Herstory/ Coalition for Community Writing Graduate Fellowship:
Teaching for Justice and Peace

Herstory Writers Workshop College Consortium and the Coalition for Community Writing are proud to offer a fellowship program to train graduate students in the use of an innovative, empathy-based community writing methodology, the Herstory Method, as part of a story-based strategy for change.    

Our Graduate Fellows, chosen competitively, participate in a year-long on-line intergenerational facilitator training institute and in-person field placement, in partnership with the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University (HISB). The institute includes graduate and undergraduate students, along with current and retired community activists, educators, and human service providers who are interested in working in alternative settings with populations that have traditionally been denied a voice. The training includes a hands-on immersion in the Herstory Method, a writing process that has transformed the lives of thousands of people—young and old, and incarcerated and free—over a 25-year period, while creating a powerful body of grassroots literature coming from those whose voices are not usually included in the canon.  The overarching goal is to provide each fellow with tools to enable those who have been silenced to create powerful narratives, while collectively finding ways to use these stories to change hearts, minds, and policies.

We are proud to introduce our 2020-2021 Fellows:

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Angeline M. Dean

Department of Language, Literacy and Sociocultural Education

Rowan University

Angeline M. Dean

www.intersystemz.rocks

“Your punishment is to read the Encyclopedia of Black history. THIS is what the schools will never teach you and I wont make it their job to do so. I will take responsibility as your father to do so. And so he did. Each week as he arrived home from driving across country, he always made time for me. What started out as a punishment became time, learning time, questioning time, relationship time, debate time, and yes-daddy/daughter time. It was amazing! He planted a seed that so many others watered, and now I watch God provide the increase. From this experience, I learned power, power structures, words, both silent and visible words, words and their power, how power operates, who has power and when, systems, but most importantly, I later realized I learned that I had a shared responsibility in relation to my knowledge and power. A responsibility, birthed in my purpose to the people. Angeline- - heavenly messenger; one who uses her voice to speak, to speak up, to speak out, to speak alongside of, and to speak on behalf of. This has been my life-always on the side of the underdog!

As an unapologetic, Black female disruptor, local and national organizer/activist, and scholar, I possess a strong disdain for ‘plantation’ politics and systems, and those who fuel the fire with their rhetoric while most times serving intentionally as oppressive predators themselves. Those who mask themselves as gate openers, but once the mask is removed, they are no more than gate keepers sent to maintain the status quo.

My focus here in this fellowship is to reflect upon my life as a means of identity and the metamorphic process of transformation while finishing my doctorate. My primary focus as a doctoral candidate is examining colonial plantation frameworks, both economic and pedagogical, their existence in today’s systems, and how their intentional and predatory nature foster new methods of enslavement. My Oppression/Plantation Paradigm© (OPP-Other People’s Property) model outlines components of the “slave creation” process not only structurally and institutionally, but also systematically and systemically. It addresses racism and internalized racism from a physiological and psychological aspect in congruence with the political economy of the Black body.

This opportunity to partner with Herstory, Stonybrook University, and the Coalition for Community Writing is not only a space to learn from one another, but also important to me as it is a space that situates storytelling as culturally relevant, responsible, conscious, a gift, and necessary. I see Herstory as a method that holds power and aids in dismantling the danger(s) of a one-sided story that frequently subjugates and “others.” It is a tool that opens avenues for others to use their voice to impact change and healing while addressing how inclusion often excludes and how justice comes with a cost for some-a cost which includes enslavement in its various forms. I hope to use this training as a shared gift with those who I have worked with in the various systems (education, health, police, penal, etc.) and communities, one that leads us all on a journey to not just being free, but free indeed. 

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Megan Heise

Composition & Applied Linguistics

Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Megan Heise

Megan Heise is a PhD candidate in Composition and Applied Linguistics at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she is the Assistant Editor for Writing Spaces. As a Herstory-CCW fellow, she will be facilitating storytelling workshops alongside refugee teens through a partnership with ARYSE, an NGO based in Pittsburgh, PA. Megan has extensive experience working with refugee youth, including with ARYSE in the U.S. and with Lighthouse Relief in a refugee camp in Greece. She looks forward to sharing what she learns through the fellowship with refugee youth to help amplify their voices and further Herstory’s aim to change minds, hearts, and policies through stories.

