Akron Story Circle Project

Carolyn Behrman

Description

Cultures around the world have long employed storytelling to transmit important values and beliefs and to build community. Further, some research has indicated that individuals retain more from stories than other forms of information transmission like lectures. The pedagogical use of storytelling might have even more relevance in our digital society in which communication is shorter and less personal.Using ideas and practices generated by John O'Neal and Theresa Holden through their Color Line Project, several faculty members at the University of Akron began a storytelling project coinciding with Akron's "Rethinking Race" event. The project brought together an intergenerational and intercultural group of students, community members, and other parties on an equal playing field, allowing participants to operate as co-creators of a community's consciousness. The interactions brought a level of understanding about race that could not have been achieved in isolation. Moreover, the conversations, the stories, resulted in rich new avenues of academic engagement and extended artistic projects.This book is part user's manual and part users' stories. Mostly, it is the tale of a journey. Unlike a traditional classroom, in which an instructor has control, stories can veer anywhere, which can be a risky proposition. However, the results in understanding and learning cannot be denied. As one of the Akron faculty members put it: "we likely fail as teachers if our lesson plans do not generate hot moments, difficult dialogues, of both the foreseeable and the unanticipated variety." The Akron Story Circle Project has initiated a process of lifetime learning and reassessment. One student was quite direct: "While we may look different on the outside, come from different cities or towns, grow up in different kinds of family, we all are participating in the same world and we all are trying to find what's right, do what's right, or simply survive this crazy thing we call life."

