The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

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Purna Chandra Bhusal, University of Texas at El Paso

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Abstract

This essay argues that critical counterstorying should be an essential component of composition studies. Discrimination happens every minute across the globe. However, dominant discourses created by the victimizers camouflage their atrocities, injustices, and violence. As a result, the traumatic memories and tormented lived experiences of the victimized get stifled in forums like university classrooms. Therefore, this essay advocates for integrating counterstories in composition studies by highlighting some of their transformative possibilities through their use as both method and methodology.

Key terms: Counterstories; Composition Studies; Voice; Agency; Social Justice; Pedagogy

 

Introduction

The world is characterized by tensions, conflicts, and contradictions that have been caused by lines of "difference" in terms of race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality, caste, dis/ability, body, religion, language, and many others. The problem, however, is that the stories and narratives of the individuals who belong to mainstream culture and society—elite, white, Christian, able, heterosexual, males who speak so-called standard English—have been accentuated and disseminated, while the stories, experiences, and narratives from the margins—poor, non-white, Indigenous, non-Christian, disabled, queer, nonmale, speaking ‘non-standard’ English—have been silenced and therefore hardly voiced and heard. Sadly, these stories have been stifled; they have been taken as a threat and a challenge to mainstream society. This essay takes those silenced, submerged, and sidelined stories as critical counterstories, proposing that it is the responsibility of composition teachers to enable students to write and speak critical counterstories in composition classrooms. Coalescing counterstories and composition studies not only honors the voices and agency of students but also interrogates the gaps, cracks, ironies, and ideological underpinnings of dominant narratives. Hence, this essay takes the integration of critical counterstories into composition studies as a call for social justice and equity. 

 

Exigence: Counterstories in the World

Integration of critical counterstories in composition stands upon the fact that the world is characterized by contradictions and conflicts, and it is the responsibility of an educator to advocate for peace, progress, harmony, and social justice. Every day, we read, see, watch, and listen to instances of conflict, war, violence, destruction, and discrimination. These tensions and conflicts exist among human beings because some humans are at the center (powerful) whereas others are placed at the margins (powerless). As a result, the center has created lines of discrimination against the margins that manifest in the discourses on race, gender, ethnicity, class, dis/ability.

Discrimination against minorities is reported every day in the United States. Jennifer R. Grandis (2023) claims that many institutional policies outline anti-racist and anti-sexist goals, but they do not follow through on the application of those goals. Grandis, after interviewing more than 100 men and women who held high-power positions, concludes that “dozens of interviewees told me stories of DEI policies that, even with the right intentions, failed to produce good results.” This shows that there is a gap between anti-racist policy and its application in the United States. Likewise, Curtis Bunn (2022) reports that, after all the attention the Black Lives Matter-led racial justice movement generated after George Floyd’s death in 2020, “the number of Black people killed by police has actually increased over the last two years.” This is depressing to hear because it indicates the violence and atrocities implicitly sanctioned by authorities against Black people. In the same way, according to the Associated Press (2023), last year, a half-dozen potential and former employees disclosed that from 2017 to 2022, a longtime Washington state insurance commissioner “was demeaning or rude, was overly focused on race, and used derogatory terms for transgender people and people of Mexican, Chinese, Italian or Spanish descent, as well as asking some employees of color for unusual favors.” In the same vein, a recent press release by the Department of Justice (2023) reads that a federal judge held the City of Chicago liable for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act by “failing to provide accessible pedestrian signals at signalized intersections throughout the city to those who are blind or have low vision.” It has already been more than three decades since the ADA became a law, but why do such problems repeat? All these stories show that violence, injustice, and oppression remain rampant.

Moreover, reports and stories from other parts of the world are no less dehumanizing. For example, Statistics Canada (2022) explicitly states that “due to the historical and intergenerational trauma resulting from colonialism and related policies, as well as individual and systemic racism,” Indigenous people in Canada, particularly Métis or Inuit, “face a number of deeply rooted social and economic challenges, including higher rates of criminal victimization.” It further reports that many Indigenous people today deal with intergenerational trauma and socioeconomic marginalization. Likewise, Nicolas Camut (2023) writes that, as reported by the European International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGBTIA), “violence against LGBTQ+ people reached its highest point in the past decade in Europe and Central Asia in 2022.” The violence against LGBTQ+ individuals manifests through planned attacks, suicides, and hate speech from politicians, religious leaders, and right-wing organizations. There is also caste-related discrimination in South Asian nations. Nepal has recently witnessed two notorious crimes against Dalit identities like the cases of B. K. Navaraj and Rupa Sunar—the former was stoned to death (Mulmi, 2020) and the latter was denied renting a room in the capital city, Kathmandu (Subedi, 2021).

