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Womanist Restorying

Theory · All theories
Evidence · 1 claim (1 mixed) · 1 study (1 qualitative), q1 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 1 claim rests on one study

Description

Womanist restorying (Baker-Bell, 2017; Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016) combines Black feminist/womanist epistemology with narrative practice to give Black girls and women a method for surfacing, analyzing, and rewriting the stories that circulate about who they are and what they can become. It treats race, gender, sexuality, and class as intersecting rather than separable, positions the storyteller as a legitimate knower and theorist of her own experience, and roots itself in the historical practice of quilt-making by enslaved Black women — a form of resistance, knowledge preservation, and kinship-building carried out through everyday material craft. "Restorying" itself names a three-phase narrative process: deconstruction (breaking a dominant narrative into parts and identifying whose perspective is centered or silenced), analysis (situating that narrative in historical and current discourse), and reconstitution (speculatively redesigning the narrative, informed by marginalized lived experience). The theory is closely related to race-critical code studies (Benjamin, 2019), which argues that technologies and educational designs encode and reproduce narratives — so that rewriting a domain's founding story is not merely therapeutic but has design consequences for what a field's technologies and pedagogies come to look like.

Implications

Context

  • Most relevant in domains with a narrow, exclusionary dominant narrative about who belongs (the paper's case is computing education, but the mechanism generalizes to any field with a strong "who does this" stereotype)
  • Depends on learners having — or being given — a concrete narrative artifact to interrogate (a historical case, a stereotype the group itself names, a "who are computer scientists" prompt) rather than an abstract invitation to "share your story"

Target Learners

  • Learners from groups whose belonging in a domain is contested by the field's dominant narrative, particularly Black girls and women, though the deconstruct/analyze/reconstitute process is not itself demographically restricted

Target Learning Objectives

  • Building critical awareness of whose perspectives a domain's dominant narrative centers and silences
  • Constructing an alternative, self-authored narrative of belonging and possibility within the domain

Claims

Examples

Key Sources

  • Shaw, M. S., Coleman, J. J., Thomas, E. E., & Kafai, Y. B. (2023). Restorying a Black girl's future: Using womanist storytelling methodologies to reimagine dominant narratives in computing education. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 32(1), 52-75. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2023.2179847
  • Baker-Bell, A. (2017). "I never really knew the history behind African American language": Critical language pedagogy in an advanced placement English language arts class. Applied Linguistics Review, 8(2-3), 275-295.
  • Thomas, E. E., & Stornaiuolo, A. (2016). Restorying the self: Bending toward textual justice. Harvard Educational Review, 86(3), 313-338.
  • Benjamin, R. (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press.
Page metadata
Field Value
type theory
title Womanist Restorying
description A Black feminist/womanist storytelling methodology in which learners deconstruct dominant narratives about who belongs in a domain, analyze whose perspectives those narratives silence, and reconstruct alternative narratives grounded in their own lived experience.
status review
canonical True
generated by claude/unspecified on 2026-08-29
trust unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources 1 — shaw-et-al-2023

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