1 Narratives help us make sense of the world; they shape our historical and contemporary understanding of cultures and societies (Clandinin & Connelly, 2004; Goffman, 1974). As people tell stories during improvisational play and through retelling or recombining narratives from popular media, they navigate daily experiences, questions and problems. Yet stories employed in social play continue to utilize negative stereotypes (or stock characterizations) of minoritized people, contributing to the ways in which readers see themselves and others, and limiting the potential for actions and interactions (Bell & Roberts, 2010; Cruz, 2002; Graves, 1999; Lester, 2011). Counter-narratives, such as those of minoritized peoples’ community contributions and resistance to inequitable power structures, offer alternative views and purposes for relationships across difference (Anzaldúa, 2012; Delgado, 1998; hooks, 2012; Mastro & Kopacz, 2006; Milner, 2008; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002; Vrij, van Schie, & Cherryman, 1996).

2 As humanities and education scholars, we are particularly interested in contemporary counter-narrative constructions as a pedagogy to engage questions of power. We see the impact of colonial Othering in the required selection of readings in our higher education courses; the educational policies and practices that disproportionately impact our students of color; and the awkward silences about race, gender, class, and white privilege in our classrooms. We believe that narrative construction has an important and under-explored role to play in examining these questions, whether in P-12 classrooms or higher education courses in education and the humanities. We want to “hack schooling” (LaPlante, 2013) through the pedagogical deconstruction and reconstitution of stories in our own arts and education classrooms, beginning with writing such stories ourselves. Students and instructors can complicate the notion of a single authorial vision of the past and present through recombining events from the historical record, contemporary news accounts, or popular culture; playing with time; or adopting various points of view.

3 We have turned to counter-narrative research to inform our narrative constructions. In the field of education, for example, narrative researchers often tell the life stories of minoritized students and teachers, focusing particularly on resistance to inequity, positioning these perspectives as vital cultural capital to the classroom and to educational reform (Coulter & Smith, 2009; He & Ross, 2010). Counter-narrative educational inquiry also engages arts-based methodologies such as visual art and poetry. Faltis (2012) uses paintings to raise questions about restrictive border and immigration policies, and the responsive struggles of Mexican/Mexican American people to live under these policies in their communities and schools. S. Chappell and D. Chappell (2011) use collage and sculpture to analyze the objectification and exoticization of indigenous peoples’ histories in children’s nonfiction resource books. Cahnmann (2006) and S. Chappell (2008) use poetry to reflect on how students and teachers navigate schools’ cultural borders. Counter- narrative and critical storytelling processes are also used as methodologies in performance ethnography and ethnodrama (Mitsumura, 2013; Saldaña, 2008). These arts-based methods demand an examination not only of “what counts” as evidence in social inquiry but also the purpose of the inquiry itself. What, we might ask, is the purpose of telling such “critical” or “counter” stories? Who “needs” to hear them? To tell them? What are the ultimate goals of the artist-researchers?

4 Our focus on counter-narrative storytelling interrogates ideologies embodied in childhood improvisational play. Social play often (re)produces unexamined norms of social dominance, through ideas/actions such as a lack of respect for difference, physical violence, and role enforcement (Killen & Rutland, 2011; Smith & Boulton, 1990). Yet, increasingly, youth-produced media counters the stance that domination-based play is a matter of “kids being kids.” Young people regularly engage in improvisational play and strategic creative activity that speak against colonial socialization and toward visions of a just, equitable, and inclusive world (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Schultz, 2011; S. Chappell, 2007; 2011, 2013; Students of Thurgood Marshall High School, 2004; Youth Speaks, 2012). We are inspired by such aesthetic strategies of intervention and counter-narrative storytelling; and, in this paper, have engaged our own narrative constructions to imagine childhood play that confronts itself—where play is stopped and re-enacted with counter-colonial purposes.

5 We write and re-write two narratives of childhood play, first engaging problems of colonial power and then imagining resistance to and critical thinking about that power. To create these stories, we examined our own childhood memories, popular portrayals of childhood play and schooling, school textbooks, popular culture artifacts, and young people’s self-authored narratives of resistance. We identified the impact of stock stories (dominant narratives) on our own childhood thinking, as well as how multiple perspectives from concealed and resistant stories informed our politicization into young adulthood. These autobiographical reflections informed our construction of the children’s play. Following the stories, we discuss the aesthetic strategies we used to deconstruct and re-story power-based relationships in and through the characters’ play, strategies that might support future pedagogy utilizing counter-colonial storytelling as a methodology both in P-12 and higher education.