Therefore, now, it is time to contest all forms of discrimination, and critical counterstorying is one of the methods of doing it. Counterstorying is a tool that exposes and challenges oppression that has been silenced, ignored, or suppressed (Hoermann-Elliott, 2023; Martinez, 2020; Olszewski, 2022; Miller, Liu & Ball, 2020). Erin Jade Twyford, Farzana Aman Tanima, and Sendirella George (2022), while working on immigration and asylum-seeking issues in Australia, write that counterstories have emancipatory potential. They write that Critical Race Theory (CRT) counterstories “counter the stories and narratives espoused by governments and policies that seek to perpetuate historic racialized rhetoric and ideology under new guises” (p. 337). In this sense, critical counterstories are the deconstructive tools that dismantle the official narratives of equity, justice, and harmony. Counterstorying as a method vocalizes voices from the margins: “Counterstory serves as a natural extension of inquiry for theorists whose research recognizes and incorporates, as data, lived and embodied experiences of people of color. . . . [it] counters other methods that seek to dismiss or decenter racism and those whose lives are affected daily by it" (Martinez, 2014, p. 33). Counterstory starts from the point where dominant narratives end; it foregrounds marginal identities and articulations.

Seen in this light, integrating critical counterstories into composition studies vocalizes silences. It highlights composition studies as a vibrant and dynamic discipline engaging students and educators in lively discussions on issues of discrimination as counterstories highlight the stories of and by minoritized people who have lived and can relate to the stories of other minoritized people (Martinez, 2020; Hoermann-Elliott, 2023). Therefore, critical counterstory should be made an essential component of all composition studies because it connects the classroom with the outer world.

 

An Outline of Composition Studies vis-à-vis Critical Counterstories

Coalescing critical counterstories multiplies the sum and substance of composition studies. Composition studies, as an academic discipline, has undergone various changes and challenges. It has made a transition from a linguistic and semantic paradigm to a socio-cultural and political paradigm (Healy, 2022). Before and during the 1950s, composition studies were more formalistic, structuralist, and text-based, influenced by New Criticism (Nystrand, Greene, & Wiemelt, 1993; Healy, 2022). Daniel Healy (2022) takes 1964 as a transition point: “...some recent investigation shows that the study of the history and structure of the English language has little or no bearing on writing skills” (p. 243).  Critiquing the structuralist and formalist paradigm, composition studies became more society-driven than language-driven, taking a critical turn after the 1970s (Nystrand, Greene, & Wiemelt, 1993; Leonard, 2022). Rebecca Lorimer Leonard (2022) argues that the term "critical" has been almost omnipresent for the last 50 years, meaning from "important" to "analytic" to "liberatory." In the 1980s, composition studies was more theorized, and in the 90s, it was taken as part of critical pedagogy.

The last ten years have shown more explicit attention paid to power relations as in Aja Martinez's enactment of critical race theory through counterstory and Alex Hanson's application of Gesa Kirsch and Jacqueline Jones Royster's critical imagination (Leonard, 2022). In addition, Christina M. Lavecchia (2022) outlines works that have waged war against racism like Helen Fox’s course design “Unteaching Racism” (1999), a 2016 “Where We Are” forum, Edward Hahn’s 2019 “Reviewing Writing, Rethinking Whiteness: A Study of Composition’s Practical Life,” and “Teaching for Agency: From Appreciating Diversity to Empowering Student Writers” by Shawna Shapiro, Michelle Coz, Gail Shuck, and Emily Simnitt (2016).

A critical counterstory turn in composition adds to this work in advancing the discipline. Critical counterstorying urges every composition teacher and student to be “an ally on this journey toward racial justice” by enabling them to act when they see “racist microaggressions happening in [all] classrooms, professional meetings, writing groups, or community” (Hoermann-Elliott, 2023, p. 307). Discourse communities and composition teachers are therefore responsible for integrating CRT counterstories.

