusing on how their communities and identities benefit them not on how discrimination hurts them. Yosso argued that deficit thinking is one of the most prevalent forms of contemporary racism and that deficit approaches to schooling are made worse by limited frameworks of cultural understanding. 

We can learn from the work of Yosso and other Critical Race Theory scholars in thinking about LGBTQ+ people. When we use a deficit approach to view LGBTQ+ teachers and students we focus only on discrimination and traumatic experiences. This sees LGBTQ+ experience as solely individual and tragic and creates “a sense of inevitability that existing as LGBTQI2-S will lead to being in harms way”  (Gamache & Lazear, 2009).

An expanded perspective sees the joy and assets of LGBTQ+ identity such as access to community, connection, and self-exploration (Gamache & Lazear, 2009). 

These type of stories are called counternarratives. They are “stories which people tell and live which offer resistance, either implicitly or explicitly, to dominant cultural narratives” (Andrews, 2002). These are the stories of, and often told by, people who are excluded from or misrepresented in master narratives (Solorzano and Yosso, 2001). 

They serve as “as means of psychic self-preservation”, allowing the storyteller to understand that their oppression is not their fault, experience healing (Delgado, 1995, p. 2437) and build community (Delgado, 1995; Solorzano and Yosso, 2001).

The psychic benefits of counterstories for LGBTQ+ youth can be seen in GLSEN’s 2021 National School Climate Survey. (This survey is conducted every two years with over 20,000 participants and provides information on the experiences of LGBTQ+ students from across the country). They found that when positive representations of LGBTQ+ people were included in curriculum, LGBTQ+ students had better educational outcomes, better connections to the school community, better relationships to teachers, higher feelings of safety, and improved experiences with peers (Kosciw et al, 2022, p. 75).

What counterstories have you heard about LGBTQ+ people in school? What counterstories do you want to tell about LGBTQ+ people in school? How do these stories make you feel?

The data shared on this page are themselves counterstories about and by LGBTQ+ teachers. They also include ways in which these teachers tell counterstories in their classrooms. This is an example of counterstories as pedagogy. Pedagogy is how and what we teach. 

The conscious use of counterstories as pedagogy has been looked at by various researchers examining specific projects in a variety of academic settings (Frith & Richter, 2021; Gachago, 2014; Jimenez, 2020; Schroeter, 2013). Researchers found that these projects helped improve student learning and helped students feel proud and represented. 

Use of counternarratives also aligns strongly with tenants of critical and culturally relevant pedagogies (Jimenez, 2020) and is implicit in many critical and youth-centered approaches to education. 

Even when the term counterstories is not explicitly or knowingly used, it has the potential to be a lens through which educational innovation is understood and is implicitly a fundamental part of the work of powerful education.