6 Recent scholarship identifies the complexity of fiction writing as social research. Diversi (1998) suggests that the purpose of narrative research is to bring the stories of others closer to the reader, helping them uncover “truth” of analogous moments in their own lives. While both types of writing employ literary techniques (characterization, description, point of view, scenes, etc.), narrative construction is widely understood to consist of renderings of the results of field-based research and empirical data (Barone, 2000; Barone & Eisler, 1997; Coulter & Smith, 2009; Polkinghorne, 1995; Sparkes, 2002). Both narrative construction and fiction as social inquiry raise questions and encourage the reader to look anew at personal and societal values, attitudes, and beliefs (Barone, 2002; Barone & Eisner, 2012; Richardson, 2000). This aesthetic destabilization can also encourage the reader/viewer to imagine new possibilities for social action. For Denzin (2000), this imagining of the future occurs through emotion: the connection between reader and writer evoked through the dialectical creation of and reflection on narrative events, and the ways both reader and writer can imagine circumstances being different, or better, in the “real world.”

7 Writing and reading stories implicitly produce “acts of transfer” (Taylor, 2003), a transmission of social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated, “restored,” or “twice behaved” behavior (Schechner, 2003, pp. 2-3). For this research on the impact of domination in play, we reflected on our own memories of childhood participation in certain played-through narratives, especially those with a focus on colonial exploration and imperialism. S. Chappell, for example, remembers enacting a rain dance in a school production of Peter Pan, as well as drawing Pilgrims and Indians in peaceful Thanksgiving communion, but never learning about the Trail of Tears or the vibrant present-day communities of native peoples. D. Chappell recalls playground (re)enactments of the archeological removal of ancient artifacts from native lands, as well as dueling between white and native characters in the manner of Indiana Jones, while true stories of the removal and restorations of native artifacts were never mentioned in class. Both authors learned about slavery as a tragic period in US history, but not about its contemporary impacts on individuals, communities, and institutions. As educators and scholars who come from white, middle class childhoods, we often reflect on how infrequently we were exposed to the problems of social dominance, informed of our own positionality within those systems, or encountered strategies to resist and transform those systems.

8 As adults, we personally and professionally confront the affective and cognitive impact of colonial narratives on our thinking and acting in the world (Chappell, 2010). Yet we struggle to imagine how children might take up counter-colonial methodologies in their own lives, particularly in their elementary school years. In this paper, we take up the question of re-thinking children’s play by emphasizing dissonance in our own storytelling. We are guided by Bell and Roberts’ (2010) framework, which requires an analysis of stock stories to identify the resistance stories concealed in or omitted from those stock stories. After such analysis, counter-stories can be created. We hope to inform pedagogies in our classrooms, with university students who will either teach young people or create art for them.

9 We present scenarios in which young people’s play leaves uncontested colonial structurations of race, class, and gender, and then utopianize these scenarios in order to raise questions about embedded relationships, values, beliefs, and practices in the activities described. In the counter-stories, we strategically foreground perspectival differences and ethical/moral complexities by specifically crafting the ways in which the child characters encounter artifacts and scenarios in his or her play. Our stories reference two cultural artifacts—a real-life board game dealing with the Spanish colonization of Puerto Rico, and an imagined integrated social studies/drama lesson that “teaches” about slavery and the Underground Railroad through the assignment of roles and improvisational drama activities.

10 In writing about these artifacts, we examine the ways in which they construct historical societies. We consider the ways that restating cultural distinction and the superiority of colonizing societies were an important part of the colonial project (Stoler, 1989)—a “justification” for policies such as land seizure and enslavement. Such policies and philosophies also depended on the consent of the colonized or subaltern (Lears, 1985), and tended to treat the (usually nonwhite) “other” as a constructed fantasy (Said, 1979), negating or rendering interchangeable subaltern identities (JanMohamed, 1985). Native peoples and places were (and are) exoticized, infantilized, and/or fetishized in literature, visual art, and theatre as part of a specific cultural strategy to demonstrate and reinscribe Western superiority. While narratives from the colonial period marked the times in which they were written, certain tropes endure into postcolonial times and the present day.

11 The first of our scenarios centers around two young people playing a game called Puerto Rico (Seyfarth, 2002), published in the US by Rio Grande Games, beginning in 2002 and still a popular exemplar of the “Euro game” style, in which the goal is not typically to attack opposing players but to outmaneuver them through the development of a superior economic “victory point” engine. As the players engage in the narrative of historical conflict and exploration, Puerto Rico asks them to assume various roles associated with colonization, including mayor, craftsman, and ship captain, and the key to winning the game is to select useful roles at appropriate times. None of these roles reference the native peoples who were on the island before the Spanish colonists arrived. The game is targeted at players from age 12 through adult, has won numerous game awards, and has influenced many other tabletop games that use the “Age of Exploration” as their in-game world. Our scenario examines the ethical dilemmas structured by the game as the players encounter its roles, game board, and storyline(s).