 

Counterstory Methods and Methodologies

Owing to the counterstorying project theorized by Martinez (2020), composition teachers should feel a responsibility and obligation to assign counterstories in their composition courses. An application of counterstorying methods brings a paradigm shift in classroom activities, providing spaces for an acknowledgment and amplification of diverse stories.

 

Deploying Interdisciplinarity

Applying critical counterstories in composition studies is rewarding because critical counterstories bring many issues forward for discussion. Culture is a constellation where discourses have been “built, shaped, and dismantled based on a constellation of relationships and the encounters people have with one another within and across various systems of shared or oppositional epistemologies and worldviews” (Powell et al., 2014). Critical counterstorying can address such constellations or intersections as it is essentially interdisciplinary: CRT counterstory is “a theoretically grounded research approach with interdisciplinary roots in ethnic, studies, women’s studies, sociology, history, legal studies, and the humanities” (Martinez, 2020, p. 3).  The interdisciplinarity of counterstorying offers multiple perspectives in the composition classroom because the issues of race, gender, class, and dis/ability are complex and interconnected social phenomena. Therefore, counterstories allow educators to critique the legal, political, and social systems that create injustices (Miller, Liu & Ball 2020; Twyford, Tanima & George, 2022). Thus, CRT counterstories are one of the promising methods for challenging the pluri-discursivity of dominant ideologies.

Here, interdisciplinarity functions something like bell hook’s transgressive pedagogy and a Freirean pedagogy of liberation and humanization that question systematic violence and oppression. Undeniably, discourses of race, gender, ethnicity, and dis/ability are rooted in power and politics; they manifest in various forms. Therefore, the pedagogy of counterstorying gives us a lens to necessarily question intertwined social institutions and normalized social practices.

 

Critiquing Identity

Integration of critical counterstories in composition studies brings a paradigm shift in perspectives by looking at social realities. One of the fundamental tenets of critical counterstorying is to challenge dominant ideologies by taking human identities as social constructs (Martinez, 2020; Hoermann-Elliott, 2023). Thus, counterstorying provides an opportunity for students to observe and reflect on processes of identity formation and the hierarchical relations among them, thereby enabling students to critically challenge binaries, which can be provisionally shown as follows:

 

Self (Stock/Dominant Stories)	Other (Counterstories)
Euro-Western	Non-Western/Indigenous
White	Non-White/Black
Male/Female	Non-binary/Genderqueer
Elite	Poor/Working Class
Able	Disabled/Chronically ill/Mad
Heterosexual	Queer/LGBTQI+
Standard English	Non-Standard Englishes
Christian	Non-Christians
Democracy	Autocracy/Communism
Individualism	Community life
Reason (Mind)	Emotional/Corporeal/Bodily
City/Urban	Rural/Agrarian
Standardized Literacy	Community-Based Literacy
Written	Oral
Objectivity	Subjective Observations

Table 1: Binaries, Self versus Other(s)

 

What is the problem with these binaries? They exist and are recognized as sources of knowledge, but the categories under the column "Self" take themselves as authentic, objective, central, and meaningful. They not only define their privileged "self" but also define and (mis)represent the categories that they classify as "Other." The othered categories have been dismissed as inauthentic, insignificant, and meaningless (Martinez, 2020). Therefore, we should incorporate critical counterstories in composition studies to challenge a biased and exclusionary tradition.

It is counterstorying that dismantles and critiques all of these hierarchical relationships. Counterstory as a method and methodology serves to expose, analyze, and challenge stock stories of racial privilege and can help to strengthen traditions of social, political, and cultural resistance (Martinez, 2014; Martinez, 2020; Alberto 2020; Olszewski, 2022). The hierarchies above are constructed by the people who hold the power, with the power-holders as the "Self" while those who are different but lack power as the "Other." Critical counterstories give us the perspectives and lenses to look at the world from the perspectives of the "Other" rather than the "Self." Critical counterstorying acknowledges the voice of "Others" and takes “NGOs, social movement organizations, academics, media, and whistle-blowers as important tools that can give voice and a platform to those who are marginalised and oppressed” (Twyford, Tanima & George, 2022, p. 338). According to Martinez (2014), the stories of the "Self" are the stock stories that “feign neutrality and at all costs avoid any blame or responsibility for societal inequality” (p. 38). The stock stories are so powerful because they have often been repeated, canonized, and normalized by excluding the voices of others: “Those who tell stock stories insist that their version of events is indeed reality, and any stories that counter these standardized tellings are deemed biased, self-interested, and ultimately not credible” (p. 38). It is critical counterstories that expose the gaps and ironies within dominant/stock narratives.

