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The Kaleidoscope Project
The Kaleidoscope Project
The Kaleidoscope Project is a diversity-based reading and creative writing program that I developed under the auspices of a Public Humanities Fellowship, jointly funded by Humanities New York and the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. The project, named after the zine for underrepresented students at my alma mater, Bryn Mawr College, sought to expand high school students' access to contemporary literature that better reflects their own lived experiences. Only 20 percent of the recommended readings on the core language arts curriculum taught in New York public schools are by women, 16 percent by non-white writers, and two books total by non-Western writers (Pablo Neruda and Chinua Achebe), whereas 85 percent of school-aged children in New York City are not white and/or first-generation immigrants. The application statistics alone attest to students' intense desires for more diverse books: my funding could only support 17 percent (18 participants) of the average 105 students applying each of the two years when the program first ran (2015-2017).
I aimed to achieve equal access and inclusivity both in terms of course content and infrastructure. All eighteen students in each summer term received free round-trip MetroCards, essential school supplies such as notebooks and pens, and dinner at every class to ensure that no one's attendance presented a burden to their socioeconomic situations. I organized the syllabus according to social differences that often instigate bias-based harassment in public schools and highlighted non-Western, LGBTQI, and/or woman-identified writers. Each week, students met to share the creative writing they had done for homework and discuss this week's readings in a college-level, seminar-style environment. After the close of the program, I continue to serve students as a mentor and reader for college preparation, recommendation letters, and personal statements.
The program has been on hiatus for 2018-2020 because I have lost access to my previous funding pipeline since graduating from my doctoral program. However, I hope to reinvigorate the program with a new institutional affiliation in the near future.
For now, all the materials I created are freely available online to literature teachers of any level and background who are committed to eradicating social inequality in education. These materials include syllabi from both years, PDFs of required readings, lesson plans, and weekly slideshows.
If you try out any of these materials, please, let me know at nicole[underscore]gervasio[at]brown[dot]edu. I would love to hear how it goes.
News on the Kaleidoscope Project
News on the Kaleidoscope Project
- "An Uncommon Core," my contribution to a Virtual Roundtable on Engaged Scholarship and Teaching that I organized for Public Books
- "Letting Scopes Collide at the Kaleidoscope Project," a blog post for the Heyman Center for the Humanities
- Blog post from Girls Write Now, the only nonprofit specifically for women writers and teens in the U.S.
Harlem Memory Walk Project
Harlem Memory Walk Project
The Harlem Memory Walk Project (now available via PocketSights for Apple and Android) arose by way of inspiration from the Gender Memory Walk in Istanbul, created by my Turkish colleagues at Women Mobilizing Memory. They coined the notion of a "memory walk" as an affective, peripatetic engagement with living, public space. In contrast to a generic "walking tour," a memory walk re-enlivens events in cultural memory that risk being lost to popular history through storytelling and physical encounters with urban environments.
On a practical level, we, as Americans, sought to replicate the interactive engagement with the materiality of social inequality that our peers had created for us in Istanbul for their convergence in New York City. However, in a broader sense, we also wanted to confront the enduring consequences of transatlantic slavery on institutionalized racism in the U.S. Citizens and leaders of our nation, on the whole, have consistently failed to recognize both our own complicity and the need for reparations emerging from this singular collective trauma. As a neighborhood, Harlem exemplifies a microcosm for opportunities and struggles facing African Americans across the country. A vivacious, resilient haven for Black life and culture, Harlem has also survived (and continues to survive under the siege of) police brutality, urban poverty, and narcotics epidemics, among other insidious structures of violence. Furthermore, we believed that we must recognize the negative impact of our institution, Columbia University, in systematically re-colonizing this historically Black neighborhood for financial gain.
Because of my background in urban studies, I volunteered to spearhead the team of graduate students who identified sites for commemoration and led a series of walks for participants in Harlem. As a baseline, we featured spaces that were important to Black literary figures but that have not garnered historic landmark status, like 267 House and Langston Hughes' former home. We also strove to highlight now-defunct spaces that were historically important to multiply marginalized residents, whose impact on the area is in danger of erasure as social conservatism becomes more commonplace. These community-builders include single mothers and caretakers at Utopia Children's House, LGBTQI-identified performers at clubs like Connie's Inn and the Clam House, and defenders of the labor movement, like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
A direct link to an e-version of the tour is available here. Since its inception, the memory walk has been used as a tool for expanding students' understandings of history, art, literature and urban environments; it is also a unique way for everyday visitors to learn more about Harlem.
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