Shaking the Single Story

This semester, my students have been studying Achebe's Things Fall Apart by examining how Achebe writes his novel to challenge the "single story" of Africa promoted by white, European imperialists. We began by looking at Chimamanda Adichie's inspiring TED talk about "The Danger of a Single Story," in which Adichie eloquently notes that "The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.  They make one story become the only story.”

I then asked my students to watch and blog about a TED talk of their choice, and I was blown away by the diverse topics my sophomores chose.  Some watched talks about alternate energy sources and the God particle, others learned about the reality of depression and the science of happiness, and others found inspiring stories like Diana Nyad's recent talk about her swim from Cuba to Miami.  I was particularly impressed by my students' responses to the talks they watched. (Check my blogroll and you'll find their posts.) Two of my students watched Sir Ken Robinson's famous talk about how schools kill creativity and disagreed with his conclusion; instead, they argued that the schools they've attended actually nurtured, and did not stifle, their creative expression.  And several of my students engaged in a spirited conversation online about the future of electric cars.  Awesome.

I watched most of the talks my students viewed, and in the course of reviewing their responses, I came across a fantastic talk that, like Adichie's, confronts stereotypes and sheds new light on many of my own assumptions.  

In a mere fourteen minutes, Maysoon Zayid--who looks a lot like Lea Michele from Glee-- challenges everything you think you know about Palestinians, disabilities, cerebral palsy, female comedians, and even Jersey girls (like me).  Her story, sense of humor, and simple message--"If I can, you can"--reminded me that we are all more than the sum of the single stories told about us.  Zayid shows us that if we want to tell our own story on our terms, we can't allow those single stories and stereotypes to dominate the narrative.     

So for my a final project on Achebe and "The Danger of a Single Story," I've asked my students to think about the many communities and groups to which they belong--their race, ethnicity, hometown, neighborhood, school, extracurricular activities, any cultural identifiers, really -- and the single stories that exist for those groups.  Then, I've asked them to find someone who is challenging one of those stereotypes, and to present to the class (and on their blogs) an example of a text that strives to complete that group's story.

I'm excited to see what they come up with...