 

Centering Students

Counterstories in composition studies promote bottom-up rather than top-down methods of teaching writing. In a composition class where critical counterstories become both the source and resource of critical discussions, students—with love, care, safety, and community feelings—have always been encouraged to share their traumatic memories, embodied and socio-political experiences (Hoermann-Elliot, 2023). Here, the teacher plays the role of a facilitator rather than an instructor. According to Martinez (2020), counterstorying “bridges the gap between theory and praxis” (p. 82). Hence, critical counterstorying is a student-centered method for addressing the lived experiences of students.

However, some questions intrigue me every time: are all the students voiceless in a composition class? How do students from mainstream (elite, white, heterosexual, able males) receive counterstories from minorities in the composition classroom? I believe that critical counterstorying benefits both students from the mainstream and the margins. In this regard, Julie Wasmund Hoffman and Jennifer L. Martin (2020), using critical social justice inquiry circles through poetic dialogue, make a similar argument. They emphasize the responsibility of a composition teacher, arguing that a critical pedagogue must simultaneously be culturally responsive and able to provide counterstories to balance oppressive histories and realities. They further write that integrating counterstories in composition classroom will be beneficial to both non-hegemonic and hegemonic students:

For the hegemonic student, counter-stories and counter-histories can work to undermine stereotypes that dominant students hold for minoritized populations with which they may have little contact, thereby potentially reducing implicit bias. For the non-hegemonic student, counter-stories and counter-histories can provide validation for and pride in one’s own culture and increase engagement in school when they can relate to the curriculum as opposed to always being “othered". (p. 694)

The argument here is that critical counterstories create a win-win situation. For mainstream students, it offers new perspectives which may dissuade them from implicit biases and prejudices. At the same time, counterstorying builds confidence, implanting a liberating potential in marginalized students. This argument reminds me of April Baker Bell’s (2020) students who took Black English as a deficit and lack at the beginning but gradually came to be proud of their Black linguistic identity through critical counterstorying. Martinez (2014) states that “CRT provides our field with the tools by which to interrogate the effects of racial bias that actively impede success and retention in rhetoric and composition for marginalized students” (p. 36). Counterstories have the potential to impart a critical consciousness to students. They provide a self-reflective perspective for students from mainstream communities. The students from the margins build the confidence needed to liberate themselves from dominant discourses and prepare themselves to reclaim language, culture, and history (Lopez, Butvilofsky, Le & Gumina, 2022).

 

Contesting Scarcity

In composition classrooms, the writings of some students are stereotyped through the lens of lack or deficit. One of the causes behind this is the discrepancy between students’ home stories and school stories (Lopez, Butvilofsky, Le & Gumina, 2022). At this point, I would like to share my own experience as a writing consultant at the University Writing Center at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). In the writing center, some students come to brainstorm ideas for assignments and others come to fix grammar and organization. What is deficiency, then? Is it the topic of ideas or grammar? How can students from the margins contest such so-called deficiency? I argue that integrating critical counterstories in composition classrooms allows students to excel in their writing as they can write about their own experiences in their own ways of expression.

Critical counterstorying in composition classrooms opens the repertoire of students' own cultural capital. It allows for verbalizing silenced narratives as CRT counterstorying re-centers marginalized people’s stories as a means to critique inequalities and injustices recurring in the world (Lopez, Butvilofsky, Le & Gumina, 2022; Twyford, Tanima & George, 2022). The reservoir of critical counterstories is full of “memoirs, stories, oral histories, and testimonies” that the students can enunciate in their writing and their speaking (Twyford, Tanima & George, 2022, p. 338). In such a context, bringing in counterstories in composition classrooms makes the class lively and vibrant.

