The Community Countertext Project

Empowering K-12 education and advancing inclusive language teaching and research

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 capture perspectives missing in dominating school curriculum. These texts may be oral, written, multimodal, and/or multilingual. This website is home to a curated collection of countertexts. Click on “Database” above to start exploring the collection!

Or check out the welcome video below to learn more about the motivation for this project and how to use this website.


    Main Objectives

    Many educators have expressed difficulty finding or accessing countertexts that speak to a range of knowledges and curricular topics. Therefore, the goals of this project are:

  1. 1. To collect, and eventually generate and publish, community texts that capture minoritized knowledges, perspectives, and language practices;
  2. 2. To make project texts available through a website so they are freely accessible to community members, teachers, students, and researchers.

This 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 Leads

Kathryn Accurso (kathryn.accurso@ubc.ca) & Jason D. Mizell (jason.mizell@gcpsk12.org)

Contributors

Giovanna Lucci (UBC PhD candidate, children’s literature expert) provides ongoing curation, research, and website maintenance. Additional research and web development was supported by Monica Lai (licensed elementary teacher, UBC B.Ed.), Yuting Liu (UBC M.Ed.), and Jacqueline Chan (website design). Funding support was provided by the Edith Lando Virtual Learning Centre.

Navigating the database and suggesting additional countertexts

  1. To access the countertext collection, click on “Database” at the top of this page. You can search using the drop-downs by grade level, author/illustrator identities, languages represented in the book, character representations, or subject-area connections. Additionally, you can enter your own search terms (e.g., a particular theme or author name).
  2. Alternately, you can simply scroll through the database and click the “Additional Info” button under any text you are interested in. The “Additional Info” page offers a summary of the text and text type, information about the creators’ identities, themes, representations, links to find the book (freely where possible), and teaching resources provided by the author or publisher (when available).
  3. To suggest a resource you would like to see added to this collection, click on “Suggest a Resource” at the top of this page. Our team will continually vet and add additional texts.

A note about our research process

  1. Each text that appears in this collection has been read and coded by at least three members of our team to confirm text type, representations, and curriculum connections. We have contacted each author, illustrator, and/or publisher to ask the creators’ how they self-identify in terms of the perspectives they bring to their work, and whether they have already put together teaching resources to guide how their texts might be used by educators.