The final stage of the project had the most profound impact on my learning and personal development as we shared our digital stories with an audience of our peers and professors. (. . .) I felt like my voice was being heard by the very community that my shame had for so long inhabited; I was a cross-cultural diplomat and an intellectual coyote, bridging the gap between my polar communities. In light of this learning, I will go forth in my life with an attitude of transparency about my identity as a low-income, first-generation college student. I will share my experiences with the knowledge that they can in fact effect change.
-Scout Crowell ‘20
The value of feeling that my identity has a place in an academic setting has to be seen in relation to years of learning a western canon that does not speak to my experience. (. . .) The retelling of our story has empowered us to find belonging while providing us with a wealth of techniques to analyze stories that we can apply for the rest of our lives.
-Jonathan Palacios ‘19
Presenting these stories publicly turned our class project into a political statement. We opened up a space in the Kenyon community for these perspectives to be heard, and now each of us has a slice of some else’s story residing inside of us. (. . .) We can evaluate my personal experience in the active-passive role of storytelling by measuring my contributions to the project (. . .). In each step of the project I made important contributions: determining the interview questions, conducting the interview, editing the written story, adding images and sound to create certain emotions around this story. While presenting the stories publicly was a political action, my role in the creation of the story was political as well, because I had to leave my own perspective behind. I learned what it means to be an ally in storytelling, which is one of the most powerful ways to decolonize identities and complicate the images we have of ourselves.
-Dani Huffman ‘19
Submissions from 2018
Rooted, Samuel Canseco and Jorge Spagnuolo
First Generation, Scout Crowell and Sean Garrett
Una adaptación de "Papá que se despierta cansado en la oscuridad" de Sandra Cisneros, Matthew Dinnen and Jonathan Pastor
Living in the Hyphen, Betania Escobar and Jonathan Palacios
Performing Masculinities, Dani Huffman, Jorge Dumenigo, and Roberto Vasquez
Lucky, Celeste Ramirez Diaz, Grace Cross, and Emi Cardinale