How Do We Change the Single Story?

Above is a Ted Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She is a novelist from Nigeria whose speech focuses on how just following a single story is corruptive to our cultural perspective. Listening to her speak, I realize that despite our best efforts, often times we as educators rely on the single story to teach our students. The single story is something that we fall upon as a society and as such, it is an epic failure on our part to educate our students in education.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch reminds his daughter, Scout, that you need to walk in another's shoes before you judge them. Stories offer us a chance to do so in many ways. Fiction offers us the ability to learn lessons and build our moral systems through stories that challenge and entertain us. Biographies and Memoirs offers us the opportunity to see something through a different perspective. However, often times, we read our stories and don't consider the other point of view. This extends past our reading and into our subjects. Think about it, we all empathize and stand with Katniss Everdeen that the Capital is wrong and President Snow must die; yet, have we ever considered the strain and pressure it is to keep a country like Panem working? Did we stop to consider that President Snow was disgusted by the Hunger Games and just didn't know how to change history? We look at our own history but are we truly diverse in how we teach it? Listening to 8th graders debate the causes of the Civil War is interesting. Many times during their debates, I heard "Northerners believed" or "Southerners couldn't do...". That is a a misnomer historically speaking. Realizing that we are working with 13-14 year old children is important, it is also important to make sure that the generalizations do not follow them. When looking at more than a single story, we see that many Northerners were apathetic to slavery and were not for equality. Southerners didn't all own slaves nor did they all want secession. The Civil War and the issue of slavery is more than just black and white, it involves all perspectives, problems, and emotions. To validate the complexity of the war, we should expose our students to multiple stories, ensuring that they understand more than just the evil of slavery, but the reality of economics on our country. In the course of one of the debates, a student said that it was inevitable that the Civil War occurred because we needed to end slavery. The question I asked is, 'Why does that make the war inevitable? No other major war in modern world history was fought over slavery. In fact, England rid itself of slavery through legislation, not war." So, how would multiple stories affect our learning of topics such as history and economics?

Often times, I hear this phrase coming out of people's mouths, "Well, it's just the way we've always done this...." That mentality is something that scares me and should scare everyone because it shows an inability to see possibility. We are stuck in that one story and it means we must change. This month is Black History Month. Our displays will show what it would look like if the Civil Rights had Twitter. Take a moment this month and read stories, many stories of this pivotal moment in our history and reflect how more than a single story can change our reality.