Fighting Hate With Storytelling

Hello, Man, these openings are getting repetitive. Anywho I am back again with another project to share with you. So let’s get right into the meat of this project🎉. 

 

Starting we have the main part of the project, The Holocaust. I have never learned so much or have been so interested in a historical event in Humanities before. This project dove so deep and looked at so many different perspectives. It gave me a completely different view of the word genocide. Seeing that words definition is much different than seeing what it represents. I enjoyed all the different perspectives. It made this project so much more interesting. The survivors, the book we read called Night by Elie Weisel, and the Holocaust Propaganda Museum all came together so perfectly to create that new perspective. That world-changing perspective. The view from behind the numbers.

 

After the Holocaust piece came a documentary on children’s psychology. It was called Won’t You Be My Neighbor. It was all about Mr. Rogers and his TV show. The purpose of this was to help us understand how kids learn. Specifically how they understand events like the holocaust in a way that doesn’t traumatize them. This documentary was interesting as it took a deep dive into a show that otherwise appeared very simple. Mr. Rogers’s passion coming from his childhood experiences was really intriguing. It was motivating in a way, It helped me understand our goal in this project. Using storytelling as a weapon against hate. Mr. Rogers was one of the originators of using stories to fight hate. His neighbourhood was a place of inclusion and harmony. A digital storybook being written live. 

We made children’s books about the broader topic of intolerance. We planned to read these books to a class of grades four and five. We were allowed to pick our own fictional or non-fictional stories to show. I chose to use hockey (looking back this might have been a bad choice). I picked hockey because there was a boy in my group who played hockey and I’m a hockey fan (specifically the Vancouver Canucks). I used animals instead of people as I thought the children would connect to it better. My story was okey. The part where it fell apart was with my drawings. I am an artist (I will be studying visual design in my post-secondary education). However, I was not proud of my illustrations for this book. They were very rushed and poorly drawn for my skill level. They brought my book down amongst the others. If I had chosen a different style of illustration and didn’t use animals I could have done way better with the amount of time I had. Even though my illustrations lacked, I would say that my story still taught them about the danger of intolerance. It was a simple but relatable story. I learned a lot from working with these children. They were all so unique and had such different opinions of our books. It was eye-opening for me. It forced me to care more about the appearance of my book. Which is something I wouldn’t have thought much about otherwise. The spacing, the drawings, the story. I cared more since I was presenting it to a young audience. Which is why I felt bad for my book being subpar. I wish I had taken a different approach story and art-wise. I could have made the story more engaging and gripping if I had made the story a little deeper. I could have gotten my story across better. 

Are driving question “How is storytelling an effective weapon against hate?”. Storytelling is very human. One of my main takeaways from Night was how he used storytelling to create this human-to-human feeling. It felt like someone was reading a campfire story to you. It made it easy to follow along and super interesting. I loved it, I would highly recommend reading this book when you get a chance. It’s truly a sad but triumphant story. As for story telling it is the best way to fight hate. People often say things without thinking. especially hateful things. When you use stories they show human perspective on things. Especially when talking about discrimination such as the Holocaust. Stories provide multiple perspectives and build a full perspective. This was the case in the Holocaust survivor archives that Steven Spielberg has made. It creates a widespread collective view shared by thousands of people. 

 

In quick conclusion, I grew a lot throughout this project. Every piece was interesting and attention-grabbing. I felt so engaged. The Holocaust as a main historical topic was incredible. One of the saddest but most interesting events in all of human history. Especially the propaganda piece of it. I like my overall story minus the setbacks it had such as the illustrations and the simplicity of the story. I enjoyed this project and hope these kinds of learning experiences follow me into my university programs. Thanks for reading and have a great day😀.