“Those who do not have the power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.” – Salman Rushdie
Story is powerful. Whether the his-stories ingested through schooling, the discourses given voice in the news or the identities composed in popular culture, we make the world and are made by the world, through narrative. Politicians get this, media scholars get this, the youth get this.
I was visiting a 5th grade bilingual classroom in the Santa Fe Public Schools (SFPS) last year, documenting the program that I worked with, El Otro Lado, which uses the arts to draw out personal story in the classroom. The students were doing an activity about their hopes and their dreams, imagining the lives they’d like to live in the future. I crouched next to desks, my camera hanging around my neck, and listened to young people tell me about going to college, buying a car, learning how to drive. As I milled through the classroom one young girl’s drawing caught my eye. She drew a princess-style prom dress on a girl with skin as pale as the page and bright blond hair pulled up into a ponytail. My eyes scanned from the paper on her desk to the brown hand holding the colored pencil and the dark hair that hid her face. The realization that this young Mexican woman saw herself in a prom dress as white-skinned and blond-haired knocked the wind out of my chest.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to speak with the young woman about her self portrait that day in New Mexico; however my experiences in education have taught me that multiculturalism impacts youth engagement in an important way (I’m still unpacking the nuances of the “how”). Although El Otro Lado hasn’t studied the ways in which students involved are impacted in terms of academic outcomes, participating teachers describe increased engagement in their classrooms and students note the impact of seeing themselves and one another in a new light through the stories they share about who they are and where they come from. Debra Holloway, among others, has synthesized studies and scholarship that demonstrate the power of arts education for social transformation in ways that mirror what I saw in classrooms throughout Santa Fe.
As an educator working at the intersection of cultural exchange, civic engagement and arts education, that moment in a classroom encapsulates the ways in which an essential component of a student’s success in a learning environment has to do with whether or not they see themself in the stories they are learning through. This year, as my work moves into the media realm and extends beyond the classroom, I’ve arrived at a burning curiosity to know how youth think about the types of narratives they encounter in their own media engagements and experiences. I’m consistently in conversation with texts, coworkers, and colleagues about these ideas but have realized that a key perspective — the key perspective — is missing. Where are the youth? To this end I am drumming up a participatory project that will bring youth from different corners of our city together to explore their own curiosities around media as a group. I’m dying to know what they think about the stories they’re exposed to, how they conceive of engagement and participation and if they use media themselves to talk back to the narratives they witness. Do students in the Boston area feel more engaged when they see themselves represented in the media? Or, will the students have an entirely different question we should be asking?
Stay tuned.