#InterculturalTales

march 2020

We wanted to do a service learning collaboration, but it ended up being something different, especially after the 2016 election. We realized that communities were so overburden with requests for stories, we didn’t want to go like, “oh, we’re talking about immigration, let’s send students to add to these additional moment of paranoia.”  We decided to encourage students to explore their own stories and the stories that were part of their networks instead of going to specific communities. … We realized something that is very common sense, which is that the university is not separate from the community, that we’re also a community and that we have networks beyond the campus. But at the time it was this huge discovery because what we were trying to do was to learn from students to value their lived experiences. We realized that a lot of them were first or generation immigrants or were part of communities of immigrants in one way or another.  So some students interviewed each other, some others explored their family histories or even their own stories of immigration. (TL)