12 In our second scenario, elementary school-aged children participate in a drama activity suggested by their publisher-produced, fifth-grade social studies textbook. The pedagogical goal of this activity is to understand a given historical event—the Underground Railroad— through dramatic play. The teacher is directed to set up a scenario, assign roles to the students, and then facilitate the unfolding of a process drama, in which the students negotiate a conflict or problem. This pedagogical strategy of dramatizing key moments in history was popularized by drama practitioner/theorist Dorothy Heathcote (Heathcote & Bolton, 1995) and further developed by others, including Cecily O’Neill (O’Neill & Lambert, 1982). It is used today in language arts, social studies, and even science and math classes. Our scenario examines the ethical dilemmas that the students encounter once the dramatic play begins.

13 In the scenarios above, children play characters—real or imagined—from history within a matrix of power and domination. Scenarios such as these, prompted by artifacts such as books, games, and curricula, encourage performance and representation that are troubling when viewed through postcolonial and critical race theories (Love, 2004). Through these theories, scholars question the imperialist mindset of whiteness as norm and the exoticization and “othering” of non-white peoples that led to exploitation, subjugation, and brutality. More generally, critical theories allow scholars to look at strands of power in any scenario involving dominant and subaltern identities. The scenarios we presented here ask contemporary students—whether children or adults—to embody people and play out events temporally and culturally removed from their present day identities. For these students, with multicultural/multilayered identities, the play raises ethical questions about embodiment. How can we teach about dominant stories while at once asking students to resist them? What roles should children take, and what if they refuse? Might they feel drawn to an experience even if it contradicts their personal values? And, how can we engage in a counter-narrative process open to multiple interpretations and social ideologies?

14 Barone (2001) uses the term “revolutionary readers” to describe “readers who are reluctant to relax their critical faculties” (p. 172). Such readers “speak back” to the texts they engage with, questioning their assumptions and creating alterative readings to serve as heuristics toward understanding and meaning. When young people create the kinds of counter narratives we depict in our constructed narratives and express them through performance, they might be considered “revolutionary” or “resistant” players, acting against the text they are assigned. Because our characters—Elena, Jonathan, and Jamal—have access to alternate perspectives—prior knowledge that they can juxtapose with the controlling narratives they’re working through—they can make critical decisions, alter the frames that structure their play, and create new narratives and performances that seem more just or ethical to them. The stories of Elena and Jamal are deliberately utopian views, constructed not to suggest real-world probabilities, but to offer a vision of how resistant play might function; how certain culturally-bound acts of transfer might be disrupted.

15 We employed multiple aesthetic and pedagogical strategies in our scenarios, intending to prompt the reader’s emotional response and promote ethical questioning. We used principles associated with narrative construction to understand the mindsets of young people playing through historical scenarios and offer some insight into what young people and the adults who facilitate such experiences might do to “interrupt” the embodiment inherent in playing through these scenarios. The strategies we will highlight here are: freezing the action, responding with counter- narratives, calling attention to gaps and slippages in meaning, and employing multiple stances of analysis in our writing.

16 Our first strategy derives from the work of Boal (1985), who, in his forum theatre methodology, “freezes” the action of a scene at a point in which the protagonist must make a decision regarding how to deal with the (mis)use of power by authority. After the freeze, Boal’s audience (he employs the term “spect-actors”) tests out various strategies for the protagonist to employ to overcome this subjugation. In our scenarios, this temporal intervention did not lead to audience interaction with the narrative (due to the stories’ form), but rather to a specific choice made by the protagonists, with utopic results. Thus, the choices we had our protagonists make represent only one solution to the problems they find themselves facing. In the classroom, we might ask students to create multiple solutions inspired by different character interactions with the problem.

17 We also employed counter-narratives—those stories of subaltern, resistance to dominant cultural norms, assumptions, and expectations—in our scenarios. These counter-narratives derived from information the protagonists had about the period; only because they had this knowledge were they able to weave it into the play they were participating in. The additional perspectives provided by the young people would have come from primary and secondary artifacts and texts they researched on their own or were shown or directed to by adult facilitators. The insertion of these perspectives aligns with Bell and Roberts’ (2010) strategy of revealing concealed narratives through interrogation of the dominant scenario often at work in children’s play.

