Co-Primary Investigators — Kathryn Accurso & Jason D. Mizell
Community and school-based K-12 educators working toward practices of antiracism and decolonization draw on community countertexts in their teaching. Community countertexts are texts by minoritized authors that reflect their experiences and knowledges and capture perspectives that are missing in dominating school curriculum. These texts may be oral, written, multimodal, and/or multilingual. Many educators have expressed difficulty finding or accessing countertexts that speak to a range of knowledges/curricular topics. In response, Edith Lando VLC grant recipients Dr. Kathryn Accurso (UBC) and Dr. Jason Mizell (University of Miami) have designed The Community Countertext Project with two main objectives:
- To collect and/or generate and publish community texts that capture minoritized knowledges, perspectives, and language practices; and
- To make project texts available through a website so they are freely accessible to community members, teachers, students, and researchers.
The project website is primarily intended to support ongoing teaching and learning in K-12 classrooms and communities. However, the vision is that it will also support language and literacy researchers to expand descriptions of disciplinary language beyond those currently based solely on texts that capture dominating perspectives and social positions.
Project partnerships are currently under development across the Americas (e.g., Vancouver, Haida Gwaii, Miami, San Francisco de Caldera).
