Every few weeks, students from a Floyd County high school enter a portal that transports them across the country to a high school 700 miles away in the Bronx, New York.
The students are part of a program that pairs students from Floyd County Central High School with 12 students from University Heights High School in the Bronx so students can connect and learn from each other’s experiences. Not only does the portal take them to the Bronx, but it also takes them around the world, to Gaza, Mexico, South Africa and more.
Floyd Central English teacher Mary Slone discovered Narrative 4 – a national program focused on story exchanges – about four years ago from Hindman Settlement School Director Brent Hutchinson. Slone attended the annual Hindman Settlement School Appalachian Writers Workshop to hear Narrative 4 Director Lee Keylock present about the Story Exchange program.
Soon after, Slone started a partnership with Narrative 4 and the Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative (KVEC). The partnership would allow her creative writing class to meet with students from all over the world, straight from their classroom in Eastern Kentucky.
“Just looking at our classrooms, each one seems very homogenous on their own, but are diverse when we are together. There are so many similarities between Eastern Kentucky and The Bronx. We each face poverty and battle the perception that nothing good can come out our areas,” Slone said. “First, we just got the kids talking. That in itself was a beautiful experience.”
Eventually, this partnership would lead to several ongoing programs for students in the area.
Narrative 4’s curriculum focuses on five core things: faith, identity, violence, environment and immigration. At the center of the curriculum is story exchange. Each person is partnered up with another student to share a story from their life. After listening to each other’s stories, they then retell the story to a larger group in first person, as if they were the person who had lived the experience.
“They practice deep listening – not just listening to the facts, but to the nuances – what’s said and what’s not said. It helps you internalize that person’s story, and empathize with it,” Slone said.
Another part of the programming is called “Empathy Eats,” wherein students exchange recipes, cooking each other’s food, and talking with each other through the Portal about the experience of finding the ingredients and cooking the dish. At Thanksgiving, the students exchanged their favorite dishes of the holiday.
“They sent us recipes for Nigerian puff puffs and flan. We sent them recipes for honey buns and banana pudding,” Slone laughed. “Nearly everything we sent them was a dessert, and most of the recipes they sent us called for plantains. We bought every plantain in East Kentucky.”
Slone coordinates the program with two other teachers at Floyd Central: Melissa Caudill, fellow English teacher, and Michelle Martin-Sullivan, the Spanish teacher. Slone became a Narrative 4 Master Practitioner after attending a training in Brooklyn. This led the teachers to start their first field exchange in December 2018. The field exchange was a six-day visit for students from the Bronx to travel to Floyd County.
The teachers created an itinerary wherein each day was devoted to the themes of faith, identity, violence and environment. On the environment day, students learned the history of Elkhorn Park, an area that was previously a coal strip mine. On the day they focused on Identity, student traveled to Jenny Wiley State Park and hosted a square dance with food and fun.
“It made us look differently at our community,” Slone said. “We don’t have to take [new] visitors to Lexington, we have a lot to offer here. It helped [students] also realize that when we visited the Bronx, they didn’t need to take us to New York City. We could just spend time getting to know each other’s local neighborhoods.”
“[This program] is a lot of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and being willing to try new things, things that you may have never known about before,” Lauren Hamby, a senior at Floyd Central, said recently in WYMT coverage of the exchange.
Slone said the portal and programming is open to the entire school district. The school board volunteered a bus to any teacher’s class who wants to use it.
Bridging divides across lines of race, culture and faith, and learning from each other’s stories, helps us make our communities places where everyone feels welcome, and where everyone sees themselves as part of Appalachia’s New Day.
For more information about the program, watch the Crossing the Divide filmed by a PBS Ground Truth documentary crew.
This is story #49 in the Appalachia’s New Day campaign, a storytelling effort launched in June 2019 by MACED. We work with Eastern Kentuckians to help identify, shape and amplify stories about businesses, programs and initiatives that are building a new economy. Read more stories here. Contact us or sign up here if you would like more details.