What is the role of a composition teacher or an educator, then? I argue that composition studies should create enough spaces and opportunities for critical topics and discussions in the classrooms. Critical counterstories contain an abundance of epistemologies if they have been re-collected in the way Jackie Hoermann-Elliot (2023) explains, by means of “bringing more love and excitement to students,” as the author explores the trauma of Quakertown, a community of free Black citizens who were forcibly removed from their homes (p. 303). As Hoffman & Martin explain (2020), it is the responsibility of discourse communities and educators to amplify the voices of the margins through critical counterstories:

They need to be seen and heard. It is time to change the rules and become actively anti-racist. This requires radical listening. We need to stop herding our students, hurting our students, and, instead, start hearing our students. They are singing their songs. Songs of pain, songs of fear, songs of independence, songs of empowerment, songs of resistance, songs of hardship, songs of resilience, songs of “the real world,” and songs of their future. Are you listening? (p. 694)

This statement reminds me of what Krista Ratcliffe and Kyle Jensen (2022) say in Rhetorical Listening in Action when they urge us to listen to the voice of the margin by standing under to understand. We should rhetorically listen to counterstories from the margins to transform scarcity into abundance (for example, see the 2024 CCCC cfp). Is there any scarcity of ideas among the students in a composition class? My answer is a big "NO." Students’ minds and hearts are overflowing with ideas, insights, and epistemologies. However, the irony is that in composition studies, pedagogies hardly open space to acknowledge multitudes of experiences. Instead, discourse communities may impose formal criteria such as word and paragraph limits, or stress grammar and structure. These narratives of organization, coherence, cohesion, and transition hinder the highway of counterstories which may come in fragments but volumes. Therefore, we need more critical counterstories in composition to dismantle the myth of "poor" or "average" writing. Martinez (2014) writes that “CRT counterstory recognizes that the experiential and embodied knowledge of people of color is legitimate and critical to understanding racism that is often well disguised in the rhetoric of normalized structural values and practices” (p. 37). Critical counterstorying legitimizes the stories and experiences of students from the margins as the most important part of epistemology, as a central part of a body of knowledge. Thinking this way, if counterstorying is integrated into the composition classroom, scarcity becomes the myth, and abundance becomes a reality.

 

Voicing the Voiceless

Counterstorying is essential to vocalizing the agency of students. Voice and agency are not new in composition studies; they have been echoing in composition pedagogy since the 1960s and 70s, but it is necessary to discuss how the current dialogue and debate of voice and agency in critical counterstories differs from that of the past, especially from Peter Elbow (1968) and Donald Murray (1970). The episteme of critical counterstory goes beyond the spirit of the expressivist tradition of teaching writing.  According to Elbow (1968), the sound and voice of the author are important, and students without a voice cannot find the world. He argues that sound is more important than style because the voice and self of the author make writing lively and alive. For Elbow, a sense of truth and style are secondary to the author's voice. Likewise, Murray (1970) writes: “A writer is an individual who uses language to discover meaning in experience and communicate it” (p. 21). For him, the exterior view of writing (words, patterns, forms, style, language, audience) matters less than the interior view of writing because “writing is an individual search for meaning in life” (p. 21). Thus, the expressivists prioritized students' voices over everything.

Expressivist tradition and counterstorying have similarities and differences. Both pedagogical imperatives are student-centered, and they prioritize the writer’s/student’s voice over formal structures of writing. So, how does counterstorying differ from the expressivist tradition? What makes counterstorying distinct? In expressivist traditions, voice means the inner self, the insights, feelings, ideas, and sentiments of an author. The purpose of (teaching) writing is to help students pour those inner voices onto the page. Here, the concepts of "voice" and "agency" sound rather neutral; they do not mean voices from the margins, the voices of silenced identities. In contrast, counterstorying is loaded with voices from the margins, meaning it has liberating potential. In counterstory, "voice" deliberately means voices that have been silenced, sidelined, tortured, tormented, and negated in society. When those voices have been enunciated, they shake, challenge, and dismantle dominant discourses. According to Maria Avila, Adriana Aldana, and Michelle Zaragoza (2021), this critical perspective is possible because counterstorying has been influenced by Critical Race Theory (CRT):

CRT also argues that narratives have been socially and hegemonically constructed. These narratives are part of what we call the master-narrative, a narrative that favors those in power and privilege. As an oppositional strategy, counter-narratives enable us to expose dominant narratives that perpetuate the justification for subordination and offer alternative stories that challenges taken for granted dominant narratives. (p. 256)

