The Storytelling Project Curriculum

1 Storytelling Project , Barnard College DRAFT February 2008 The Storytelling Project Curriculum : Learning About Race and Racism through Storytelling and the Arts Lee Anne Bell, Rosemarie A. Roberts, Kayhan Irani, Brett Murphy with the Storytelling Project Creative Team Copyright 2008 Storytelling Project , Barnard College DRAFT February 2008 Contents Table of Contents 2 Acknowledgments 4 Free Use of Curriculum 5 Introduction: The Storytelling Project : Learning about Race and Racism 7 through Storytelling and the Arts Lee Anne Bell and Rosemarie A. Roberts Chapter 1: Creating a Storytelling Community Overview 20 lesson 1: Stories, Stories, Stories 21 lesson 2: Comfort Zone and Learning Edge: Guidelines for a Risk-Supportive Community 25 lesson 3: Give Me Some Respect: Guidelines for Learning on the Edge 29 lesson 4: Prevalence of Race Continuum 33 Chapter 2: Stock Stories Overview 36 lesson 1: The Difference Between Us 38 lesson 2: The Stories We Tell 41 lesson 3: The American Dream 44 lesson 4: Race and Rights in History 59 lesson 5: Meritocracy and Color-Blindness 65 lesson 6: White Affirmative Action 68 lesson 7: Stories We Walk Into 73 Chapter 3.

2 Concealed Stories Overview 76 lesson 1: Who Has the Right Story? 78 lesson 2: A Picture Says a Thousand Words 80 lesson 3: Sharing Artifacts 82 lesson 4: Income Distribution, Race and Mobility 85 lesson 5: Media and Culture 89 lesson 6: Education and White Advantage 92 lesson 7: The American Dream: Who is Left Out? 95 lesson 8: Criminalizing Youth of Color 108 Chapter 4: Resistance Stories Overview 112 lesson 1: Complete the Image 113 lesson 2: Still I Rise 115 2 Storytelling Project , Barnard College DRAFT February 2008 lesson 3: Paint Down the Wall 117 lesson 4: Local Community Resisters 120 lesson 5: Anti-Racist Coalition-Building and the Role of Allies 123 lesson 6: What Does It Mean to Make Conscious Art?

3 127 lesson 7: Visual Resistance 135 Chapter 5: Counter Storytelling Overview 143 lesson 1: Put Yourself in the Middle 144 lesson 2: This is not a Bottle 147 lesson 3: Issue identification and Action Research 150 lesson 4: Drawing On Our Dreams 153 lesson 5: Who s Got the Power? 156 lesson 6: Planning an Arts-Based, Anti-Racist Action 158 lesson 7: Sharing the Storytelling Model with Others 160 Handouts and PDFs 162 Chapter One Energy Boosters PDF Chapter Two Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Race, lesson 1 PDF America the Beautiful lyrics, lesson 3 47 Schwarzenegger Speech to 2004 Republican Convention, lesson 3 49 Obama Speech to 2004 Democratic Convention, lesson 3 54 Time Line of Court Cases and Laws Related to Race, lesson 4 62 Racialized Public Policies and Institutional Practices, lesson 5 PDF The House We Live In, lesson 6 71 Chapter Three Family Net Worth by Race, 2004 PDF Image, lesson 5 PDF Echoes Poems, lesson 6 PDF Puerto Rican Obituary by Piedro Pietri.

4 lesson 7 98 A World Without Black People by Philip Emeagwali, lesson 7 102 Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes, lesson 7 105 NYPD and City Hall Excerpts, lesson 8 110 Chapter Four Birth of a Movement by Judy Baca, lesson 4 PDF Where is the Love by Black Eyed Peas, lesson 6 130 Crack Dat Soulja Boy by Soulja Boy, lesson 6 133 Storytelling Project Artist Checklist, lesson 7 138 Excerpt about James Farmer PDF CD of Visual Art, lesson 7 available at 3 Storytelling Project , Barnard College DRAFT February 2008 Acknowledgments: The Storytelling Project was made possible through generous funding from the Third Millennium Foundation. We are grateful to Marco Stoffel, Director of the Foundation, for his personal encouragement that we take risks in our work and generate something new.