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Gabrielle Kelenyi

Composition & Rhetoric

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Gabrielle Kelenyi

Building community through writing means that words are more than simply something to put on paper: writing is a way to understand and be understood, to feel and be felt, to commune. I believe writing fosters a better understanding of self, others, and the world. Thus, I was drawn to the Herstory/ Coalition for Community Writing Graduate Fellowship because it aligns with my commitments to teach writing as a means to build community and to research writing as a means to instigate social change.

These commitments have strongly influenced my experiences and objectives as a teacher of writing across languages, ages, and communities. As a PhD student in Composition & Rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I have developed expertise around research, writing, and equity through courses that explore connections between literacy and peacebuilding, pursue answers to questions like “What makes writing hard?,” and identify and augment best practices in public rhetoric and community writing. I have developed strong academic interests in literacy studies, community writing, composition pedagogy, writing development across the lifespan, and community engaged/ participatory research.

My community-engaged dissertation research with a writing group for nontraditional students intends to support participants in developing a sense of writerly identity through consistent writing time and support as well as co-research about their writing practices. I work with alumni of a humanities focused college access program for adult students near the federal poverty line, the vast majority of whom are people of color, who want more opportunities to write after the initial two-semester course ends. Our writing group aims to help members use writing however they want and feel confident doing so by sharing writing strategies, expertise, feedback, and experiences as well as by engaging in co research about writing practices and experiences. With the Herstory Project and the Coalition for Community Writing, I am eager to learn how to empathetically gather grassroots stories with and from my co-researchers that amplify their voices, affirm that their stories matter, and instigate the social changes they desire.

My ultimate goal is to centralize the experiences of nontraditional adult students to design inclusive, culturally sustaining writing instruction. The Herstory/ Coalition for Community Writing Fellowship will enrich my teaching, research, and community-engaged practice now and in the future by providing me with the experience, knowledge, and skills to collaborate with my participants, colleagues, and Herstory cohort members to use community writing to advance social justice.

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Jessica Lowell Mason

Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies

University at Buffalo

Jessica Lowell Mason

Too often, psychiatric labels function as sources of oppression that undermine autonomy and self-determination, relegating the voices of those with psychiatric labels to categories of incompetence and preventing those voices from being heard in care systems and society. My work both in and outside of academia is concerned with cognitive rights and the treatment, socially and institutionally, of people with psychiatric labels and disabilities. As someone who identifies as a psychiatric industry survivor, I know from personal experience the kinds of erasures of dignity, freedom, and human status that happen in mental healthcare systems, where differences are pathologized and where labels become the fragments through which the complexity of the whole person is forced into narrow view. My work is part of larger efforts and social movements dedicated to fighting against discrimination and making changes within mental healthcare systems. I believe that it is essential that we listen to people who are affected by mental healthcare systems, and who are, therefore, subject to the forms of discrimination and trauma that are often inherent in such systems. We need to know about their experiences of and perspectives on care in order to reflect upon and reform our care systems. Through the organization that I co-founded in 2017 with my sister, Madwomen in the Attic, I have been able to be part of feminist mental health and madness literacy projects and support that place the voices and perspectives of women and gender non-conforming people with lived mental healthcare experience at the center. The meetings we hold and literacy projects we do aim to provide a safer space, outside of the mental healthcare system, for women and gender non-conforming people with lived experience to gather together to support one another non-coercively and to engage in literacy projects together, in order to advocate for change in our communities and care systems. I couldn’t be more honored and thrilled to be able to work with Herstory to develop writing workshops and programs for people within and outside of psychiatric institutions in order to combat stigma and discrimination, raise awareness around institutional experience, and amplify the voices of people affected and sometimes oppressed by the mental healthcare system in the United States. The development of workshops and writing programs that use the Herstory method would help to sustain and push forward the literacy agenda Madwomen in the Attic is developing. I believe that narratives of lived experience are what our mental healthcare system desperately needs and that bringing together the voices of women and gender non-conforming people with lived psychiatric experiences will affect change in mental healthcare policy across the country.

