"The Work of Art Is a Scream of Freedom": The Power of Multimodal Arts and Humanities in Teaching Marginalized Histories

This qualitative case-study looks at how one preservice teacher uses multimodal counter-storytelling to push back on dominant historical narratives in social studies teaching. It examines how the teacher conceptualizes the use of critical arts and humanities as pedagogical tools to represent historically marginalized voices and disrupt dominant narratives (counter-storytell) in social studies education, and secondly, how they engage with these critical multimodalities in order to counter-storytell in their social studies student teaching. Findings show that preservice teachers can deftly and richly use multimodalities as access for counter-storytelling towards transformative social justice teaching with their students, but that a lack of curricular support and the necessity of content knowledge create challenges which demand greater assistance for educators in this pedagogical journey.