Talk to any educator, and they will confirm that teaching “name” and “place” assists students in better understanding traditions, histories and cultures that make up their backgrounds and their communities. It helps them appreciate difference and similarities in people. It also facilitates appreciating their own maternal and paternal heritages. At least that was the finding in a month-long workshop with pupils in Ms. Selene Stewart’s second-grade class at Longfellow School.
Every Tuesday morning in April they participated in a human rights storytelling seminar sponsored by Art Start and conducted by this columnist. Art Start is funded by the Oak Park Education Foundation. The foundation’s mission is to raise non-tax revenues to provide enrichment programs to the greatest number of District 97 students. Art Start Director Deb Abrahamson showed up at our second meeting to photograph the students engaging in a thought-provoking discussion about Oak Park and their relatives’ respective places, and why we should care. Students said we should care because it gives all of us meaning and clarity about who we are and how we might fit in. At least half the class reported their names derived from relatives. A quarter of the class said their names had French origins. Another quarter cited spiritual and religious connections to their names. One even said she was named after a 15th century Dominican nun. Meanwhile, most helped me find their parents’ or grandparents’ ancestral places on the large map.
All of the students told fascinating stories, but none moved me as much as Catherine, a bright, bilingual 7-year-old, who wrote her middle name?#34;Yoon Gee?#34;in English and in Korean calligraphy in my journal as a way to show her pride as a Korean American. Speaking Hangugu (Korean) to her, I greeted her and explained that I have two relatives?#34;Shin Do Han and Oh-Gina?#34;also Korean Americans who are half-black, half-Korean, and that I’ve visited her dad’s ancestral land looking for my relatives’ mom in a place called Nam Dae Moon. The whole class laughed with solidarity when I called her “Cousin Catherine” and hinted we may be related, as we all may be since the globe seems to shrink our multicultural world.
That theme?#34;that we all may have more in common than in conflict?#34;stuck with the students as we also celebrated and embraced some of the cultural differences, a point we stressed in the third session. We spent the third class illustrating our names and places. We also discussed popular names from the last decade like: “Halie, Alyssa and Jaelon.”
Since all the students said they were born in Oak Park or Chicago, I left a copy of my short documentary, “The Promise Landers,” which features some of the early blacks and biracials who attended local schools 100 years ago. I hope this made not only the blacks and biracials in the class feel good, knowing their presence here in this “place” has a century-old tradition, but also made others feel this community has a welcoming tradition that goes beyond merely “tolerance,” a term some find patronizing to people of color who seek equity with dominant whites and not merely to be tolerated.
In addition to the video, we used books, interviews, journals, maps, and language as tools to inquire into “name” and “place.” The journaling, coordinated by Ms. Stewart, helped them practice interviewing, composing and oral history collecting, all transferable skills. She gave them a worksheet to collect data on what their names meant. This written exercise inspired their energetic oral storytelling.
We also discussed gender equity in storytelling. I read a story about author-anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston who 100 years ago was told by the men and boys of her Eatonville, Fla. township next to Orlando that only the boys could sit by the campfire and tell stories. Longfellow students said this is “bogus”?#34;that girls have every right to tell stories as boys if they choose to.
They enjoyed the rich discussion and the beautiful pictures in the book I read aloud, Zora Hurston and the Chinaberry Tree by William Miller and illustrated by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Lu (Lee and Low Books). They then began to tell cool stories about their own names, which are: Brandon Boyle, Arney Bray, DeJohne Carter, Catherine Yoon Gee Cho, Olivia Coamey, Colette DeGrazia, Madison Lisle, Kevon McCollum, Alyssa McGrone, Austin Nakamura, Safira Newton-Matza, Anthony Paolinelli, Jeffery “J.J.” Powell, Halie Schuster, Emma Sullivan, Jaelon Sykes, Miguel Vasquez, and Mark von Ebers.
Their places included: the Philippines, Germany, France, Mexico, England, Korea, Italy, Japan, Sweden, Ireland, and West Africa.