Final Status Report FY 2014 - CU-Boulder Outreach Committee
1. Program Title: Liberalizing Humanities Education: Tell Your Story Studios and The Our Town Stories Project
2. Awardee Names: William McGinley - CU
3. Participant Counts
Tell Your Story
Tenure-Track Faculty: (1) William McGinley
Public School Teachers: (3) Katie Miles, Connie Quigg, Val Wheeler, Steven Kurzban
CU MFA Student: (1) Dakota Manton
Boulder High Student: (1) Miles
Other Teachers: (2) Jack Collum, American Poet; Jovan Mays, National Slam Poet
Total Participants External CU: (20) Students, Casey Middle School
Our Town Stories Project (Humans of Boulder and Visions of Sand Creek)
Tenure-Track Faculty: (1) William McGinley
CU Graduate Student: (1) Christine Kuster
Public School Teachers: (2) Katie Miles, Sarah Brooks
Total Participants Inside CU: None
Impacted Populations
Tell Your Story
K-12 Students: (20) Casey Middle School
K-12 Educators: (3) Katie Miles, Connie Quigg, Val Wheeler, Steven Kurzban
CU MFA Student: (1) Dakota Manton
Boulder High Student: Miles
Other Teachers: (2) Jack Collum, American Poet; Jovan Mays, National Slam Poet
TYS Audience: (20) Parents/Guardians from Casey Middle School
Boulder Community Members: (50+) (Pearl Street Art Exhibition and Performance)
Total Participants Inside CU: (3) Faculty and Graduate Students
Total Participants External CU: (20) Casey Students
Our Town Stories Project (Humans of Boulder and Visions of Sand Creek)
K-12 Students: (47, 7th and 8th grade students) Horizons K-8
K-12 Educators: (2) Katie Miles, Sarah Brooks
CU Graduate Student: (1) Christine Kuster
Boulder Audience: (20) Boulder Community Members
Total Participants Inside CU: (1) William McGinley
Total Participants External CU: (20 Boulder Community Members)
4. Project Time
Tell Your Story
Contact Hours:
Total Hours:
(56) Two, four day weeks 6/9 – 6/19; Monday – Thursday 8:30 – 3:00
Preparation Hours: Preparation hours varied across participants ranging from 5 hours to 80 per adult
program participants depending on specific roles and responsibilities.
Based on the above calculations, total hours ranged from 62 hours for minimally participating members
to 136 hours for program leaders/teachers. See Appendix A for details.
Our Town Stories Project (Visions of Sand Creek)
Contact Hours:
Classroom Preparation M-T @ 6 hours per day x 2 (Carnegie Archives, Boulder History Museum)
12 Hours
Field Activities W - F @ 13 hours (Overnight Travel, Tour of Bent’s Old Fort Site with NPS Rangers,
Eads, CO - Sand Creek Massacre Site, Ledger Art Projects, Reading, Home Travel)
Our Town Stories Project (Humans of Boulder I & II)
Contact Hours:
Classroom Preparation M -T @ 6 Hours x 2 = 12 Hours
Community Activities CU Street Interviews W - F @ 3 Hours x 2 = 6
Community Activities Boulder Street Interviews W – F @ 6 Hours x 2 = 12
Total Hours:
30 (HOB I & II)
5. Activity Descriptions: What activities occurred? Which specific groups, schools, and communities were involved?
It is important to distinguish between activities that occurred across two separate, but conceptually related projects – Tell Your
Story and Our Town (Visions of Sand Creek and Humans of Boulder). Both projects embrace an applied approach to
Humanities education that seeks to enact and embody ideas through the creation of performances and artifacts. TYS included
students from Casey Middle School. This work focused on writing/performing poetry as well as personal narrative-based art
projects. Our Town included 7th and 8th grade students from Horizons K-8. The work centered on school-based “project
weeks” that included “excursions” to CU, downtown Boulder, and the site of the Sand Creek Massacre in Kiowa County, CO.
Tell Your Story
Students participated in morning writing/poetry workshops and afternoon art studios centered on personal narrative. These
studios included instruction by two, nationally recognized poets, a public school art teacher, four public school language arts
teachers, and a CU MFA student. Afternoon art studios focused primary the following media: 3-dimensional art objects,
printmaking, sketching (e.g., “soul rubbing,” “identity cubes,” and the “acrylic name project”), photography, and personal
narrative, poetry/performance. Objectives and lessons plans were developed by program faculty for each of the eight days. At
the conclusion of the writing and art workshop program, students presented their final art, writing, and performance pieces to
their peers, families, and friends in a final community exhibit and performance that took place on the Pearl Street Mall.