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Anthropology

Informations

• Publié par: University of Akron Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629220543
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright © 2017 by Carolyn Behrman, Bill Lyons, Patricia Hill, James Slowiak, Donna Webb, and Amy Shriver Dreussi
All rights reserved • First Edition 2017 • Manufactured in the United States of America •
All inquiries and permission requests should be addressed to the Publisher, The University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio 44325-1703.
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ISBN: 978-1-629220-52-9 (paper)
ISBN: 978-1-629220-53-6 (ePDF)
ISBN: 978-1-629220-54-3 (ePub)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Behrman, Carolyn, author. | Lyons, William, 1960– coauthor.
Title: The Akron Story Circle Project : rethinking race in classroom and community / Carolyn Behrman, Bill Lyons, Patricia Hill, James Slowiak, Donna Webb, Amy Shriver Dreussi.
Description: First edition. | Akron, Ohio : The University of Akron Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017005526 (print) | LCCN 2017005607 (ebook) | ISBN 9781629220529 (paperback : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781629220536 (PDF) | ISBN 9781629220543 (ePub) | ISBN 9781629220536 (ePDF)
Subjects: LCSH: United States—Race relations—Study and teaching (Higher) | Storytelling—Social aspects—United States. | Storytelling—Political aspects—United States. | Akron Story Circle Project. | Storytelling—Ohio—Akron.
Classification: LCC E184.A1 B347 2017 (print) | LCC E184.A1 (ebook) | DDC 305.800973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005526
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI z39.48–1984. ∞
Cover design by Chris Hoot
The Akron Story Circle Project was designed and typeset by Amy Freels, with assistance from Tyler Krusinski. The typeface is Adobe Caslon with Futura display. It is printed on sixty-pound natural and bound by Bookmasters of Ashland, Ohio.
Contents
Foreword
John O’Neal and Theresa Holden
Introduction
James Slowiak
1 Teaching about Racial Conflict with Story Circles
Bill Lyons
2 Let My Story Speak for Me: Story Circles as a Critical Pedagogical Tool
Patricia S. Hill
3 Story Circles and the Social Science Toolkit
Carolyn Behrman and Sandra Spickard Prettyman
4 Once Upon a Time Story Circles and Public Art in Cascade Village
Donna Webb
5 Story Circles: A Powerful Tool in the Multifaceted Toolkit for Addressing Race in University Cocurricular Programing
Amy Shriver Dreussi
6 The Akron Color Line Project Performance
James Slowiak
7 Concluding Thoughts: Storytelling and Democracy
Foreword
The Pinnacle of the Color Line Project
Theresa Holden and John O’Neal
Over a ten-year period, from 1999 to 2009, we first created and, with our partners, helped to run Color Line Projects in six cities in the United States. Our partners were colleges, universities, and community or city arts organizations. The goals were lofty and challenging and we had many memorable moments that came close to achieving the mission and goals of the Color Line Project. The Color Line Project at the University of Akron not only met each of the goals, but also far surpassed our dreams for this important work.
The Color Line Project (CLP) was a multi-year, multi-community initiative of our organization Junebug Productions. CLP was a process designed to catalyze creative engagements among artists, educators, community activists, and their diverse constituencies. These engagements were intended to lead to the creation of high-quality art and to heighten our collective understanding of the dramatic impact of the Civil Rights Movement. Equally important, this process helps us work together to create activities, programs, and projects that challenge injustice today and improve the quality of life for all.
The Color Line Project was responsive to the fact that, despite its importance, the Civil Rights Movement is little known or understood and is devalued sometimes even by the people who participated in it. The project is also responsive to the need for archives of primary source material about the period. There is a certain urgency to the work because so many of those who were there are dying now. Most movement documentation was focused on leaders such as M. L. King Jr., while the grassroots salt-of-the-earth types, without whom there would have been no movement, have hardly been documented at all. These are the people whose stories the Color Line Project sought to prioritize.
Our Color Line Projects were carried out in the following six places: Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ; Palm Beach Community College, Lake Worth, FL; Cincinnati Arts Association, Cincinnati, OH; Flint Cultural Center Corporation, Flint, MI; Reston Community Center, Reston, VA; and The University of Akron, Akron, OH. The projects have been as unique as each of their locations. They each gave their Color Line Projects unique titles. The thousands of stories collected have created a rich treasure trove, which in itself proves the importance of such a project. However, the depth and width of the Akron Color Line Project, called the Akron Story Circle Project, was superlative.
The Akron Story Circle Project was and still is an incredible success because it discovered the power of stories. Our national CLP focused on stories because we believe people reveal more of their lives through their stories than through their arguments. Arguments can spawn defensiveness and may or may not reveal many telling insights. Stories on the other hand will always be insightful and authoritative and often will be entertaining as well.
We believe that by involving artists in the process of collecting stories from their communities and using them in their work, we strengthen the connections between the artists and their respective communities. When the communities see themselves reflected in the images created by their artists about them, the people will be made stronger, clearer and prouder of who they are and what they have done. Artists will emerge with stronger insights and appreciation of their roles in the life of their communities.
We believe that when educators see the stories of the people in their communities as vital to local and world issues and history, their students and the community will also grow stronger, and the educators will discover yet more ways to engage their students with their communities. And this is exactly what happened at the University of Akron.
As is evident in what follows, the Akron Project met each of our national CLP goals and strategies:
National Color Line Project Goals:
• to create public awareness of the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and the roles played by ordinary people in each locality;
In Akron: The CLP project and story circles were used in the Rethinking Race week. Through invited speakers and the stories told, much was shared about the Civil Rights Movement; a reminder to both those who remembered the Movement and for those learning about it for the first time, of how far we have come, but how far we still have to go.
• to identify and engage local artists, educators, and activists in each community to collect the personal stories and oral histories of community residents and to help these artists, educators and activists find ways to use the stories and the process of collecting them in their own work;
In Akron: Six incredible professors, Carolyn Behrman, Amy Shriver Dreussi, Pat Hill, Bill Lyons, Jim Slowiak, and Donna Webb, from six different departments, all took on the CLP with an energy and dedication unsurpassed. The professors welcomed us into their classrooms, where we offered our ideas and techniques to their students. Then with incredible creativity, each professor, using the story circle method, created projects for their students that met the educational goals of their subjects. Their students reached out into the wider community and used the vast resource of individual stories to carry out their inspired projects.
• to empower communities to hold their artists and educators accountable to the communities’ collective interests;
In Akron: The stories collected were “returned” to their storytellers in several ways, which are covered in this volume. For instance, a play derived from community stories is offered back to the people who told the stories; beautiful pieces of pottery, inspired by stories, are placed back in the that community for their appreciation. In each of the subject areas, the students whose projects reached into the community to gather stories “gave back” to that community, or will eventually, by what they have learned in their subject through the valuable insights they received from those very stories.
National Color Line Project Strategies:
• Local artists will use the collected stories and oral histories to make art;
• Educators will use them to study, to teach, and to employ the stories appropriately within their disciplines;
• Activists will be encouraged to use them in their efforts to mobilize and organize diverse constituencies;
• Junebug and the local partners will seek to network all these elements together so that they can learn from and assist each other.
This book shares the story of how these goals and strategies were accomplished with creativity and innovation by each of the professors.
The Akron Project captured the imagination of six remarkable professors, who in turn believed in the power of story with us and relayed this belief and indeed, passion to their students. These incredibly lucky students now have this simple, powerful tool in their hands to carry into their future, letting stories help build and heal their communities.
The Akron Story Circle Project was an incredibly rewarding project for us while we were working with each of the professors and all of the students. It was truly the pinnacle of the Color Line Projects. And now, what a reward for our ten years of work and dedi