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Based in instructors' embodied perspectives, positionality stories are a critical methodology that opens space for students to consider academic counternarratives that contest educational conditions and assumptions. Sharing two stories here, we illustrate how educators might use these to help students from marginalized communities develop connections with teachers and navigate academia.
Nearly fifty years ago, Paulo Freire called for a critical pedagogy in which dialectics between teachers and students become a liberating force based in real-world experiences (Pedagogy). Since then, composition scholars have argued that instructor-centered pedagogies may have serious negative impact on learning, oftentimes promoting student discontent and passivity (Murray; Macrorie, Uptaught; Elbow, Writing without Teachers; Howell). Our field "since 1960 increasingly has centered on students-in all their diverse plumages-embedded in the ecosystems of their experiences" (Sullivan 367). Nonetheless, as teachers we know that framing instructor-centered and student-centered pedagogies as dyadic methods can be a problematic oversimplification. There are times when centering the teachers experience may contribute to a student-centered pedagogy in productive and useful ways. In this article, we take up one move that teachers can, and oftentimes do, make in the classroom-the sharing of stories about their own lived experiences-to show how such a practice centers the teacher situationally while centering students functionally. These stories, which we deem positionality stories, allow instructors to present academic counternarratives that contest educational conditions and assumptions while opening space for students to consider their own positionality within the academy. In these ways, positionality stories generate critical dialogue that is especially accommodating of students from marginalized backgrounds, fostering conditions such as those underscored by advocates of critical pedagogy.
Positionality stories must be practiced critically and carefully; they are not casual attempts at empathy or identification-oppressive or colonial moves when undertaken from a privileged perspective. Instead, they are open invitations to student-teacher dialogue that constellate the instructor within a network of potential resources from which students may draw as they see fit. Particularly for students whose backgrounds do not reflect traditional notions of academic identity, positionality stories may offer a way to self-position within the classroom and academia as a whole. That is, positionality stories can provide students with opportunities to move away from self-impressions of deficit that arise from assumptions that instructors are "naturally" assimilated into educational...