Students written work was also published in a program anthology called The Nature of Art and Writing. For details regarding
the schedule and activities, please see Appendix A. For project activity photos, see Appendix B.
Our Town (Visions of Sand Creek and Humans of Boulder)
The projects (Visions of Sand Creek and Humans of Boulder), involved 47, 7th and 8th-grade students and their teachers from
Horizons K-8 in Boulder. We collaborated with teachers interested in developing classroom instructional practices that reimagined humanities education as more socially engaged and connected. In general, we introduced humanities innovations;
monitored the nature of these innovations; and adapted them based on our assessments of effectiveness. Some of these
innovations took place in the context of the following community-based expeditions: Humans of Boulder, Hundertwasser - the
5 Skins, Visions of Sand Creek, and Inspiring Lives. The Sand Creek project engaged students in research, writing, discussion,
and on-the-street interviews of Boulder citizens regarding the history and context of the Sand Creek Massacre. Students visited
the Carnegie Archives and the Boulder History Museum as part of the background research process. They also traveled to
Eads, CO for two nights during which time they visited the Sand Creek site, engaged in discussion and “meditative” activities
designed to help them to narrate and imagine the tragedy that occurred, along with developing their own ledger art projects.
See Appendix C (document attachment) for the publication (Encountering Sand Creek) containing the ledger art of students.
In many ways, Humans of Boulder is a project with a similar spirit and focus. Humans of Boulder was inspired by some of the
street-based interviews of city residents that students conducted on Pearl Street during TYS. It was also inspired by the more
well known Humans of New York work begun in 2010 by Brandon Stanton. In his own words, Brandon “started collecting
quotes and short stories from the people I met, and began including these snippets alongside the photographs.” These portraits
and captions recently became the subject of a recently published book. Humans of Boulder borrows from this basic approach
with young students in a way that is more thoughtfully conceptualized. Drawing upon ideas derived from theories of narrative
understanding and narrative knowing, we developed an approach to greeting and interviewing city residents (strangers) by
inviting them to “tell a story” about their own lives. Teachers and students practiced this approach in the classroom, extended it
to students on campus at CU, and finally put the approach to the test in downtown Boulder.
6. Describe the project’s impact on CU faculty, staff, CU students, and/or your audience.
Tell Your Story
Those primarily impacted by this project were 20 students, from Casey Middle School. Our primary goal was to help students
discover (through writing and art) the manner in which their own life stories (stories of Self) were an integral part of shaping
and defining the values and visions of their community (stories of Us). Such narratives, by nature, were those stories that
connect the goals of individual life to the collective sensibility that develops from living a shared, community life. Through a
process of both enacting and embodying ideas and visions through performance and artifacts, students learned to tell a story of
self and a story of us. Though they at times struggled to fully understand the power of their work as a way to take action to
improve our world, their work did embrace the spirit of applied humanities. They wrote, created, and performed “their lives”
over the course of the eight day project. Post project interviews with students revealed some interesting trends and themes
regarding their ability to imagine the lives of others with compassion and complexity and the central role that stories occupy in
that process. As Alana illustrated in a series of comments related to some of the art-making and on-the-street interviewing
experiences in which she participated:
[Gestures to a quote on the “identity cube” she constructed out of paper] This one is about Bob Marley: “Open your eyes,
look within, are you satisfied with the life you’re living.” So, it kinda just opened my eyes, and said wow, am I kinda doing
what he’s saying. Like am I happy with my life? It kinda gets you thinking, yeah. I really like that. . .
It was really interesting because through talking to other people and getting to know them through their story, it kind of just
gives me an idea of how other people think and what they’ve been through and it’s just really interesting to kinda learn
more about other people’s story. And, just yeah.
[Shows me the stranger’s shoe “sole-rubbing” she developed] So… um… I interviewed um a guy, he was doing parkour on
the CU campus. I wrote [what he said] as like “Hey, I’m Noah, my shoes describe me as stanky, abusive toward my shoes,
quite… I don’t know what he said, it was like a made-up word. “Blergh?”… “My shoes will go everywhere because why
not. Once I ran across some rooftops hopping electrical wires and other junk on my way to grab some grub in these shoes.
