"Let His Voice Be Heard": A Community's Response to Inclusion of an Indigenous Counter-Narrative in the District Curriculum

Abstract

Curricular counter-narratives can affirm the experiences of marginalized youth, but, given their complexity and unfamiliarity, they can also generate discord between community members. This case study analyzes documents, observations, and interviews to explore ways an Indigenous counter-narrative can create space for multicultural education within a Montana school district. The findings demonstrate both positive and negative community responses to the focus novel, the importance of teaching about context and multiple perspectives, and the potential for student agency and social action. The results also provide cautionary notes about the complexity of critical pedagogy and the importance of community consultation.

A conceptual analysis of inclusive education in terms of participation and agency

“…Munns (2007) developed practices to engage students who lived in poverty, reporting on a project in which a conceptual framework was implemented to develop students' long-term engagement with the sense of 'school is for me', students' understanding of the meaning of knowledge and students' sense of self-efficacy. Other studies focused on involving students in school communities with, for example, Indigenous peoples (McCarthy & Stanton, 2017), students on the autism spectrum (Qi & Wang, 2018) and immigrant pupils (Marsh & Dieckmann, 2017).…”

“…Florian and Beaton (2018) note that when students are given the opportunity to self-assess, they gain a clearer idea of their own progress by comparing their current work to their previous work, instead of to others' achievements. Additionally, our analysis process highlighted that hearing other students' opinions enhances all students' learning having multiple formal and informal opportunities to express themselves as part of the learning process (McCarthy & Stanton, 2017;Sanahuja et al, 2020).…”

Complicating College-Transition Stories: Strengths and Challenges of Approaches to Diversity in Wise-Story Interventions

“…Given that counter-stories rely on highly contextualized narratives of marginalization, what gets sacrificed in scaling? There is scarce research on the impact of scaled critical stories on dominant groups, so we draw from one case study (McCarthy & Stanton, 2017). The researchers investigated the outcomes of incorporating a counter-story, a young adult novel entitled The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian , into a district-level curriculum.…”