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Shahrzad Sajadi

School for Global Inclusion and Social Development

University of Massachusetts Boston

Shahrzad Sajadi

I have always known about the connection between my name Shahrzad and storytelling. When I was little my mum would tell me the story of my namesake, Scheherazade the Persian queen who insisted on marrying the tyrant king of the time and had changed the course of history with her stories. It felt empowering to identify with this mythical storyteller who was a heroine of her time, but I didn’t fully grasp what storytelling meant until I started to appreciate the power of words. Words who immersed me in the world of books and the writer’s imagination, words who made me care about people I had never met, words who made friends out of strangers and some words who stung. Words are alive. They breathe. They give voice. Words have power.

Even as a social scientist, doctoral candidate and researcher, my obsession with words continue. My research involves understanding the impact of voice. I want to understand who has voice and how that impacts their power to create change? I am interested in studying the systems that prioritise some over others. I ask how words and voices create systems and how systems shape voice. I challenge systems that give voice to some and silence others. I study systems’ failures to include marginalised populations specifically for people behind bars and refugees in informal settlements. In my opinion, the connection between these two populations is rooted in the way systems treat them–forgotten and tucked away out of the sight and consciousness of the rest of society. I believe that listening to these populations’ stories and amplifying their voices is the best way of recognizing their agency and restoring their power. To that end, my research uses narrative methods to capture people’s lived experiences.

My interest in the criminal justice system and incarcerated lives started in my law school years in Iran. This fascination with the impacts of incarceration on voice was deepened when I got the opportunity to investigate suicides in county jails in Massachusetts as a recent journalism graduate in Boston. Parallel to that research, I was involved in a study understanding the experiences of Syrian refugee child brides in informal settlements in Lebanon. In both cases, it is the stories of people that stay with me the most and what inspire me to continue on this work.

I hope to use my training at the Herstory institute to capture these stories. I am relying on Herstory’s specific methods to pull out the stories of people whose voices have often been overlooked. In addition to creating powerful narratives, the strength of this approach is in its adaptability to populations who might lack formal educational trainings. These stories will become part of a set of triangulated data for my dissertation project that will explore systems’ failures to inclusion that will hopefully shine a light on the impact of voicelessness on exclusion.

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Alison Turner

Writing Program

University of Denver

Alison Turner

I was born in the mountains of Colorado, where I learned to spend large amounts of time outdoors hiking, snowboarding, walking, and waiting for buses. While I have left several times, no matter where I am, I am somehow returning to these mountains and the ways that they raised me.

While this returning occasionally happens physically, more and more it happens through writing. I write stories with themes including searching, disorientation, and, yes, returning. How do the places we pursue and then leave shape us? How does this change if we don’t have control over where we are and for how long? What can we do when we are settled in a place that did not seem to be but then becomes home, and how are we restrained and energized by that settling?

I regularly participate in spaces of community literacy that support the writing and expression of folx without access to conventional academic settings and/or education systems.  I have worked on writing projects with people at a day shelter for women and trans folx, people who are incarcerated, higher education students living in refugee camps through an asynchronous online tutoring program, and with guests at an emergency 24/7 shelter created during the pandemic. From these writers, I learn new ways of thinking about home during acute and chronic displacement, as well as new ways of returning when there is no home, in a conventional sense, to return to.

It is my hope that by learning the Herstory method, both by experiencing its benefits and practicing its facilitation with mentors and other Fellows, I will be better able to support writers in spaces of dislocation. The stories that I hear from writers in these spaces change the way I understand the world, and I believe whole-heartedly that wider audiences for these storytellers would create stronger and more resilient communities. Most importantly, I believe that sharing these stories can empower writers, and that writing communities, no matter how disparate their origins and participants, can create a sense of home.