A thing that I want to do in these shoes is rap with my homies.” So it kinda like shows me that like some people are not
afraid to take risks and ya know live life. So, I really liked doing that.
Just that there’s all different kinds of people here. And, you’ll get to see a person but you’ll never really know their story so
the program kinda helped me to realize that every one is different. That everybody has something in them, like a unique
story of them.
Her comments and the comments of other students provide some initial understanding of how we might use the language arts
to create occasions designed to help students explore the insights that emotion and compassionate imagination offer, as well as
how such insights are unique to language arts and central to a conception of civic reasoning and interpersonal understanding
that is fundamentally narrative, complex, ethical, and democratic.
Our Town (Visions of Sand Creek and Humans of Boulder)
Those primarily impacted by this project were 7th and 8th grade students attending Horizons K-8 who took part in the “project
weeks” led by two Horizon teachers. There were approximately 8 students across two HOB projects and 39 students who
participated in the Sand Creek. In addition, and as part of each project, the on-the-street interviews that students conducted
involved interaction and discussion with 40+ CU students and Boulder community members. Both projects explored ways to
re-invent school-based humanities instruction by envisioning the humanities as a vehicle for building socially engaged and
tangible relations with the real world. In both projects (SC and HOB), we were interested in learning how students might adopt
and understand the opportunity to engage personally and emotionally with community members, whose lives were totally
unfamiliar to them. Additionally, we wondered how young students might respond to the invitation to engage in a style of
learning about a historical event that prioritized personal, empathetic, and imaginative dimensions, as well as more logical
paradigmatic styles. Ultimately, we did this through activities with the potential to portray lives (contemporary and historical)
in ways that were emotionally evocative and complex through . While we documented specific instructional approaches, we
also conducted interviews with many students (and their teacher) about their experiences at SC and with HOB that revealed
some interesting trends and themes regarding their ability to cross affective borders in imagining the lives of others with
compassion and complexity that linked to their willingness to expose themselves to the stories of other people. In what
follows, we limit our discussion to excerpts from the interview of one student made in response to visiting the Sand Creek
Massacre site.
For the purposes of this final report, we offer this single progression of interview comments from Adela as they provide a
broad view of the kinds of understanding and “lived” perspective she developed in response to her experience at the site of the
Sand Creek Massacre. Across her remarks, she sheds light on how the experience of “standing and looking” from a hill at Sand
Creek, as well as making her ledger artwork portraying the experience of a “lost” American Indian Girl, were instrumental in
cultivating the compassionate imagination and empathy she drew upon in formulating her perspectives that centered on
“try[ing] to feel what they would’ve been feeling.” She began by summarizing with a chronology of her experiences before
expressing her sense of the meaning of those experiences.
A: Well, it was really amazing. We got to go to um… oh, I can’t remember the name… the first day we went to the
Carnegie Archives. And we got to look at all these documents about Sand Creek, and Boulder during this time. Then, we
got to go to Pearl Street to interview people [about Sand Creek]. And, I thought it was amazing how many people didn’t
know about this topic, even living in Colorado. Even growing up near the place where such an amazing thing happened…
to not know anything about it. It was really cool. And then we got to go to– Well, we went down to *Old Bent’s Fort to
learn about how the trading worked there. And then we went– We did– We got to go to the Sand Creek Massacre site, and
we took like a tour, sort of, where they told us about the events that happened there. Then, on the last day we did our ledger
art. So, we got to choose our document that we wanted to do artwork on, that we thought would make… really … a
powerful statement, then we got to design our own piece of [ledger artwork].
A: Um, well, what I tried to do [with my artwork] was from a child’s perspective. And, I’m not the most artistically
talented person, but what I was trying to do was to have the girl be… sort of feeling lost. And this [points to artwork] being
almost like the memory of what happened. I chose to do my artwork on a map, just to show like the vastness of the area,
and just like how– like my title, like how lost and alone, scared.
A: Um, just… sort of getting to look at all the different documents, most of the documents we read were from the
perspectives of the soldiers or of the chiefs. And so, I really wanted to be able to try to think about what it’d be like to be
someone, like a girl– Like a little girl who didn’t really understand what was happening as much. So, I sort of just wanted–
From looking at all these different documents, I wanted to be able to… sort of, almost for myself be able to look at a new
perspective.
