Another Way To Find Counternarratives
Another way to find a conternarrative is to follow up with people who’ve been profiled in a news article and ask them, “How do you feel about the way your experience was represented? Is there anything else you’d like to say?”
In 2017 in the Chicago Tribune, I came across “Loyola program opens college doors for vulnerable students” by Dawn Rhodes. The article struck me as perpetuating a messiah complex narrative where the low-income, first-generation college students needed to be saved, controlled, micro-managed according to the private school’s standards if they were to succeed.
The use of “vulnerable” triggered my own memories of being a low-income, first-generation college student. I asked myself, “Did I ever think of myself as vulnerable?” I was definitely lost and broke--but vulnerable?
So I reached out to a student there, a student who had been my student, and asked her, “What did you think of the Tribune article?”
Lisseth Perez--ambitious, intelligent, undocumented--told me she and many students said they felt misrepresented, looked down upon. So I asked if she’d like to tell her side of it. That’s how this counternarrtive story came to be a few weeks later: “Two Chicago Universities Establish Generous Scholarships for Undocumented Students” for Latino USA. When I give this to students, I’ll remove my name in the byline.
Students can go through the same news driver exercise with these two articles and then write a reflection:
- Which article presents the people profiled more as individuals with agency?
- How does the Tribune article use language that shows the students as disempowered people?
- How does the Latino USA article use language that highlights the students’ agency?
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