18 In addition to referencing these counter-narratives, we had our protagonists call attention to gaps and slippages (Iser, 1980) in the artifacts they were using for their play. The lives of the Taino people, for example, are completely absent from the game of Puerto Rico as it is published, as Elena points out. These gaps and slippages provide opportunities for players to “fill in” as they see fit—yet this includes the opportunity not to fill in the gaps and leave the silences as they stand. In our story, the players choose to fill in the gaps because they care about the absence they represent.

19 One strategy for “filling in” Iser’s gaps is to recast and rewrite given historical scenarios. In addition to creating voices not present in the scenarios, recasting and rewriting can also talk back to stock responses or stereotypes as part of play (Bell & Roberts, 2010). As mentioned above, this strategy depends upon knowledge of counter-narratives; players cannot talk back to stereotypes, for example, unless they recognize them as stereotypes, and this recognition is based on knowledge and understanding of the complexities of culture(s) from within.

20 Finally, in our writing we employed two stances of analysis suggested by social studies education scholars Levstik and Barton (2005). We adopted explicit positionalities on cause and effect and moral response as authors, and conveyed those stances conveyed within the scenarios. Through the stance of cause and effect, fiction can make connections between otherwise disparate events or ideas. The moral response stance allows the characters to judge the actions of people in history from a contemporary standpoint, such as when Jamal insists the abolitionist have the opportunity to speak, or when Graham and Elena raise questions about the absence of indigenous people from the Puerto Rico colonial trading scenario. Whether in P-12 or higher education, a counter-colonial methodology necessitates that instructors and students adopt moral response stances, with the open possibility that these stances may lead to diverse, even contradictory, responses to the action. Instructors and students engage the characters’ questioning process as a means for personal reflection on issues such as cultural and economic domination, othering, and response/resistance.

21 If the artifacts and performances of culture function in ways that often (re)produce colonial power relations (A. Chappell, 2008), then we suggest that counter mimesis (McKenzie, 2000) can also structure play. Through a prolonged engagement with ethical questions, deconstruction and reconstruction, we can teach young people to play—and adults to facilitate that play—differently. This pedagogical strategy can serve to counter the narratives that young people are often expected to engage in and assimilate into their understandings of both historical events and peoples and contemporary culture.

22 Through our scenarios highlighting moments of play—in particular, the moments when play can change—we worked to develop ideological clarity (Expósito & Favela, 2003) regarding the ways that play and storytelling might contribute to internalized systems of social dominance, as well as re-configurations of those systems toward care and justice. We are sensitive to the ethical implications of our narrative inquiry. While we strive to create a utopian “third space” (Bhabha, 1994) for examining the power of social dominance, we also recognize JanMohamed’s (1985) stance that it is impossible to “negate” dominant culture in order to comprehend the “Other.” Thus, we worked to interrupt dominant culture and include counter-narratives rather than attempt such a negation. Rather than a comprehension of “the Other,” we wanted to hint toward the complex social questions that are not typically addressed in scenarios such as the ones we built upon. Like Barone’s (2000) “artful writer-persuader,” we worked to relinquish control of interpretation, putting the reader in the center of the meaning-making process.

23 Yet we are conscious of the deep introspection required of writers—researcher, teacher, and student—interested in counter-narrative storytelling. Tillman (2002) calls for culturally sensitive research that examines our positionalities within/across collaborations, and shifts spaces toward asset- and capacity-based views of participant knowledge. Such sensitivity can apply to the ways that we as writers view our characters, the power of their voices, and the expertise they convey. Through such a proactive reflective and critical stance, writers can explicitly address neo-liberal epistemologies (Scheurich and Young, 1997). For example, the social studies textbook often emphasizes the end of slavery rather than an analysis of its explicit historic impact or its implicit structuring of economies today. This stance requires self- reflection, and an analysis of the relation between self and social systems of power (Milner, 2007).

24 As Leavy (2013) suggests, there is strong potential for fiction writing or hybrid narrative research/fiction writing as a methodology of living inquiry. Fiction encourages the act of everyday witnessing to bring to light unquestioned curricular moments we struggle with culturally (Coulter and Smith, 2009). Fiction writing helped us as researchers and teachers to envision utopian moments of resistant play, in which we questioned old scenarios and imagined new narratives. Future applications of this research involve reading these narrative constructions with our university students in the humanities and education, discussing the ethical dilemmas they pose, examining the aesthetic strategies used, and employing them during in-class writings, and reflecting on the applications of “interruption” as a counter-colonial strategy in our daily lives. We are committed to future enactments of narrative construction as potent vehicles for pedagogical conversation about nationhood and citizenship, and as conduits for alliance-building that results from such critical, creative processes, whether in P-12 or higher education.