People always look for inspiration and role models. They look for stories of people who overcame the odds and created something of themselves, someone that they can look to for encouragement. These stories were the focus of our latest PLP project. Stories of hope, as defined in my earlier blog post, are stories that use adversity, resilience, and survival to inspire others. My focus for this project was at the stories of people who were forced from their homes (adversity), yet overcame it (resilience) and created a life for themselves after losing nearly everything (survival). What made this project special was that it was the first project in nearly 3 years where we would have the opportunity to go on a field study to learn about this project. 

I have always loved going on field studies. It is always interesting to see first hand examples of what we learn in the classroom. Our trip for this project was to the southern United States, where we learned about stories of hope. Like I said before, my focus for this project was to look at people forced from their homes, so before the trip I was looking forwards to the Dallas Holocaust and Human Right Museum because of the stories that would come from there, and I was not disappointed. Something that made the museum very interesting was that they had gathered stories of people who were affected by the Holocaust, yet survived and ended up moving to the Dallas area later in life to create a new life for themselves. They were first hand examples of the stories I had read about, and we even had the chance to speak to a Holocaust survivor who had moved to Dallas.

When we first went on the trip, I was very focused on refugees and people affected by war, but after talking to my teachers about it they advised that I opened up my thesis and broaden my lens because everything that we were going to on the trip could be connected to my thesis. This was proven right when we went to Tulsa, Oklahoma to learn about the Tulsa Massacre. We went on a tour of Greenwood, learning about a few of the people who survived the massacre and rebuilt their businesses and livelihoods, and even seeing a couple of the businesses that still exist today. I learned about people who I focus on in my final project here, and I’d say that Greenwood had the biggest impact on my project and my thesis. 

All of these experiences and research was to be culminated into a final video about stories of hope. I decided on using stories from The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, Greenwood, and some stories from my own life. In my video I talk about two people from Greenwood, John Hope Franklin and Bill Spiller, I talk about the stories from the kindertransport in WWII, and I talk about a personal story about my family’s journey from Vietnam after the Vietnam War. My biggest struggle while creating this video was to make sure that my video didn’t follow the same format of that last sentence. “First we have this story, then this story, then this story… etc.” If these stories truly fit into my thesis about people who were forced from their homes yet still rebuilt their lives, then I would be able to find common themes from each story and talk about those. I decided on focusing on how in each story someone lost their home, but then but then worked to rebuild their lives and give opportunity for people in their situation. For example, following the Tulsa Massacre, Bill Spiller worked for a career in professional golf, but was denied it because of the colour of his skin. So he spent his life making sure that nobody would be denied that opportunity the same way he was. 

I always enjoy going on field schools to learn about our project. Since this one was in our final year of high school, I was glad that I was able to learn so much about what I went there hoping to see. While learning about these stories, I’d say the biggest lesson I learned was that one can overcome nearly anything, as long as they are willing to adapt and face the obstacles they have ahead.