“How do we help people ask a different set of questions – create different stories – about a topic that they think they already know?” Professor Wendi Manuel-Scott asked a group of high schoolers huddled against the February bluster in dark hoodies and jackets beside a fountain at the center of Mason’s campus. More even than the brilliant blue of her fuzzy coat, Manuel-Scott’s words stood out in the wintry gray: They would guide the students, members of the John Lewis Leadership Program, in researching and creating powerful web exhibits under the banner, “Our Stories Matter.”
The Leadership Program is offered at John R. Lewis High School, whose population speaks 25 different languages and has roots in more than 61 countries, and led by educator Dr. Deborah March. Its curriculum delivers hands-on learning about leadership, justice, service, and advocacy, inside and outside the classroom. For the “Stories” community action project, students immersed themselves in pedagogy and research practices devised at the Center for Mason Legacies. With guidance from CML’s Manuel-Scott and mentors from Leadership Fairfax, March and her students set out “to preserve and honor the diverse stories of our community” in Springfield, Virginia.
CML research and praxis mines local memory and lived experience to elevate these narratives, a process that also informed creation of the Mason campus’s Enslaved People of George Mason Memorial. It was on a tour of that memorial that Manuel-Scott challenged the students to ask the same questions driving CML scholarship at the university level: “Whose voices and whose experiences are not represented in the traditional story, and how can your memorial bring those marginalized voices and experiences into your project?”
Like all CML scholars, the students selected topics “rooted in our community …[but] also connected to the world beyond.” They covered immigration, education, gun violence, disability rights, health care, poverty, and substance use, among other subjects, turning their research into online story maps.
Their Mason collaboration included sitting in via Zoom on Manuel-Scott’s “Inquiry to Action” justice-research class (in the School of Integrative Studies) and making two in-person campus visits, which included a day-long research workshop led by Manuel-Scott. She asked students "to consider the significance of our own families’ stories,” they reported, walking them through the process of interrogating a chosen subject’s historical roots and social context. A visit to the University Libraries introduced them to archival resources. Training with mentors versed in oral history technique prepared them to conduct their own interviews with sources, one-on-one and in groups.
Several said these conversations helped them take in elders’ experiences they had once tuned out. “I want my mother’s story to be heard and explained,” read one student's planning memo, for a project focused on immigration. Another student interviewed her mother about her experiences as a child and adult with a disability. Hearing “how little support [my mother] got from teachers and even her parents,” she said, made her grateful her own parents pushed her, “despite my annoyance.” Students who spoke with Fairfax educator and human rights administrator David Temple marveled at his youthful courage during protests against segregated Richmond restaurants: Only 16 at the time, Temple claimed to be 18 in order to seek arrest with fellow activists from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
Manuel-Scott reflected on the project’s lasting influence on this group of students for whom little about social justice can be taken for granted. “The majority of students at John Lewis speak English as a second language, and WHEN they go to college, they will be the first in their families to do so,” she said, reflecting on how their new knowledge empowered them. “I am so proud of these kids.”
July 12, 2024