"The Danger of a Single Story" by Linda Christensen

 Ahead of this blog post, I decided to read the chapter "The Danger of a Single Story" by Linda Christensen from the Rethinking Media and Popular Culture book. Once I began reading this chapter, I realized why the title of this chapter spoke to me: it was named after the Ted Talk of the same name from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Not only had I seen this Ted Talk before (many times), Adichie is one of my favorite authors, and was also the commencement speaker at my undergraduate graduation from American University in 2019. 

Christensen wrote this chapter to discuss how she goes about teaching a lesson on writing personal narratives. She explains how she decided to create this lesson after observing students who were at "the intersection of being surprised by the racism their brown bodies brought to them and the tough-boy masks they created to survive." She decided that she wanted to design a curriculum that taught students how to navigate a society that discriminates against them and how others have dealt with that discrimination. My favorite quote from this chapter is "When students are pulled from police cars, followed in stores, suspended for refusing to obey ridiculous orders, our job as teachers must be to produce a curriculum that demonstrates that they are not alone and not crazy. At the same time, we must give them tools to dismantle those mistaken assumptions."

When teaching students how to write personal narratives, she introduces them to the idea of the "Single Story" by showing Adichie's Ted Talk and having students come up with a list of "single stories" that are told about them, and how they have created conflict in their own lives. Throughout the process of writing the narratives, students focus on both the structure of the personal narrative, but also the healing nature of being able to share these stories of discrimination so that their impact can hopefully be diminished.

While this lesson was designed for an ELA curriculum, I was trying to find ways I could incorporate portions of it for a science curriculum. My immediate thought was to use this towards the beginning of the school year when I ask students to think of themselves as scientists in my class. There is a very large lack of representation of women and people of color in the sciences, and I want to encourage my students to think of themselves in those positions. I think part of this comes from the fact that there is a "single story" told about the types of people who can be scientists, or what type of work scientists do: they have to be "naturally" smart, they have to be good at math, they memorize lots and lots of arbitrary facts, they wear lab coats and do experiments all day, etc. I want students to simultaneously break this "single story" of what it means to be a scientist, but I also want students to break their own "single stories" and make it so they see that they all possess qualities to be a scientist.