Writers unveil an inherent tension between master narratives and critical counternarratives. The voices articulated employing counterstorying deconstruct the inherent contradictions, ironies, and gaps in stock or dominant narratives. The purpose of voicing is not just to express a writer's individual self as proposed by the expressivist tradition but to advance change. Counterstorying aims at the “social transformation of educational research, classrooms, curricula, policy, the study of knowledge (epistemology) and teaching (pedagogy)” (Martinez, 2020, p. 113). The role of critical counterstories is "to redress the lack of information, impediments to accessing the material, and silences in the official accounts and ideologies around off-shore detention regimes through individual stories” (Twyford, Tanima & George, 2022, p. 338). Critical counterstories take us to the untraveled terrain (from the perspective of the mainstream) of marginalized identities.

 

Highlighting Human Rights

Exploitation and violence are almost everywhere in the world, and there are racial and socio-cultural hierarchies all over the world, too. Critical counterstories may tell the experiences of an individual, but their stories can represent those of more people who have been marginalized based on race, gender, ethnicity, and dis/ability. A single critical counterstory by an individual has the potential to challenge dominant discourses that affect the lives of many. Critical counterstorying, as a method and methodology, re-presents voices from all the margins.

Optimistically, the spirit and themes behind critical counterstories align with provisions on human rights outlined by the United Nations (n.d.):

Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status. Human rights include the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and many more.  Everyone is entitled to these rights, without discrimination.

Markers of difference cannot or should not be a problem in exercising rights and freedom. Any form of discrimination based on identity is a violation of human rights. If global law (the UN provision) explicitly states as much, it is the responsibility of an educator to inform students about this. A good example of using stories for social transformation is that of counterstories from Traveler communities in the United Kingdom (UK), as presented by Kate D’Arcy (2017). D’Arcy writes that bringing stories of marginalized communities into the classroom, such as those of Traveler communities and their lack of education, raised student consciousness. As a result, “students chose it as a topic for further study and challenged inequality in their environments. Sharing counter-stories with policymakers and commissioners resulted in further research funding and ideas to effect change” (p. 645). Stories of the Traveler community are unique, but they also resonate with stories from many marginalized communities around the globe. Counterstorying as a method drives a classroom to engage “ongoing conversations in the field about narrative, dominant ideology, and their intersecting influence on programmatic and curricular standards and practices” (Martinez, 2014, p. 53). Critical counterstories have the potential to transform and change the world, creating spaces for sharing the experiences and observations of individuals across communities and the world.

 

Promoting Social Justice

Coalescing critical counterstories in composition classrooms promotes social justice and equity. Here, a composition classroom does not merely become a barren space of reading and writing; it becomes a place of empowerment and resistance. As Martinez (2014) writes, “these narratives serve the purpose of exposing stereotypes, expressing arguments against injustice, and offering additional truths through narrating authors' lived experiences” (p. 51). Since counterstories challenge the dominant discourses, they question and challenge all forms of discrimination that happen in society.

The goal behind introducing critical counterstories in composition class is to enable the students to speak and write against any form of discrimination both at present and in the future. It makes students aware of the use of language and behaviors in their lives; it teaches them to be conscious throughout their lives. CRT counterstory asserts the following tenets: (a) Permanence to Race and Racism, (b) Challenge to dominant ideologies, (c) Intersectionality and anti-essentialism, (d) Centrality of experiential knowledge and/or unique voices of color, and (e) Commitment to social justice (Martinez, 2020). Even if we see a commitment to social justice listed at the end, it is the outcome and ultimate goal of critical counterstorying:

Racialisation contributes significantly to social injustice as a form of domination and ideology. To correct this inequity, race and racism require calling out within research rather than remaining an accepted and fixed structure that we work around or even ignore. Instead, we should be smashing racialization apart with every tool available, which is why we add the emancipatory capacity of CRT to the critical literature. (Twyford, Tanima & George, 2022, p. 338)

An act of counterstorying questions social injustices and by default advocates for social justice. Even listening to counterstories contributes to social justice because “Counter-stories draw on the voices of marginalized groups to build up a counterattack to negative stock stories” and “listening to stories enables us to observe the lives of others and better understand their world” (D’Arcy, 2017, p. 646). Therefore, it is the time to read, listen to, and speak/write previously unspoken stories and narratives. These voices can potentially expose years (even centuries) of injustice. Together, we can make those muted voices speak in composition studies and work toward social justice and social transformation.

