By Dr. Andrew Stuart Bergerson and Dr. Gayle Levy
For many years UMKC undergraduates have been required to complete at least one interdisciplinary course at UMKC on culture and diversity. Team-taught by at least two members of the faculty from different disciplines, students explore the history and nature of “difference” with special consideration for how both high culture and everyday cultures create boundaries between the “self” and “other.”
For the last ten years, our versions of this course have focused on the Second World War and its associated genocide, based on our scholarly interest in the origins and nature of the Holocaust from the perspectives of both the victims and perpetrators as well as the responses of ordinary people to the ethical challenges of the Nazi Occupation of Europe as collaborators, bystanders, and resistance fighters.
Each year towards the end of the course, we ask the students to respond to what they have learned with some kind of creative or narrative project. We want to see how the students apply their new understanding of culture and diversity to their own lives, even as they keep in mind the very different historical circumstances of contemporary America.
During the initial years of teaching this course, we left the scope of this project quite open. Students could create a work in any genre; they produced everything from paintings, sculptures, short stories, and poems to photography, short films, graphic novels, propaganda posters, musical compositions, performance art, games, toys, meals, and even a Lego set! Many years later, students often described this assignment as one of the most impactful of their undergraduate careers.
Since 2018, we decided to focus the course more specifically on the topic of storytelling and narrative: the histories and legends that people use to construct ethnic identities, the stories that people tell to each other and themselves in order to justify violence against others, the ways that scholars attempt to make sense of these events and stories, and the struggle for victims, perpetrators, and collaborators to narrate their biographies after the rupture of total war and genocide.
In keeping with this new theme, we narrowed the scope of the creative project somewhat. We asked each student to find a person in their lives who is different from them in some significant way and whom they would like to better understand. Ideally, this person also had experienced at least one particular incident of persecution based on that form of difference. The students collaborated on basic questions to ask all the interview partners; each student also followed up on the particulars of that person’s experiences. The narrative interviews were ends in themselves: we wanted the students to learn the benefits of hearkening to the experience of a person who experienced the world differently. Before the interviews began, the interviewer and interviewees signed a written agreement that clarified their mutual rights and responsibilities including the use of the interview and any associated images for noncommercial-academic purposes and whether the interviewee wished to remain anonymous. After transcribing their interview, the students were then asked to respond in various ways. In 2017, we asked students to work together to produce documentary films using their interviews on “Life in Trump’s America” (by RooCinema and by Senatus Populus Que).
In 2018, we asked them to create a flip-book with individual chapters written in any genre—an analytic essay, a journalistic article, a fictional story, a play, a poem, etc.—so long as it sought to truthfully represent the experience of this other person while also positioning the student in relation to their interview partner’s difference. In 2019, we repeated the same assignment but decided to change the format from a flip-book to this blog. In all cases, we, the instructors, provided feedback on the drafts of their transcripts and narratives, giving the students a chance to revise. But ultimately, it was an editorial team of students who made the final decisions regarding which narratives to include. The students were responsible for copy editing, editing, and proofing the final collections.
Rereading these stories, we are struck by the ways that undergraduates today interact with difference. Our students certainly sought out some of the classic forms of difference that have presented challenges to Americans for many centuries: citizenship, class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sexuality. But they were also sensitive to other forms of difference that do not always make it into public scrutiny: generational differences, an absent parent, physical and mental disabilities, and the prejudices directed at military authorities or colonizing groups during an occupation.
To be sure, our students learned to appreciate the experiences of this other group, but they did not represent those experiences in any simplistic way. Many of the best narratives identified complex intersections in the operation of selves and others in everyday life: ways in which one category of difference overlapped and interacted with others, creating complicated situations that required careful and thoughtful responses. Instead of simply identifying a persecuted minority, they discovered dynamic individuals navigating the complexities of everyday life—arguably because the students themselves had experiences of their own with this kind of complexity.
But it was their empathy that most struck us about their work. Our students share a self-evident assumption that we all must accept people for who they are. Their work demonstrates a manifest desire to support their family, friends, and neighbors in the challenge of becoming who they are and a surprisingly genuine faith that our society will in fact become more accepting in the future. We are struck by the character of our students: their unabashed, proactive commitment to tolerance and their hopeful optimism for the future.
We are sharing these narratives with you for two purposes: as a record of people in our community who are still struggling for acceptance and equality, and as a record of the students who took the time to hearken to their life experiences. We validate both by listening to their stories and appreciating the creative work that results from their attention and care.