A: Um, just like…uh just like… uh, I don’t know– Just wanting to feel so confused and scared, and like not knowing why
this was happening. And, yeah… I don’t know.
A: Yeah, it was really incredible, because first of all, I thought it was kind of appropriate the day we went was sort of like
rainy and dark. I don’t know– It made it more powerful sort of, and like, really understanding that this wasn’t something
that teachers just tell us that we should learn and memorize, then push aside and learn new things. This is something that
happened, and all these innocent people were killed, and scared, and lost. It was really hard too, because just knowing that
something like this happened is just– It’s hard to even take in, ya know? Even just standing there and looking– We sort of
hiked up this little hill, then looking down over where the tribes were camped– It was just hard. I’m getting like… [refers
to starting to cry]… It was just sort of like– I remember getting teary and sort of choked-up and my heart pounding. It was
just so hard to be there.
A: Um, I think… Sometimes artwork can be even more powerful… depending on different things… ‘cuz you really get
the– It gives you like this vivid image in your mind versus just like hearing it and trying to understand it. I just feel that
artwork, especially if it’s done powerfully, like how we did this ledger art. I feel like a lot of the pieces in here are really
powerful, and really strong. They just sort of shock you at first.
A: Um, for me it was sort of a way to get all of these emotions that I had been building up inside me over this week onto
paper that I could share with the world, and sort of being able to express a little of how I felt. Where, with writing it’s more
factual. But, [referring to Bill] it’s like you said earlier, [art] is more emotional. I just feel like it helped me understand,
versus like, writing an essay– You would just sort of write down all the– You would give information about what you
learned. But, this sort of helped… process this more. Helped… it just… I thought it was just more powerful to be able to
share. And, ‘cuz, we learned a little about ledger art too. Like, how they would get these papers from trading after they
started to run out of buffalo hide. So, they would start doing their artwork on this, and then they became these pieces of art
that had so much meaning. And, I just thought it was… mmm… I just thought it was better to– It was more powerful just
to be able to try to feel what they would’ve been feeling.
7. Please describe any data gathering methods you used to assess the project’s impact and gather information from
participants (surveys, anecdotal feedback, data comparisons, observations, etc.).
Across both programs, we sought to implement and understand students’ experience and response to innovative humanities
that spoke to and embodied the exigencies of their lives and their communities. We used the following sources of data in
varying degrees in our programs: Field notes of classroom and community observations; teacher and researcher curriculum
collaborations; audio-taping of collaborative curriculum meetings with teachers; student and teacher interviews; audio-taping
of relevant language arts activities and student discussions and community-based activities; photocopies of student artifacts;
and email/google.doc communication between teachers/researcher.
8. Include any comments about your projects. For example, did you experience any unintended results? Challenges,
Surprises?
We managed to run two very interesting and inspirational projects on a very conservative budget. We also collected a range of
interesting data about students’ experience in both programs. We witnessed a dramatic level of engagement and willingness to
perform publicly among second language learners, especially among young Latino students. For TYS, although our enrollment
has continued to almost double with each consecutive year, we intentionally limited enrollment in 2014. This created a more
manageable instructional process, as well as a more thoughtful approach to documenting and evaluating students’ experiences
as participants. Regarding unintended results, we were surprised by the extent of student understanding and the development of
the empathetic imagination across both projects. In response to Sand Creek and Humans of Boulder, this imagination linked to
understandings that derived from their willingness to expose themselves to the stories of “distant” others.
9. Given what you know now, how might you maintain, improve, or expand this program?
Tell Your Story and Our Town
We have already begun a more formal study of these ideas in the language arts classrooms of public school teachers. We are
continuing to develop and expand our framing of the project in line with the spirit of an applied approach to humanities
education. Unlike their counterparts in STEM fields, for humanities students (and teachers), the step from concept to
application is not so easily realized. Yet, we have begun experiment with this step by providing students with opportunities to
participate in more tangible and socially engaged humanities practice. Stories are central to each project because they offer
certain unique epistemological advantages. These are advantages that we have begun to actually document rather than just
simply theorize about. This documentation would not be possible without funding from CU Outreach. Ultimately, we would
like to use both Tell Your Story and the newly proposed Our Town-inspired project (New Humanities) to foster a deeper
commitment among ELA faculty at Casey and Horizons. In initiating this process we propose five basic strategies for making
humanities concepts tangible through media and the arts, activism, through co-creation, contemporizing, and through crosspollination (Nikitina, 2009).
