Thank you. It is an honor to be here surrounded by so many accomplished St. Olaf students, faculty, peers, and family.
This is a room filled with case studies—examples of what it looks like to live education and use your growing experiences to define vocation. You are not just academic specimens with impressive GPAs. You are always learning and connecting and articulating. You are each a unique piece in a puzzle with multiple layers and communities.
Throughout my career at St. Olaf College, I have learned to identify this kind of constant exploration, love of listening and learning, and unique intelligence as something deceptively simple: storytelling. As I participated in daunting interviews, applications, and conversations about my “future” this past Fall, I spent a lot of time thinking about my story. I spent a lot of time thinking about all of your stories too—about why we tell them, who we tell them to, and where they take us.
When I was a little girl growing up in Whitefish Bay, WI (an idyllic suburb located about 5 minutes outside of Milwaukee,) I used to stare at the wall while tucked inside my periwinkle down-comforter—asking myself again and again “who am I who am I who am I?” until the question no longer made sense.
That question didn’t go away. It is one our student population and our generation faces each and every day. We are confident and fear-filled and optimistic and hopeless as we fill in its “answer lines”—all at the same time. We are faced with conflicting messages as we attempt to define ourselves in these years that we’ll look back on fondly. We are told to be our resumes, to devote time to friends, to play, to maintain “plugged in” lifestyles required in the digital age, to engage in our communities, to learn holistically, and to memorize. We flip through Facebook albums to prove that we are who we want to be.
We are approached often with the tension that exists between expressed and operative values—feeling lost as we recognize the injustices of our world and our inability to tackle all of them. We don’t feel that we can take on every cause, but we do our best to at least talk about all of them. We live in a culture of daily time poverty, but in the grander scheme of things we feel like we have a lot of time left.
My mind has wound in this circuitous direction for the past four years—branching into sinewy question-filled paths and then coming back. I have had the opportunity to follow my interests while developing a wide base of knowledge and theory.
My stories have become intertwined. Intertwined with my peers, my coaches, my professors, my family members, my curly-haired Irish roommates from a semester spent studying abroad…. They’re woven in with the stories of the incredible children I’ve tutored, the organizations I’ve joined, and each and every one of the assignments I’ve read or presented or written (whether I enjoyed them or not.)
As author Daniel Abrhams says in his chapter on Reciprocity from the 2011 anthropological book “Becoming Animal,” “it is only the lived, felt relationships that we daily maintain with one another, with the other creatures that surround us and the terrain that sustains us, that can teach us the use and misuse of all our abstractions.”
In other words, we learn as much from each other as we do from our textbooks and lectures and tests. We are a culture filled with hidden curriculums.
The theme of storytelling for social change and developing a sense of self and place and identity is not new. It has been broadcast in countless speeches like this one—used to inspire young people on the cusp of a mysterious future.
And yet, I’m not sure that we take full advantage of our stories. I don’t think we always notice our moments of “flow”—those minutes, hours, days, and weeks when the courses of our lives are changed because we are completely immersed, impassioned, and motivated.
Philosopher Csikszentmilhalyi coined and defined this sensation of flow as one where “people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life.” He argues in his book The Psychology of Optimum Experience that we can bring on this positive experience in our everyday lives.
I think that this goal can be accomplished through storytelling.
We need to think constantly about our stories—shaping them as we put them into conversation with one another. Conscious as we juxtapose them with stories of the past (and sometimes the future.)
For me, St. Olaf College has offered an experience of “flow” that has lasted four years. As I prepare for the next chapter, I will use the tools gained on this limestone campus to challenge and transform my plotline.
And so, I’d like to share a summarized version of “my story” with you—a story that changes with each terrifying instance when someone asks; “Tell me about yourself.”
But before I begin, know that this is your story too. The names and dates and details may differ, but the campus is the same. We’ve walked these sidewalk squares and sat at the same tables, and passed in the hallways. We overlap.
Think through your own experience—how do you tell your story? As author Joyce Carol Oates asks in the title of one of her most unsettling and awesome short stories: “Where are you going? Where have you been?”
When I’m asked to tell you about myself, I always begin with my hometown—a beautiful lakeside town of about 14,000. I grew up on a street that winds its way along the curved outline of Lake Michigan. I was fortunate to grow up with everything I needed and more—a supportive family, a highly acclaimed public school district, the opportunity to participate in cross country and track and orchestra and horseback riding…and the privilege of very high expectations. I always knew that I would go to college.
Not everyone in Wisconsin public schools had it this way. My town was ridiculed as “white folks bay” for a reason. In my junior and senior years, I had a sense of guilt for everything I’d been given—things that so many people my age would work hard for and never receive.
The questions I asked myself in high school were questions that would eventually shape my vocation—I just didn’t know it yet.
Growing up in the affluent community of Whitefish Bay, I witnessed disparities daily in the form of three bright yellow school buses. There was a clear “achievement gap” in our schools. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term “achievement gap,” it is defined by Education Week as “the disparity in academic performance between groups of students. The achievement gap shows up in grades, standardized-test scores, course selection, dropout rates, and college-completion rates, among other success measures. It is most often used to describe the troubling performance gaps between African-American and Hispanic students, at the lower end of the performance scale, and their non-Hispanic white peers, and the similar academic disparity between students from low-income families and those who are better off.”
In many ways, this achievement gap is more of an opportunity gap.
