The program gives participants the chance to ask elders about who they are, what they’ve learned in their lives, and how they want to be remembered. More than 75,000 stories have been shared through this initiative since its inception, according to StoryCorps.
At Campbell Hall Episcopal in Studio City, California, three teachers — Kathleen Lawton-Trask, Christine Gaul, and Amy Blakeney — worked TGTL into their diverse curricula and in different grades in 2016 and will do so again this year. Below the three share their stories.
Kathleen Lawton-Trask, 11th-grade American Literature
I decided to add The Great Thanksgiving Listen assignment to my curriculum because we were reading different works of personal narrative all year. Asking students to talk to an elder was a meaningful way to start a discussion about how to shape a personal narrative: by thinking and talking about what is most important in our lives. I also asked students to write a personal essay using narrative storytelling — describing what they learned from their elder.
I think these conversations prompted my students to talk to their elder counterparts in new ways. Some students asked such thought-provoking questions as, “What does it mean to be a man?” and “What was the most crucial thing that happened to you when you were my age?”Julia Arndt, now a senior at Campbell Hall, says, “I think this assignment was actually one of my favorites.... It allowed me to see my grandmother in a different way, and I got to learn the values she holds close to her.... My grandmother got married and had a baby while she was still in college, but she didn’t quit college … very uncommon for women at the time. I am forever grateful that I got the opportunity to sit down and learn more about her.”
During this unit, we also read Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” a short story in which Capote describes the much older cousin who watched him as a child and how they celebrated Christmas together. This story showed students how to choose details that illustrate a character’s traits and values, and hooked some students because of its funny and poignant nature. The story also opened conversations in class about family and the different ways family can affect us.
For the students who really invested in the project, this unit set them up to think about how to live a good life and what is most important to them. In the second and third trimesters, I asked students to identify a social issue they care about and write an editorial about it — and I think TGTL helped them think about their own values, which informed their work.
This year, I’m going to encourage my students to use the app for their recording as well as to publish some or all of their interviews to TGTL website.
I still think about last year’s essays and hope that some students will use them to shape their college essays this year. They certainly changed our classroom discussions for the better.
Christine Gaul, 11th-grade American Literature
As a graduate student years ago, I took a class on narrative and trauma. Through the class, I was introduced to Rose, a Holocaust survivor, and then assigned to compose her narrative for a collection at a local university. By listening and writing Rose’s story, I learned how powerful storytelling could be. I knew the value of listening.
Lately, I’ve been drawn to narrative storytelling and to looking at someone else’s authentic story through one’s own eyes. In my American Literature class last year, I approached the Thanksgiving Listen assignment with similar intentions — wanting my students to know and value the stories of others. Some students came back to class with rich, detailed stories about their loved ones, including:
- a grandfather who was the bedrock of an immigrant family,
- a humor-filled story about a father and his life on a kibbutz, and
- a mother who showed her strength, succeeding in a male-dominated industry.
At the same time, some students saw the Thanksgiving Listen assignment as a means to an end — just another assignment to complete. These students’ narratives lacked the details and enthusiasm to make their interview subjects come to life. For instance, a student might have written out the question and answers instead of pulling those details into a cohesive narrative about the person’s life and why it mattered.
I attribute some of the lack of student investment to the way we folded the assignment into the curriculum. The idea for the Thanksgiving Listen came up right before we were preparing for Thanksgiving break. The timing seemed perfect, but I may not have prioritized the assignment enough to convey its significance.
This year, I’m spending more time creating a unit around the narrative assignment rather than folding it into an already busy trimester. I plan to set up the assignment by reading Truman Capote’s “Christmas Memory” to get students thinking about the ways we can write about people who matter. I will also give students more time to write and revise, reinforcing the significance of the narrative assignment.
Amy Blakeney, Ninth-grade Ancient World History
Students often view the evidence of history — primary and secondary sources — as far removed from their experiences, as events that happen to other people and which historians dig up, like fossils of long-lost species. This may be because history is often viewed through the lens of big people, big ideas, and big events, not individuals’ experiences.
When students create primary source documents for future researchers or family members to relish through The Great Thanksgiving Listen assignment, I hope they learn that history is also made in the day-to-day and that they are living history. I see TGTL as a means to connect the idea that history is experienced by real people we know and love.
While this assignment does not fit cleanly into a specific unit of ancient world history, it does allow for a personal interaction with the “data” of history and demonstrates how the interviewer, interviewee, and listener all participate in the interpretation of historical events. A few themes in history that bridge modern experiences to older ones include immigration, war, social norms, politics, identity, changing societies, religion, and interacting with the environment.
I asked students to select an elder with a story they were curious about. Students encountered diverse experiences, including:
surviving civil war in El Salvador,
Credit: Nahomy Azucena
a South African standing up to apartheid,
an adoptive mother’s empathy for a birth mother,
a new focus after cancer,
Credit: Jelani Janisse II
a child abruptly separated from all immediate family during World War II,
a trickster’s courtship,
Credit: Bryce Jacobs
loving and defending Detroit during troubled times, and
Credit: Maya Hoffman
forever leaving family by walking alone across the North Korean border at age 13.
I also threw a “listening party” as suggested in TGTL teacher support materials. Students introduced their interviewee, stated why they chose that person, displayed the photo, and played a one- or two-minute clip of the interview through the app. During that single class period, we learned something personal and intimate about the people around us. I came to know who my students find personally important and the topics they care about through this exercise. The first year of TGTL, I did not think I could fit the listening party into the curriculum and left students asking for weeks if they were going to hear one another’s interviews. Ouch.
Additionally, I make time to discuss how much data historians of the future will need to sort through to understand our “now”: billions of selfies, Tweets, and Snap-Insta-Facebook posts. TGTL interviews allow students to use the tools of the technological revolution across generations to create purposeful, permanent, and intimate stories of those they loved who lived history. Epic!
