Bridge Building with Scattergood Friends School and Des Moines Valley Friends Using Digital Storytelling

You can’t judge a book by its cover. The same is true of people.

Open Book and E-Book

Open Book and E-Books are community projects of CultureALL, a West Des Moines-based non-profit, that creates connections through story sharing where People are “Books” and You are a “Reader.” Whereas Open Books share stories in small conversation circles, E-Book share stories using a digital medium which are screened for community members. Rather than "judging a book by its cover," Open Book and E-Book are story sharing experiences designed to get Iowans to practice seeing beyond stereotypes through storytelling.

Bridge-Building

In partnership with CultureALL, the 2024 May Term class "The Danger of the Single Story" was designed to pair Scattergood students with a Quaker member of IYMC (Iowa Yearly Meeting Conservative). The class launched with an Open Book live storytelling experience featuring storytellers from Des Moines Valley Friends Meeting. During their May Term course, students created two E-Books: one about their own life and one about a Quaker—the process is designed to begin with students examining their own life before empathizing with someone whose life experiences are radically different from their own. Each E-Book features a storyteller sharing a pivotal life moment, then asking a question of the audience rooted in a core value or universal theme from their story.

"The Danger of the Single Story" May Term Class

Humans are storytelling animals, each sorting our scattered life experiences into coherent, digestible stories. But the problem arises when our complex reality doesn’t match the narrative, leading us to create stereotypes about the world around us. Author Chimanda Ngozi Adichie calls this phenomenon “The Danger of the Single Story,” which is also the namesake of our May Term course, in which Scattergood students learned tools to meet their classmates’ differences with curiosity, not judgment; to meet their community members’ differences with empathy, not apathy; and to learn about themselves deeply, not superficially.

Digital Storytelling was a way our class approached deconstructing the “single story” we have of ourselves and of each other. Using editing softwares DaVinci Resolve, Descript, and Adobe Premiere Pro, students learned digital skills and applied them to important life questions related to identity-formation, cross-cultural connection, and intergroup communication. Stand-out digital stories from the course will be screened during the Iowa Yearly Meeting on July 25th, 2024, from 7 - 8:45 pm at Scattergood.

Quaker Stories

*Not all digital stories below are of Quakers. One story below is of a Scattergood alumni (Lily) and another is of a Des Moines-based artist (Street Prophet)