Teachers have so many great ideas for their curriculum and classroom. I’ve had ideas about book groups, sets of five or so books of diverse authors and topics for reading workshop. I’ve had ideas about beautiful journals. I imagined all of my students having a beautiful or cool journal that they would take care of and enjoy writing in — you know the ones that look like books with a hard cover.
As for the book groups, I have bought many books on my own (much to my husband’s chagrin), and as for the journals, I think students will value them more if they buy them, so I’ve decided to buy a few and sell them to students. However, many teachers have ideas (far more creative than mine)that fall to the side because of the cost, but these days, many schools and local organizations offer mini-grants.
In March, my district sent out a call for grant proposals, and nearly $16,000 was awarded to teachers in our district for community service projects, nonfiction texts, a dinner-theater business, at-home libraries, reading groups, music literacy, a mariachi program, and robotics. Oh, there is one more:
Sarah Donovan of Winston Campus Junior High for her project titled Bearing Witness: Every Story, Every Life Matters.This project will reveal to students the wisdom of humanity through the art of interviewing. Students will learn to develop and select questions, listen and be present, engage in follow-up questions, and record and share their interviews.
Indeed. Just a couple of days before the April 1st deadline, our eighth grade class was reading Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a story about a teenage boy who decides to make the twenty-two mile journey from his “rez” in Wellpinit, Washington to a “white” school daring to imagine a life beyond the borders of his reservation. We watched Billy Moyer’s interview with Sherman Alexie, “On Living Outside Borders,” and students were really engaging with the interview. Of course, Alexie is fascinating and funny and, just, real, but Moyers is a great interviewer. He really listens and asks relevant, probing, compassionate questions to help Alexie tell his story.
I thought about how many people around us, in our lives and on the fringes of our lives, have a story to tell. Those stories are full of the wisdom of humanity, so I decided to write a grant to fund an interviewing project that I call “Bearing Witness.”
So much of our communication is fleeting and inconsequential. Think about quick text messages, Snapchats deleted in seconds, messages limited to 40 characters. While such digital communication is a part of this “twenty-first century learning,” so, too, is it part of the way we relate and understand one another.
In order to be heard, to be understood, to get a little closer to what humanity “ought” to be, I think we need to teach our students more than how to use digital tools, even more than listening or questioning skills. We have to teach a stance or even a philosophy of communication. With this project, I want to see if we can develop a way of communicating with others that is closer to bearing witness to each others lives, to recognize every single life matters equally and infinitely.
According to Shoshana Felman who wrote Testimony as it relates to the Holocaust, “the interview-listener takes on the responsibility for bearing witness that previously the narrator felt he bore alone.” The encounter of coming together with another human being makes possible something like a “repossession of the act of witnessing”; there becomes this joint responsibility of witnessing a life, which is the source of the re-emerging truth.
When we tell someone’s story or attempt to represent another life through images or tweets, we are not alone; we have a responsibility to that life. Authors of the Common Core recognize the need to cultivate speaking and listening skills for college and the workplace, but those authors do not consider the ethics and justice in our content and methods. While debate and argument are important, I don’t want to lose sight of the human beings with and about whom we are arguing. “Global competency” is another hot phrase, but again, can we talk about that in the context of ethics? Can we define global competency as an understanding and sensitivity to diverse cultures and ways of being in the world? Stories teach us this empathy.
The Bearing Witness project teaches — or intends to teach — students how to take part in and facilitate meaningful interviews within school and even beyond to family, the local community, and potentially the global community. I hope we learn the wisdom of humanity through the art of interviewing: developing and selecting questions, tips to recording, the art of listening and being present, engaging in follow-up questions, and then learning to upload the recordings to share in some way.
Student will begin learning to bear witness to the lives of their peers and then extend this to their own families so that they will not one day say I wish I would have asked my grandma or abuelita about her childhood. They will learn what it means to ask Who are you? What have you learned from your life? How do you want to be remembered? Ultimately, I hope the lessons of this project will lead students to develop a personal philosophy about relating to other human beings in school and beyond, perhaps into their careers but perhaps into how they view diverse peoples. I hope that they global will recognize that everyone around us has a story, and the world needs to hear it.
The mini-grant money will go to digital voice recorders and batteries. Our school has iPads, but students cannot take them home, and I hope this project can bridge our school and the students’ communities. Students will take these digital recorders and say, “Tell me your story. I will listen.” I imagine an archive of human stories, an enduring, impactful testament to who we are as human beings.I have some experience using them with my own research, but this summer I will be reviewing how to use them while I develop the logistics of this project.
I will post updates on this project on Ethical ELA this year. Please get in touch with me if you have suggestions, connections to journalists, or want to take part in any way.
Do you have project ideas for your students, classroom, or school community? Ask your school about their grant program, look for local grants in your community, or check out some of these sites to fund your ideas:
- http://www.donorschoose.org/
- http://www.fundforteachers.org/funding-opportunities/
- http://www.uft.org/teaching/funding-classroom-projects
- http://www.edutopia.org/grants-and-resources
Then, if you get the grant, write about it on Ethical ELA. If you don’t get the grant and decide to use your own money, tell us about that, too (but don’t keep it a secret from your spouse; I’ve found that after the sticker shock, my husband was “invested” in “our” project).