In other sections of this website, we’ve explored the importance of storytelling in the classroom, of storytelling as a means of navigating identity, of creating connections, or guiding both students and educators toward a culturally responsive classroom. Through the survey put out by “The Bards,” we learned of the ways educators explored storytelling in their own classrooms.
For my individual project, I wanted to showcase personal stories of people who participated in higher education. I wanted to explore identity and representation in the traditional canon and looked for people who self-identified as belonging to a historically-underrepresented population in any way and who also had college degrees.
I wasn’t looking to prove a theory with the interviews, though some common threads emerged from them. Though the stories that came from this project are applicable to any educator, I focused on college because I am a college instructor and one of my goals is to constantly evolve my syllabus, my style of assessment, my personal views, and even my style of feedback based on listening and exploring other people’s ideas on how they feel represented and heard in higher education.
Here, I offer the personal interviews of Shipra Agarwal, Emily August, Nisi Burton, and Cheryl Head.
Shipra Agarwal is a doctor-turned-author who studied creative writing at Harvard. A Pushcart and PEN/Dau nominee, a 2022 Authentic Voices Fellow, and assistant fiction editor at Identity Theory, Shipra writes about the small towns of India, similar to the one she grew up in. Her work appears in Witness, FlashFlood, and Janus Literary. Shipra can be found hiking and kayaking in Arizona, and at www.shipraagarwal.com.
Emily August is an Associate Professor of Literature at Stockton University, where she teaches courses in 19th-century British literature and culture, medical humanities, literatures of crime and detection, and creative writing. Her scholarly research focuses on depictions of medicine and the body in 19th-century literary and scientific texts, in order to discover how a singular, normative version of the human body became the authoritative clinical standard of medical health. Her debut poetry collection, The Punishments Must Be a School (forthcoming from The Word Works in June 2023), explores themes of domestic violence and intergenerational trauma. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, and have appeared in Callaloo, Cimarron Review, Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals. She divides her time between Lake Superior’s North Shore and the Atlantic Ocean’s Jersey Shore.
By her own description Nisi Burton is a “notorious” storyteller. As a child she wound tales, characters and voices for her younger sister. These antics continued as an adult, serving as a professional fundraiser engaging thousands of donors and volunteers to support critical causes. Story connects, creating links between cultures, generations and all persuasions and Nisi thrives in this connection, creating links through genealogy research, writing memoir and creative non-fiction, and telling stories through her art.
Cheryl A. Head writes the twice Lambda Literary-nominated, Charlie Mack Motown Mysteries. The most recent book in the series, Warn Me When It’s Time, was dubbed “chilling and prescient” by The New York Times. Time’s Undoing, a crime novel based on her family’s personal tragedy was released through Dutton Books in February 2023. Cheryl lives in Washington, DC with her partner, and canine supervisors: Abby and Frisby.
Reflection on the interviews
Click here to access this reflection in PDF form
Click here to access the Heyzine flipbook version of this reflection
Story-Based Pedagogy 