In efforts to decrease the homogeneity of our classrooms, the perennially high-achieving Whitefish Bay school district implemented a program in 1976 called Chapter 220. This program was designed to allow “minority students from Milwaukee to attend suburban schools and non-minority suburban students to attend MPS schools” (schoolchoicewi.org). In reality, suburban students stayed where they were, and a group of underserved students from the city were bused in each morning at 7:35 AM.
Throughout my primary schooling experience, the division between black and white was clearly drawn. Black children were categorized as “other” as they arrived by bus, and white children walked to school or were driven by parents. For those students designated as “different,” academic difficulty was an unspoken expectation.
In high school, not one black student filled a seat in my AP-level classes. Even at 18 and in a position of privilege, I was struck by the unmentioned injustices. Like the “who am I?” question, considerations of race, class, and privilege would be unpacked at St. Olaf.
When I arrived on the Hill, everything I owned stuffed into the family station wagon and hauled up the steps of Hoyme Hall, I was given the opportunity to delve into my studies in a unique and inventive way. I still think about that day we were all packed into Skoglund’s Auditorium—wondering if I could chart the relationships I’d form over four years if I looked back…like one of those freeze frames at the beginning of a movie that starts at the end.
In my first two years I developed an independent major titled Growing Up in America: A Systems Thinking Approach. It started out as a “study of American identities” … and it turned into more.
Throughout this experience, the questions of my childhood and adolescence returned in questions posed in midnight conversations, the frequent visits to my mentor Professor Jim Farrell’s office, and across the journeys from Buntrock to Hoyme, down the hill to Schmidt House, up the hill from Lincoln Manor, and past the volley ball courts to Ytterboe.
In my first year at St. Olaf, while navigating the inner workings of Pause Dances, tray sledding, and shifting groups of friends, I learned the art of “dense facting” via American Conversations program. I was captivated by the genius of professors Jim Farrell and Gary Gisselmann.
The strangely conjugated verb “to dense fact” is an expression for seeing the connections in everyday life. It was everything I wanted from education in a nutshell.
The stitching on a pair of blue jeans transformed into a study of department store history, globalization, and “branded selves.” My dorm room was a museum. We took inventories and thought deeply about what our possessions said about us. “Where are you going, where have you been?” was behind everything.
I learned that I could write an essay about something as mundane as a paperclip. My view of the world around me changed completely. From lessons on Benjamin Franklin to Bill Clinton, I fell in love with stories and facts. We didn’t just read books. We wrote and we argued and we observed. We performed our own Vaudeville skits in place of a midterm exam and met in circles outside when the weather got warm. For one final assignment, I wrote a 40-page play (inspired by Thornton Wilder’s Our Town) about my experience growing up in Whitefish Bay. I called it Town of White. I didn’t want the experience to end.
So I kept it going.
Compiling the questions I had pondered throughout American Conversations and the other courses of my first two years of St. Olaf, I created my own academic path. I continued to “dense fact.” I took a risk by creating a major that many would scoff at when I explained it over brunch or at an event where “so, what’s your major?” is the icebreaker.
I took a risk, but I had a safety net. I was supported by an amazing learning community that allowed me to forge ahead.
Within “Growing Up in America,” I examined the complexities of the American education system, modern media and childhood development, and the idea that there is a “hidden curriculum” outside of the classroom. I began to think in systems—connecting personal experiences to larger concepts in concentric circles. I started with St. Olaf and Northfield communities and then moved to larger circles encompassing economic, political, religious, and government systems. It was a “local to global” approach—one you probably experienced in at least one of the classes you’ve taken.
In the psychology, anthropology, American studies, and education classes that made up my major, I asked questions like:
How does our country deal with accepting individual differences throughout history and today? How is this reflected in our school system?
How has technology impacted the way we grow up and define ourselves as Americans?
As Americans, what do young people fear, hope, and dream for? How has the American dream changed throughout history and where do youth see it today?
How have child-rearing/ parenting practices in American culture shaped our identities? How do our child rearing practices differ from other cultures? And how do they intersect with our schooling practices?
These questions preceded independent studies on topics like “Child Rearing Across Cultures” and “Mommy Blogging for Social Change.” They paved the way for two summers spent doing research through St. Olaf’s CURI program and the incredible opportunity this semester to co-teach a democratically led class called “Campus Ecology.”
The questions and connections posed within my major translated to my experiences outside of academics as well.
In two years spent living in the Activism for Social Change Network honor house, a summer dedicated to the intentional community of the Leaders for Social Change program, and 5 months spent studying, mountaineering, and enjoying the pub scene of Galway, Ireland, I learned that strong relationships can be built upon questions and challenging conversation.
Over three years with several hours per day devoted to cross country and track, my group of “runner friends” proved that we could do anything we put our minds to (or that our coaches decided we could do.) We practiced the art of storytelling on a daily basis—spinning tales to keep things interesting on 80 minute “long runs.”
In my CIS senior project centered on developing a new kind of student organization on campus, I thought more about the power of storytelling as a co-chapter leader for Students for Education Reform (SFER.) Through this organization, part of a nonprofit organization that uses student voices on 100 campuses across the country to raise awareness about achievement and opportunity gaps in education, I have developed my personal outlook on education reform and brainstormed ways to express my values in my immediate communities—planning awareness raising events, taking a critical approach to work with a national non-profit organization, and inspiring action.