Download PDFSharing Our Stories
We utilize story as our means of reflecting on our experiences, taking inspiration from the work of Martinez (2016) with counterstories and, more specifically, González (2020), who emphasizes the importance of Critical Race Theory (CRT) counterstorying for graduate studies. In particular, González (2020) contends that “CRT counter-storytelling can leave room for students to witness, examine, and interrogate the ways in which their experiences in graduate studies are shaped by the larger discourses of power and privilege, and, in turn, expose and resist those discourses” (para. 15). We see Gonzalez's (2020) claim as affirming/supportive to our approach of storytelling given that we want to further complicate the graduate student-instructor dual role via the use of race. By using counterstorying, then, we are making space for us to examine and interrogate the ways in which discourses of race circulate and come into contact with our experiences in our dual role.
With this in mind, we plan to share our stories, utilizing our own storytelling styles, which will be followed with an analysis section that synthesizes our work in relation to discussions of race in graduate student-instructor experiences. The ultimate goal of these stories is to locate additional precarity and vulnerability that we face as racialized graduate student-instructors at a PWI and bring them to the conversation for those that might share similar experiences.