I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. Were those words seriously just said? The image of corpses and children piled on top of each other, flashed in my mind. I had walked into the steam room and coughed from the dense air. “Hey, it’s like you’re in WWII,” one of my friends said. “What?” I responded. I didn’t understand what he meant at first. “You know, the gas chambers…in Auschwitz.” His friends laughed. I froze. It was at that moment when I realized the true power of our human paradigm.
As with the coincidental case of most projects In my time here in PLP, our newest humanities project fits snugly with the crisis of our society today. The rate of hate crimes, specifically of antisemitism has skyrocketed in the past few years and acts that would have seemed unthinkable by most a few years back are becoming commonplace in our current climate.
Read my final product above ^
It is a fact that intolerance for the out-group is growing exponentially and on both sides of the political spectrum, tolerance is a growing scarcity. That’s why this past project, Echos Of History, was so crucial, and that is why this past project has transformed my understanding of life. Let me explain.
GDJ / Pixabay
In a past project I had talked about the importance of perspective when addressing historical events but what that sentiment boils down to is human psychology. As we learned in the case study of Dylan Roof, our brains are fragile and easily manipulated and when exposed to the right information at the right time, our perception of morals or ethics can be altered by our amygdala response. In my Revision of Division podcast, I talked about this as our ego and in my Podcast on the psychological consequences of WWII, our instinctual trigger for survival. Our fragile minds are easily indoctrinated with information and propaganda, and this fact is how events as horrible as the Holocaust could possibly have happened. But what can we do about it, how can we as students help fight the war of instinctual apathy and pave a future where acts of empathy fill news headlines instead of acts of hate? That was what we were tasked with on our second to last project in PLP and more specifically, how stories act as a means of getting us there.
Our final task was to write and illustrate a children’s book to help build intellectual and emotional resilience to hate, discrimination and intolerance. We would be working with and presenting to grade 4s and 5s and helping students from a young age learn the importance of tolerance.
I watched a TED talk recently about the power of imagination and creativity and how it is one of the most important skills for high-level thinking and problem-solving. I didn’t realize it at the time but this video and the reflection that came after it would be the foundation for how I found an answer to the driving question above. After reading the novel Night by Ellie Weisel, I had felt l had realized that in the face of hate stories are one of the most powerful things in the human experience but I still wanted to go deep and find out why exactly I felt that way. I had an epiphany when I tried connecting the feeling of empathy I had after reading that novel to my story in my picture book. I realized that it is stories that bring out the highest level of thinking for us and it is creativity that combats the “low road” response that I mentioned earlier. It was kind of ironic that the most effective way to combat intolerance is through impacting youth and the most effective way to impact youth is through something that they naturally are gifted at.
Earlier in the project, we had watched a documentary about Mr. Rogers focusing on how he was able to share difficult topics with children. I had concluded through a synthesis of information and understanding from the documentary that his effectiveness came from his ability to connect with the kid’s life experiences. What I didn’t realize however was the fact that the reason connecting to their life experience was so important was because that is their creative minds. I realized that we can only connect to what we understand or have experienced. But here is where it gets interesting. I still was stuck. I was stuck in The ambiguity of effective storytelling. I had determined that storytelling is an effective means of building tolerance because it allows us to connect to the story through our imagination which allows us to creatively learn, understand and ingrain an emotional/intellectual response to the story itself, but how? How can I create a story that impacts kids as much as Night impacts adults?]
Then I looked outside. I saw the beauty of vibrant greens and the clouded sky, and I realized how. For me nature has bridged countless gaps in relationships like most passions do, but yet there was something different about it. When I talk to true nature lovers, there is an immediate connection, almost friend-like. A shared appreciation for its wonders, a shared understanding of our role in life. Nature is something that as a human species we rely on it and although it is very environmentalist-hippy of me, I believe that whether or not we decide to fight hand in hand against our climate crisis, will determine if we have conflict as humanity. In my children’s book, I brought together all of the incredible ideas I had formed into one creation. I may have spent most of my night working on the drawings before we presented the next day, but it was worth it. When we arrived at the elementary school that morning I was eager to share my story. I remembered the initial note-taking I had done in the car ride back from the first time we met the students and I thought about how the notes I made on their critical thinking and creative eye were surprising and then I reflected on how far I had come.
I reflected on the learning I had done outside of school, watching videos of opposing beliefs, or heated debates with the far right and I remembered the role that school has played in my understanding of life. Like a story itself, school has allowed me to connect the dots, connect towards learning about the world around me and have light sparks towards ideas and passions that guide my understanding of life. When the students laughed at my silly illustrations or looked longingly at my character’s pride in finding empathy, I realized that it may be our human instincts that guide us to the unthinkable but it is also our unique human ability to imagine that gives me hope. It is our ability to imagine a world and future that is different, one filled with empathy, understanding, and tolerance towards all life. Maybe if we can share messages of kindness then we could use our imagination to find meaning in our differences, meaning that fights all attempts to take our humanity away.