APPENDIX 1
TYS 2014 Daily Schedule
(Mon.)
9:00 - 9:30
9:35-9:40
9:45 - 10:30
Session A
(Jack & Jovan)
10:35-11:20
Session B
(Jack & Jovan)
11:25-11:40
Share-out.
Monday 6/9
Stories of Self
(Tue-Thu)
Welcome Activity
Image and Word
Katie & Val
Official introductions
& break-down of daily
schedule
9:00 - 9:20
Welcome
Jack (ed 146): Going
Inside
Group Poem
9:30-10:15
Session A
(Jack & Jovan)
Jovan (ed 251):
Nana’s Cages
In pairs, walk and talk:
summarize experience,
share piece of writing
Tuesday 6/10
Stories of Self
“Personal Pictionary” passing
game. Groups of 4, as they arrive
Wednesday 6/11
Stories of “Thou” or “Other”
Guerilla Art I
are given pack of cards w/ word or
image. If it’s a word, sketch the
picture, if it’s an image, write the
word.
10:15 -11:00
Session B
(Jack & Jovan)
11:00 - 11:50
Writing Lab
Jovan (ed251):
Nana’s Cage
Val/Katie:
Jack: Meet by varsity pond
Steve: (ed 251) TED Hidden
Worlds. Photographs of extreme
scale Can what we observe and
how we interpret take us “beyond:
ourselves? Growing branches,
growing roots. *Observation
exercise w/ photos
Jack (ed 146):
Illot-mollo
Val/Katie:
Val/Katie:
11:45-12:15
Lunch
Niwot Market
11:55 - 12:25
Lunch
@ Cosmo’s
12:20 - 1:40
“Name” in acrylics
Portrait Cube
12:30 - 1:40
Art Studio I
“Name” in acrylics
Portrait Cube
Soul Rubbings
Dakota @Henderson
Connie @ EDUC146
1:50 - 3:00
Art Studio II
Miles escorts writers
to their pick-up zone.
3:26 - 3:30
Miles escorts writers to their
pick-up zone.
Miles escorts writers to their pick-up
zone.
Art, Connie (146)
1:45 - 3:05
Art Studio
Guerilla Art II
Thank you notes
to Cosmo’s
Thank you notes
to Niwot Market
Jack (ed 146):
Ego Tripping
Group Poem
Thursday 6/12
Stories of We/Us
Steve (ed 251): Place
Portraits and/vs the typical
postcard.
Henderson Museum, taking
pictures
Papusas
Miles escorts writers to their
pick-up zone.
Monday 6/16
9:00 - 9:20
Welcome
9:30-10:15
Session A
Jack (ed 146): Lunes/Haiku
Tuesday 6/17
Hike Day!
- make sack lunch
- stop by Henderson museum exhibit
Urban Exploration
Steve (ed 251): “The Other” Boulder
Postcards (lunes, haiku, overheard
quotes or captions on the back).
Meet on the Mapleton Field
bleachers
Jack :Things to Save
Performance
Steve: “The Other” Boulder
Postcards(lunes, haiku, overheard
quotes or captions on the back.
Jovan (ed 251): “Pueblo”
10:15 11:00
Session B
10:50 11:40
Writing Lab
Val/Katie:
Observation, listening as a
writer
Wednesday 6/18
Val/Katie: “Nature and Me” venn
Revision/masterpiecing?
11:45 - 12:15
Lunch
Sack Lunch
12:20 - 1:40
Art Studio I
In the field
12:20 - 1:40
Art Studio I
In the field
Val/Katie:
Thursday 6/19
Jack (ed 146):
Performance
Jovan (ed 251): “Pueblo”
Performance
(travel time - to Pearl St.)
Burritos
Pearl St. Performances
Miles escorts writers to their pick-up
zone.
Miles escorts writers to their
pick-up zone.
3:10 - 3:25
3:26 - 3:30
Miles escorts writers to their
pick-up zone.
Miles escorts writers to their pick-up
zone.
TYS 2014 Daily Agenda
2014 Tell Your Story Summer Studios
2014 Tell Your Story Summer Studios