This article describes strategies that the author employed to make a general education course titled "Fairy Tales and Folklore" more diverse and inclusive. Students read primary texts and secondary articles as part of ongoing debates, then form their own arguments within the debate, thus coming to understand how fairy tales are embedded within open and ongoing critical discussions about contemporary culture. Further, students analyze a classic work of Native American literature that, like the Grimm Brothers' "Kinder- und Hausmärchen," employs folklore within a project of cultural nationalism, but with very different implications due to systems of power and oppression that emerge at the intersection of folklore and colonization. Finally, students create new tales out of their own experiences. Through analysis of diverse texts, debate, and creative writing that emphasize the role of storytelling as resistance, the course described here takes first steps toward turning the fairy-tale classroom into a space of empowerment.