Personal Cultural History and Community Map Project
How can young people gain confidence as authors of their own experiences and produce narrative or media-based projects where their knowledge can become a meaningful frame for classroom discussions on identity and belonging in the United States?
Get to thinking!
Your assignment to help you expand your understanding about yourself as well as others follows:
1. What is your racial and ethnic identity?
2. What is your earliest recollection of observing someone being excluded from your group based on race or culture?
3. What is your earliest recollection or memory of being different or excluded, based on race or culture, from those around you?
Take those ideas and translate them into just symbols or images. How does that change your perspective or your answers? How did it feel to answer these questions? Take turns sharing your answers with your group, Share out: where are you comfortable? where are you least comfortable? what did you learn?
Next, challenge yourself again with another series of questions:
1. What similarities and differences do you notice in everyone's experiences?
2. What are some of the major forces (families, communities, society, historical time period) that shaped each person's experiences?
3. How did the oppression, discrimination, and prejudice affect all of your lives?
4. In what way were people privileged and disadvantaged? Why?
5.What does it mean to be a person of color in the United States?
6. What does it mean to be a White person in the United States?
Reflect on these questions on your own and then share with your group.
Finally, slightly change gears and think about the community where you live and work. Look at the micro level (family), the meso level (community), and macro (institutional) levels.
Draw three concentric circles with micro in the middle, then meso, and then macro with arrows linking each where appropriate relationships exist. You can create the map specifically for yourself and your reference points or generally, utilizing basic systems. Think about how these levels contribute to oppression or liberation/empowerment (thanks Charlene & Chris).
Now consider, either in a group or on your own, the ramifications of what you discovered? How can this be changed? What can you do to break the cycle?
Assignment is a mashup of ideas from Corinne Manabat and Margo-Okazawa-Rey, Beyond Heroes and Holidays.
Thanks so much to Jennifer, Chi-Hui, Keith & Melissa for all of your expertise and input.
Thanks to the 15 members of the NEH seminar for expanding our thinking and being open to new ideas.
1. What is your racial and ethnic identity?
2. What is your earliest recollection of observing someone being excluded from your group based on race or culture?
3. What is your earliest recollection or memory of being different or excluded, based on race or culture, from those around you?
Take those ideas and translate them into just symbols or images. How does that change your perspective or your answers? How did it feel to answer these questions? Take turns sharing your answers with your group, Share out: where are you comfortable? where are you least comfortable? what did you learn?
Next, challenge yourself again with another series of questions:
1. What similarities and differences do you notice in everyone's experiences?
2. What are some of the major forces (families, communities, society, historical time period) that shaped each person's experiences?
3. How did the oppression, discrimination, and prejudice affect all of your lives?
4. In what way were people privileged and disadvantaged? Why?
5.What does it mean to be a person of color in the United States?
6. What does it mean to be a White person in the United States?
Reflect on these questions on your own and then share with your group.
Finally, slightly change gears and think about the community where you live and work. Look at the micro level (family), the meso level (community), and macro (institutional) levels.
Draw three concentric circles with micro in the middle, then meso, and then macro with arrows linking each where appropriate relationships exist. You can create the map specifically for yourself and your reference points or generally, utilizing basic systems. Think about how these levels contribute to oppression or liberation/empowerment (thanks Charlene & Chris).
Now consider, either in a group or on your own, the ramifications of what you discovered? How can this be changed? What can you do to break the cycle?
Assignment is a mashup of ideas from Corinne Manabat and Margo-Okazawa-Rey, Beyond Heroes and Holidays.
Thanks so much to Jennifer, Chi-Hui, Keith & Melissa for all of your expertise and input.
Thanks to the 15 members of the NEH seminar for expanding our thinking and being open to new ideas.