Storytelling in Critical Literacy Pedagogy: Removing the Walls between Immigrant and Non-Immigrant Youth.

Abstract

Storytelling is so ubiquitous an everyday practice among youth that it seems inconsequential as the focus for literacy education. And yet, as numerous critical literacy scholars have argued, when youth have the opportunity to explain and expand on the images, emotions and meaning of their lives, they may be recognised in new ways as people with complex social histories and insights about equity and justice (c.f. Blackburn, 2005; Campano, 2007; Daiute, 2010; Janks, 2010; Kinloch, 2009; Medina, 2010). The twelveand thirteen-year-old youth I work with are usually acknowledged among one another for the entertainment value of their stories. Quite often, however, their purposes in storytelling align with the aims of critical literacy: to name what matters to them, to speculate about what is possible in their lives, to unravel contradictions, to make sense of what is senseless, to claim or question a point of view, to wonder and to act. These are the beginnings of what Morrell (2008) describes as critical textual production, texts that “serve as the manifestation of an alternate reality or a not-yet-realized present that only enters into the imagination through the interaction with new and authentically liberating words that are created by writers as cultural workers” (p. 115).