Using Stories to Cause Change

Stories are the building blocks of knowledge, the foundation of memory and learning. Stories connect us with our humanness and link past, present, and future by teaching us to anticipate the possible consequences of our actions.

Story is meaning Jerome Bruner

How we narrate facts determines how we will remember and integrate them. And that's what learning is.

Stories are not just facts; they contain facts and feelings and senses and colors and metaphors and associations. They revolve around human experiences: actions, events and conflicts. They are the dynamic, robust way in which human beings communicate meaning and construct understanding

Stories build worlds and define world views.

Storytelling helps us connect to and make sense of the world.

And with that understanding comes a tremendous power of emergent change, of seeing what is possible.

Stories connect us with our humanness and link past, present, and future by teaching us to anticipate the possible consequences of our actions.

Stories enable us to connect with other people…to view the world through a different lens.

"Give me your tired, your poor,

 Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

 The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

 Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

 I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

The Concepts of Migration are the Same….

Internal migration

External migration

Emigration

Immigration

Push factors

Pull factors

The Narrative of Migration Has Changed….

The way we tell the story is different….

Guest worker

Remittances

Illegal immigrant

Forced migration

Human trafficking

Satellite society

Brain drain

Fences

History never simply happens: it is constructed by historians.

We must let students decide between competing accounts, competing narratives…alternative stories about how things are, how they might have come to be that way, and how the story could change.

And with that understanding comes a tremendous power of emergent change, of seeing what is possible.

It is through the dialogic, discursive process that was come to know the Other and his point of view, his stories.

The migration journey of Khadija’s fathertook him from rural Morocco to the urban Netherlands. Several years later, his wife and children followed under the rubric of family reunification. Soon after, Khadija was born on Dutch soil.

Adama’s migration journeytook him from Burkina Faso through Mali, Algeria and Morocco to Spain – first to the Canary Islands and later to the Spanish mainland. The total journey took Adama over 3 years.

Using Stories to Cause Change

Moving Young

http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2006/moving_young_eng/preface.html

Coming to America: In Search of the American Dream Immigrant Voices

http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0212700/final_website/