Narrative inquiry for reimagining social studies instruction

Reprinted from EducationWeek, August 29, 2023

In traditional school settings, social studies is often seen as a body of knowledge that is approached in a reading-based manner; students are taught to decipher the text and to use a critical lens when looking deeper into it. They might be encouraged not to take the text for granted and read between the lines for underlying assumptions. However, there remains a reverence for what “experts” have said, resulting in an established hierarchy of knowledge in which student experiences are treated as anecdotes rather than evidence.

As a multilingual learner turned social studies/ESL teacher and then teacher educator who teaches sociolinguistics, I often aim to focus on knowledge as a form of power. This perspective was further heightened in 2020 when the global pandemic created the perfect storm for social and intellectual upheaval. An “aha moment” arose when I watched this video, which showed a Brooklyn-based artist, Misra Walker, striving to understand how Hurricane Sandy impacted their New York City communities, revealing a history of social inequity. The project demonstrated how multimodality and interdisciplinarity could be used together to create a powerful narrative about our present place in history and build stories from the community to drive meaningful action.

Learning from works like Walker’s inspired me to create a Narrative Inquiry (NI) approach to social studies. NI is a method used to unveil the experiences of an individual or group, usually through storytelling. Through this approach, students would be able to identify the assets in their community and comprehend that each historical event holds multiple interwoven perspectives. Adapting Jean Aguilar-Valdez’s work (2015) on culturally responsive-sustaining teaching, I reworked NI into an asset-based approach, wherein student identities, languages, and cultures are recognized as resources for classroom learning:

Identity/Asset/Voice: NI seeks out not just facts but stories and in-depth details of people’s lives, interests, and voices. Instead of teaching a textbook narrative, it is critical to select topics that enable students to engage their individual and collective strengths to present a different interpretation of reality.

For example, when studying the Dust Bowl in American history, we can strive to reconstruct the dominant discourse. Through this inquiry process, students are urged to draw on their experience with natural disasters and how their communities approach challenges with resilience, flexibility, and triumphs. As part of this inquiry process, students can share their identities, cultures, and perspectives, knowing that their valuable contributions will be welcomed and cherished.

Access: By implementing NI, students are given the opportunity to delve into academic discussions that were previously dominated by Euro- or U.S.-centric ideas, which often silenced marginalized students. NI gives these students a voice and the chance to participate meaningfully in their communities. Teachers can showcase perspectives from marginalized communities through multimodal texts that emphasize the richness and complexity of details, pictures, and languages instead of just presenting a summary. This type of storytelling could also serve as an excellent mentor text for multimodal storytelling as students create their own stories.

Multimodality/Translanguaging: NI encourages multimodal practices in order to uncover the full details of history and community stories. In the example of the Dust Bowl, students can use their total language repertoire to interview community members whose ancestors might have experienced that disaster , or whose families have experienced more ones, creating a more layered, complex understanding of the event from the perspectives of different cultures. The inclusion of multilingual and multicultural perspectives will add depth to the study of the topics.

Connection and Higher-Order Thinking: NI creates an authentic learning experience for students by bridging the gap between school and their communities. When contextualized through personal experience, the Dust Bowl is no longer seen as a time capsule wrapped in U.S. history—it’s part of a connected global world. This approach allows students to view multiple realities, understand who is most affected and why it happened, and reimagine alternative outcomes, particularly in the era of multiverses.

Social Justice and Decolonization: NI is an exploration of the relationship between knowledge and action. I often ponder why minority voices were so absent in the grand narrative of historical events. To make the invisible visible, students can be urged to center the perspectives of minoritized groups and encouraged to write counter-narratives that build on stories from these communities, amplifying the still-silenced voices in history. The truth of who speaks and whose perspectives are considered valid does not just lie in what is said or learned but also in how it’s learned. By granting student voices a legitimate place within the school curriculum along with community knowledge and opinions, we can start to disrupt the hegemonic discourse.

Conclusion
The Narrative Inquiry approach to social studies, which can be adapted for other subjects, encourages us to reevaluate the purpose of the school curriculum and its contribution to upholding the existing power structure. By mapping out community assets and recognizing them as valid sources for classroom knowledge, we can begin to legitimize them through our classroom learning, allowing for a reinterpretation of the past.