Last week I attended the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations in New York City. This is the 60th session the commission has been working towards empowering women and girls in achieving sustainable development goals. I was able to sit in on several different panels and learn a great deal about the worldwide response to achieving the goal of gender equality and helping women and girls gain an equal status. This may seem unfathomable from an American perspective, but hearing from African, South American, and European women broadened my perspective on just how great the need is to empower women and girls so that as a global community we can achieve sustainable development.
One of the most engaging panels I attended was called “The Power of Stories in Preventing Violence Against Women: from Local to Global.” A number of different women and men told their stories about experiences of experiencing gender discrimination or inequality in their lives to a very diverse audience from all over the globe. The daughter of human rights and environmental activist Berta Cáceres who was murdered earlier this month in her home in Honduras told the story of being raised by her mother and the last few conversations they had together. Berta had told her daughter to not be afraid, no matter what happened. It was a powerful reminder to continue telling your story no matter what. Berta has been working tirelessly her entire life on behalf of indigenous people, women, and LGBT groups in Honduras to overcome the oppression of a tyrannical government. Despite being threatened with violence, harm, and even murder many times, she continued to work on fighting discrimination. The emphasis on telling stories in this panel made it apparent to me the importance of a global network of sharing stories to broaden our understanding of issues we aren’t aware of and often have a hard time caring about when we don’t feel a connection to them. This, however, is the power of stories, and is instrumental in achieving compassion for people and issues on the other side of the world.
The panel also included a brief workshop on the elements of telling stories hosted by Breakthrough, a group who works to use stories to fight gender discrimination. On their website, they say that “Stories cause the friction that sparks change” and that “Stories enable us to see one another as fully human.” These are important elements of teaching writing to students so that they recognize the power they gain not only by telling and sharing their story but also through listening to others. They gave us some pointers on how to tell an engaging story about an experience and even had us practice as a group writing and then sharing our experience. They encouraged us to ask ourselves:
- What happened?
- What did you do or not do about it?
- How did it change you? What new actions did you take?
Be sure the story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. There should be a moment in which something happens and something changes. The conclusion can be anything that you learned, or gained, or did differently. For more guidelines, see their website.
Elements of what was going on in this panel and on a larger scale at the UN seem very pertinent to what we try to achieve on this blog. Our goal is to inspire educators to help youth and any age of students to learn to write reflectively about their experience. The power of writing reflectively to tell a story and even just to express feelings and experience is a powerful tool that can change major issues like the threat of violence against women, gender discrimination and inequality. In order to teach this, it requires the tools though to enable students to meta cognitively assess their progress and reflect in a way that will produce good writing. That takes practice obviously, but the result is long-lasting and impactful. Because of the stories of brave men and women, and their capacity to write about their experience, we as a global community have a greater responsibility to change the harmful mindsets that prevent people from having basic and equal rights all over the world.