By Josefino Rivera, Jr. HS English & TEDx Event Organizer Asociación Escuelas Lincoln
I’m pleased to share with you Lincoln’s Year 2 IB Language and Literature students’ collective magazine: “Rejecting the Single Story“.
This is the final product of the Service Learning Assignment I shared with you previously.
Some articles that might interest you: “Stereotypes at Lincoln” by Nina van Wingerde featuring MaJo, Veronica, Tim “Journals from a Nazi Soldier” by Florencia Petrikovich “Welcome Home” by Julia Celoria who interviewed a random sample of locals at the Belgrano station and asked them how they felt about their home and many, many more Students were only given oral feedback once as prescribed by the IB, so there are a few mistakes.
About “Rejecting the Single Story” This digital magazine is a collective class effort to take a prescribed IB assessment and make it authentic and meaningful for each student. It is an example of the IB Lang/Lit Written Task 1 as well as a Service Learning Assignment.
The Assignment The IB Lang/Lit Y2 students are in the middle of Part 2 of the course: Language and Mass Communication. In this unit, we explored how Western media executives, journalists and authors cover world events and our ability to understand and participate in a global society is helped or hindered by them. Miller argued that American news coverage tends to give its citizens a distorted worldview. Zuckerman unpacks the idea of “imaginary cosmopolitanism”, the notion that we do have the technology to live in a more globalized society, yet we tend to still connect only with people similar to us. Adichie warns us of the danger of a “single story” that can diminish a group of people to nothing but a stereotype.
However, we also explored how others can debunk the myths of single stories. Al-Sakkaf shows us another side of Yemen, a side that the rest of the world does not see. And Nachtwey lets us into the world of stories he’s been privy to in his documentary journalism.
As a class, we will do our part to reject the single story and instead share the stories of the silent voices, of the uncovered, of the powerless, of the forgotten, of the other side. Together, we will compile a digital magazine of articles, speeches, letters, journals, and other text types of your choosing.
This magazine will be published on campus, to parents, to the TED speakers we learned from, to our affiliate schools in AASSA, and to the rest of the world in order to bring awareness and regain a more accurate worldview.
The Process After brainstorming, outlining, drafting, and revising the Written Task, we used Lucid Press‘s Free Trial to organize their work in a magazine format. Students used the preset templates and worked simultaneously over the course of one class period.
Students that wanted their work published and met the deadline are featured here. As per guidelines of the IB, no editing corrections were made by the teacher.
Once the magazine was complete, we downloaded it as a PDF and uploaded it to ISSUU.com, a digital publishing platform.
We hope you enjoy and please let me know if you have any comments or questions.