Overview of "Storytelling as Resistance"

For the weekend reading, I chose to read “Storytelling as Resistance” from the text Rethinking Popular Culture and Media. This chapter focused on Jerica Coffey’s re-telling of her experience teaching her students a nonfiction narrative writing unit. A major theme of this chapter is Coffey’s belief that the stories we tell define who we are (as does the absence of the stories we do not tell). Alongside teaching her students the elements of nonfiction narrative writing, Coffey set out to teach her students about the power that comes with telling one’s story, especially when that narrative goes against the grain of the stories being told by mainstream media (and not the people who live within the community). Thus, the main goal of Coffey’s unit was to have her students “document stories of the community that students believed were marginalized or silenced in the mainstream culture but that deserved to be recorded and celebrated as acts of resistance” (p. 301). 

As I read about the steps Coffey took to prepare her students to craft their final narratives, I was frequently reminded of the TED Talks by Wesch and Mitra. Like Wesch and Mitra, Coffey provided her students with a task that was connected to their lives. Certainly, there were specific skills and readings she taught to her students throughout this unit but the final form of the narratives were in complete control of her students. Coffey, like Wesch, provided check-points during this unit so that her students were supported during the creation of their narratives. And like Mitra, Coffey often started daily lessons with questions for her students to discuss as a group. Certainly, I suspect Coffey prepared materials and questions to direct the conversations in a specific direction, however, the excerpts she provides within this chapter suggests that she was also open to the knowledge and connections her students made during these conversations. She let the thoughts of her students lead the discussions and only interjected by asking more questions (rather than providing direct answers).

A final point that connects to the sources we have been reading is Coffey’s advice to her students when she noticed they were getting stuck with their interviews: “‘you just have to be curious’” (p. 305). It was here when I recalled the words of Sir Ken Robinson: “if you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance, very often. Children are natural learners” (2013). As Robinson made clear in his talk, our current education system is set up in a way that stifles natural curiosity. Thankfully, however, educators like Coffey (and Wesch) encourage that natural curiosity to guide their instruction. Another similarity I noticed between Coffey and Wesch was Coffey’s choice to turn the written narratives into digital stories so that they could be shared with their school community. Overall, Coffey’s unit displays how media can be used meaningfully to enhance instruction and make the projects we ask our students to complete authentic to themselves and the world around them. However, the meaningfulness of this task was not accomplished by the mere presence of media; Coffey's ongoing commitment to create a responsive learning environment that nurtured students curiosity and encouraged their discoveries along the way is, as Mitra has said, "the key" to the learning that occurred.