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Paul Mikel Watts-Offret

Department of English

North Carolina State University

Paul Mikel Watts-Offret

Failing Public Schools and Predominantly White Institutions: An Educational and Biographical History

By: Paul Mikel Watts-Offret

I attended high school in Yuma, Arizona, a border town where my family has roots that predate both the U.S. and Mexican governments. Young people from all along the border were bussed to school in Yuma, so my high school had nearly 6,000 students when I attended, 91% of them Latinx. Only 19% of those kids passed the state test in Reading, and only 14% passed in Math. Despite the large student body, only one honors or AP class was offered in each subject area, and the majority of the students in those honors/AP classes were White. My junior year, the school had to maintain police officers on campus to break up fights, and students were not permitted to brandish the colors of the Mexican flag. I graduated never having to read a book, write a paper, or do a day of homework. 

I struggled early in my college career, but I ended up in an American literature course where I read Frederick Douglass’s narrative of his life as a slave. His story served as a counter-story to American meritocratic ideas on why the poor are poor and the rich are rich. I came to realize that the racism I witnessed in high school was an extension of centuries old White supremacy. I majored in English and took all the African American and Latinx literature courses offered. A productive anger grew inside me, and I wanted to fight racism on the front lines: failing public schools.   

I applied to the program Teach for America (TFA) so I could teach in one of the most help needed schools in the country, but I wasn’t accepted. Undeterred, I earned an MA in Teaching for English in Secondary Education with a focus on low-income schools. I applied to TFA again and was successful. I became a middle school English Language Arts (ELA) teacher in the Mississippi Delta at a school in the Black community that had just been taken over by the state for seven consecutive years of failing test scores. I blended a curriculum heavy in creative writing and personal narrative with the test prep administration required. A local African American woman named Miskia Davis was hired on as the new principal to lead the school’s turn-around, and she had a dream of turning that school into one of the best in the state. After three years, our middle school was one of only six in the state awarded a blue ribbon distinguished school award, and Miskia Davis went on to become the superintendent of the school district. I discovered that real academic growth comes from students being able to tell their own stories and see themselves in their work at school.   

I knew I wanted to be a writer even before I became a teacher, but in my first year teaching I realized I wanted to write stories for young people that developed their social consciousness and inspired them to succeed despite the public institutions failing them. I wrote a short story with my students about a good kid who was pressured into making a really bad decision. That short story grew into my first novel. By the time I finished the novel, I was teaching middle school ELA in the Latinx and Vietnamese communities of East San Jose, CA. I printed out class sets of my novel and delivered an entire novel study, incorporating non-fiction reading on slavery, Jim Crow, and the school-to-prison pipeline. I experienced my writing with my intended audience in real time, and my students’ enthusiasm inspired me to imagine my writing in classroom libraries all over the country. I wanted to be as good a writer AND as good a teacher as any in the world, and I wanted to serve historically oppressed communities.

I decided to pursue an MFA in fiction and was accepted into a fully-funded program. I got to work with talented and inspiring people, and I felt lucky to be in my MFA program. At the same time, I realized I was in a predominantly White institution for the first time. Colleges in the U.S. are labeled according to the racial demographics of the students: Predominantly White Institutions, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, Tribal Colleges, ect... Student tracking, segregation, and low-expectations are so strong at the K-12 level, that the communities I identified with and served were not adequately represented in my post-secondary institution. While many people I worked with were socially conscious and inspired, many other kind and generous people had never had to consider the role of racism in education because they hadn’t worked intimately outside their own communities. My instincts as a teacher for social justice were ignited, and I wanted to add a perspective into academia that meaningfully accounted for systemic racism. I know I am not alone in wanting more representation within higher education. My desire to develop an inclusive, anti-racist teaching pedagogy led me to the organizations Herstory and the Coalition for Community Writing. Currently, I am privileged to be a Herstory/ Coalition for Community Writing Graduate Fellowship: Teaching for Justice and Peace Fall 2020 Graduate Fellow.

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