5 We hope we have done that here. Our collaborative work was inspired by the hospitality and creative space provided at the International Center for Tolerance Education in Brooklyn, NY, a Project of the Third Millennium Foundation. We are especially grateful to Carol Stakenas, Director of ICTE from 2005-2006, for help and support throughout this Project and for providing such a generative space in which to work creatively. We were incredibly fortunate to work with an amazing team of teachers, university faculty, teaching artists and Barnard students throughout the 2005-2006 year. We want to acknowledge them here: Thea Abu El-Haj, Roger Bonair-Agard, Anthony Asaro, Vicki Cuellar, Dipti Desai, Zoe Duskin, Leticia Dobzinski, Christina Glover, Uraline Septembre Hager, Kayhan Irani, Patricia Wagner. Their creative energy, intellectual insights, and challenging questions pushed this work forward and stretched us to go farther in our thinking and creativity.

6 We also want to thank two outstanding teachers, Lisette Maestre and Hamlet Santos, who introduced the Curriculum to their students and allowed us to observe and videotape its implementation. We are indebted to these two wonderful teachers and the creative and critical youth in their classes whom we got to know during the 2005-2006 school year. Four Barnard student researchers helped us record the implementation process and interview the students and teachers involved. We are indebted to their hard work and creative insights: Vanessa D Egidio, Svati Lelyveld, Ebonie Smith and Brett Murphy. 4 Storytelling Project , Barnard College DRAFT February 2008 Free Use of Curriculum : Thank you for your interest in the Storytelling Project Curriculum : Teaching about Race and Racism through Storytelling and the Arts.

7 We are eager to have others use lessons from the Curriculum we have developed using the Storytelling Model and/or to have you develop your own lessons using our model. We have made this model and Curriculum available as a free PDF and encourage teachers to use the lessons and/or modify them to meet the needs of your own students and subject area, as well as create new lessons that fit the different story types. We ask that you sign in so that we can follow up and invite feedback on the model and Curriculum provided and invite contributions of new lessons we might add to the final Curriculum (with attribution to the creators of new lessons). We will use this feedback to strengthen the Curriculum before publishing a final version. Enjoy! In order to download the PDF and enable us to solicit feedback from users we ask that you provide the following information by registering on line at By filling out this form and downloading the Curriculum you agree to participate in a short follow-up questionnaire asking about your reactions to the Curriculum and inviting suggestions for improvement.

8 We will contact you three months after you download the PDF. First name_____ Last Name_____ Email address_____ Mailing address_____ Date of download_____ Race/Ethnicity_____ Gender_____ Grade Level/Subject Area Your Work With: _____ 5 Storytelling Project , Barnard College DRAFT February 2008 Reasons for interest in the STP Model/ Curriculum (check all that apply): _____To use in my own classroom/teaching _____To use as framework for developing lessons in subject area(s): _____ _____Interest in the Story Types to look at race/racism _____Interest in the Story Types to look at other social justice issues: _____ _____Interest in using the arts in teaching _____Other (please specify) Use as much space as you like below: Thank you. To fill out the form or if you have any questions please contact us at: 6 Storytelling Project , Barnard College DRAFT February 2008 Introduction: The Storytelling Project : Learning about Race and Racism through Storytelling and the Arts Lee Anne Bell and Rosemarie Roberts As a multicultural society, the United States is rich with the stories of the diverse groups that make up this country.

9 As a deeply racialized society, stained by structural racism, not all stories however are equally acknowledged, affirmed or valued. Many stories survive through tenacious resistance in the face of a status quo that marginalizes, and often silences, their telling thus diminishing their truths. This Curriculum asks students to consider what we lose when stories of and by diverse groups are concealed or lost, and what we gain as a society when we listen to and learn from the multitude of stories available for our consideration. The Curriculum also invites students to tell their own stories and through telling identify the challenges they face in a racialized society and articulate their visions for a future that offers inclusion, equity and justice to all of the diverse people who make up our society.

10 In the Storytelling Project Curriculum , we examine four story types about race and racism in the United States. These are: stock stories, concealed stories, resistance stories, and counter stories. Each of these story types is described briefly below. 7 Storytelling Project , Barnard College DRAFT February 2008 We begin with stock stories because they are the most public and ubiquitous in dominant, mainstream institutions, such as schools, government, workplaces and the media, and because the other story types critique and challenge their presumption of universality. Thus, they provide the ground from which we build our analysis. Stock stories are those told by the dominant group, passed on through historical and literary documents, and celebrated through public rituals, monuments and media representations.