What is Counterstories

Using interviews, artifacts, email correspondences, and lesson plans collected from six white, female, preservice teachers during their student teaching, this chapter focuses on the stories that shaped their ideologies of the emergent bilingual children in their classrooms. The findings indicate the preservice teachers, while having diverse lived experiences, held some common majoritarian stories concerning English learners. In addition to those majoritarian stories already established in the field, there were three additional stories uncovered in this study that significantly influenced the ideologies of emergent bilingual students. The chapter concludes by encouraging teacher educators to unpack story and use it as a vehicle for addressing teacher ideology of emergent bilingual students.