Thanks to their use of Out of Eden Walk HomeStories, eight Chicago area middle schoolers—all newcomers to America from Ukraine, Mongolia, Mexico, and El Salvador—recently won a chance to celebrate and shine under the rotunda at the Illinois State Capitol Building. What’s more, the students seized the opportunity to turn their moment in the spotlight into a rare growth experience.
Educators at Jack London Middle School, in Wheeling, Illinois, had found that writing HomeStories helped the school’s young migrants ease their adjustments to a promising but quite foreign new country. In their stories, the kids wrote about their feelings for their former homelands and their high hopes for the new lives they were building here. The process helped connect them more closely with their families, classmates, and teachers. It was chronicled here earlier this year.
Inspired by Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk, HomeStories describe where the writer most feels at home. They’re posted on an interactive map and shared with users around the world. The map also invites the writers to explain who they are, where they’re from, and where they’re going—the same three questions Paul asks the first person he meets at every hundred-mile waypoint, or Milestone, along his global trail. It’s an ideal outlet for people to reflect about moving from one country to another.
HomeStories are fairly simple and short, but they’re written from the heart, conjuring deep feelings of belonging as personal as each individual storyteller and as ancient as humanity itself. The map’s modern technology makes it fast and easy to share those insights with people of all ages anywhere on the planet.
The Jack London Middle School delegation poses for a portrait in front of the capitol dome. Tracy Crowley (red top) and Alicia Duell are at the far right.
Jodi Greenspan
“Technology lets you remove barriers that could prevent real communication,” said Alicia Duell, then director of technology and information services for the Wheeling-based school district and a HomeStories proponent who joined the group in Springfield. “If students tried to speak in person, they’d have to overcome a language barrier and could only say a little bit.
“But HomeStories allow us to get to know them as fully formed people,” she said. “They may come from different parts of the world, but they can still talk about their families and experiences. You find they’re very proud of their home countries and cultures, like all of our kids.”
Educators marveled at how HomeStories helped young migrants blossom even when the surroundings and people around them seemed so new. “Teachers who worked on HomeStories felt very moved and inspired by helping newcomers write and post their stories on the map,” said Tracy Crowley, a Jack London faculty member and the manager of the HomeStories project. “Both students and teachers left the experiences smiling.”
The process was such a success that Jack London entered it into a statewide competition organized by the Illinois Digital Educators Association to show how technology can be used to enhance learning. Organizers selected HomeStories as one of the projects to be presented to legislators, other state officials and educators from around the state at the capitol building in Springfield.
The students, along with teachers and some family members, left Wheeling early one May morning for the long ride to their presentation. They got off the bus outside the grand capitol building, built proudly not long after the Civil War and something of a showpiece honoring notable Illinoisans, especially Springfield’s own Abraham Lincoln, whose historic home, library, and tomb are only a few blocks away. Yuliana, an eighth grader from Ukraine, walked into the building with a big smile and kept saying, “It’s so beautiful, it’s so beautiful.” (Following school policy, we can only publish the students’ first names.)
Once inside, the kids got to work, setting up a computer to demonstrate HomeStories to the crowds working the tables at the event, called Student Advocacy Day. A little shy at first, the students soon leaned into the job, gaining confidence and growing in experience with every demonstration. Most of them wore clothes from their native countries.
The Jack London Middle School delegation poses for a portrait in front of the capitol dome. Tracy Crowley (red top) and Alicia Duell are at the far right.
Jodi Greenspan
“Technology lets you remove barriers that could prevent real communication,” said Alicia Duell, then director of technology and information services for the Wheeling-based school district and a HomeStories proponent who joined the group in Springfield. “If students tried to speak in person, they’d have to overcome a language barrier and could only say a little bit.
“But HomeStories allow us to get to know them as fully formed people,” she said. “They may come from different parts of the world, but they can still talk about their families and experiences. You find they’re very proud of their home countries and cultures, like all of our kids.”
Educators marveled at how HomeStories helped young migrants blossom even when the surroundings and people around them seemed so new. “Teachers who worked on HomeStories felt very moved and inspired by helping newcomers write and post their stories on the map,” said Tracy Crowley, a Jack London faculty member and the manager of the HomeStories project. “Both students and teachers left the experiences smiling.”
The process was such a success that Jack London entered it into a statewide competition organized by the Illinois Digital Educators Association to show how technology can be used to enhance learning. Organizers selected HomeStories as one of the projects to be presented to legislators, other state officials and educators from around the state at the capitol building in Springfield.
The students, along with teachers and some family members, left Wheeling early one May morning for the long ride to their presentation. They got off the bus outside the grand capitol building, built proudly not long after the Civil War and something of a showpiece honoring notable Illinoisans, especially Springfield’s own Abraham Lincoln, whose historic home, library, and tomb are only a few blocks away. Yuliana, an eighth grader from Ukraine, walked into the building with a big smile and kept saying, “It’s so beautiful, it’s so beautiful.” (Following school policy, we can only publish the students’ first names.)
Once inside, the kids got to work, setting up a computer to demonstrate HomeStories to the crowds working the tables at the event, called Student Advocacy Day. A little shy at first, the students soon leaned into the job, gaining confidence and growing in experience with every demonstration. Most of them wore clothes from their native countries.
Four London Middle Schoolers explain the HomeStories map to Illinois State Representative Justin Slaughter from Chicago.
Tracy Crowley
They met students and teachers from around the state and enthusiastically showed off HomeStories to a Chicago area state representative. Afterwards, they took a guided tour of the capitol and watched from the gallery in rapt and respectful silence as the General Assembly debated legislation.
“It’s great that they could connect directly with lawmakers because the legislators usually don’t have a line of sight to know students,” Duell said. “And it’s great for the students too—I certainly didn’t have that chance when I was a kid!”
All the participants were given commemorative T-shirts, and the next day, to the surprise of their teachers and classmates, the cohort of eight Jack London kids all wore them to school, a plan they’d organized among themselves.
They had a right to be pleased for they’d taken a big step forward, helped a bit by HomeStories. Their way ahead may still be challenging, as it is for all immigrants, indeed all middle schoolers, but after this trip they could walk into their futures with a little more assurance.
The eight young presenters are ready to show off the HomeStories map. The students were all newcomers to America and mostly newcomers to the English language. They originally hailed from Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.
Tracy Crowley
Bill Parker, the director of the HomeStories project, is a former associate managing editor of the Chicago Tribune.