 

The Performance of Critical Counterstories in Composition Classrooms

Higher education still represents the complex relations between race, property, and oppression. Despite growth and change in U.S. demographics, the academy is an overwhelmingly White terrain in terms of physical representation and symbolically, in terms of curriculum, campus policies, and campus spaces. (Patton, 2016, p. 320)

The excerpt above implies two things: the U.S. higher education system is white-dominated, and therefore it needs to be challenged and reformed. Here, the relevance of integrating counterstories into composition studies becomes clear. Ultimately, the goal of CRT counterstories is to bring about change in everything from our pedagogies to our epistemologies (Martinez, 2020, p. 133). In my opinion, it is the responsibility of every discourse community in composition studies to invent spaces for critical counterstories by developing and designing relevant curricula, syllabi, learning outcomes, and pedagogical imperatives; and, it is the responsibility of every teacher, following Paulo Freire and bell hooks, to implement pedagogies of transgression, humanization, and liberation.

Following this, then, the role of the student is to take part in debates and discussions about issues of race, gender and sexuality, ethnicity, dis/ability, and many others. In dominant ideology, there exist myths about equal opportunity, but racism and other inequalities remain a significant influence on reality (D’Arcy, 2017, Alberto 2022). Seen in this light, the practice of critical counterstorying develops a sense of belonging and fights dis-belonging: “nonhegemonic students, who have, over time, failed to recognize themselves: their language, their history, their people, in the school curriculum; additionally, the few times such students do recognize themselves within their curriculum, they only see atrocities, so best not to look” (Hoffman & Martin, 2020, p. 693). Students are never motivated to excel in their activities when they cannot access and articulate their voice and self. Thinking the other way around, the curriculum and classroom activities which give space for counterstories give a sense of relief and satisfaction to students at the margins because they can identify themselves as part of the composition classroom.

Again, now, the question is how composition classrooms can integrate critical counterstories. Indeed, it can start with the curriculum, learning outcomes, assignment modules, and classroom activities. There may be different possibilities:

For instance, students complete a narrative assignment that requires them to write about their lived experiences in the context of their various social positionalities such as race, gender, sexual orientation, faith, and nationality. A separate assignment asks students to critically revise their narrative by analyzing the ways their experiences can be understood through intersections of social systems structure power, privilege, and oppression. This revision is also an opportunity for students to make explicit the connections between the course readings and their lived experiences. As a final assignment students present a CRT informed critique of a contemporary social issue in the form of a creative exhibit (e.g., spoken word, theater, art instillation) and a critical essay” (Avila, Aldana, & Zaragoza, 2020, p. 260-261).

This excerpt proposes various possibilities and strategies of integrating critical counterstories in composition studies. It is the educator's responsibility to introduce such assignment modules and classroom activities while remaining under the curricular goals and prescribed learning outcomes. Whatever form critical counterstorying may take in the classroom, however, I suggest that four goals are always the common denominator: to vocalize silenced voices; to help others liberate themselves; to dismantle biases and prejudices; and to promote social justice.

 

Conclusion

Bringing critical counterstories to the composition classroom is a humanizing act where stifled voices from the margins can be made audible to the dominant public. When injustices and discrimination have been rendered audible, ages-old harmful discourses of race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality, caste, dis/ability, body, religion, and language can be seriously contested. Critical counterstories act as a compelling force for change and social justice when they get an opportunity to be performed in composition classrooms. Coalescing critical counterstories in composition classrooms also highlights some nuances that can be conceptualized as shown in the figure:    

 

Table 2: Counterstorying advances composition studies.

 

Composition teachers should make integrating critical counterstorying a fundamental curricular goal. When composition curricula, learning outcomes, and classroom activities compose a collective space for the enunciation of counterstories, it turns out to be a wake-up call for all, regardless of the different identities present in the classroom. Therefore, in closing, I re-iterate that counterstories should be included as an essential component of all composition studies courses and classrooms. 

 

 

References

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Purna Chandra Bhusal is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and Writing Studies as well as an Assistant Instructor (AI) for the First-Year Writing Course in the Department of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, USA. His research interests include counterstorying, composition/writing pedagogy, cultural (Global South) rhetoric, and the rhetoric of justice. He is also a winner of the 2024 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Scholars for the Dream Award.