BENTONVILLE -- An experience with bullying, an absent father and a dying mother were a few of the stories high school students shared with the community Tuesday.
"Voices of Bentonville" started as a memoir-writing exercise for students and grew into a website where the entire community is welcome to post stories of their own.
Voices of Bentonville
Visit www.VoicesOfBentonv… to read memoirs or to submit one of your own.
Source: Staff report
"Now that we have shared our stories, we want to hear yours," Isabel Neal, a Bentonville High School junior, told a few dozen students, parents and School District employees during a Voices of Bentonville launch party at the high school Tuesday night.
English III teachers Holly Howard, Zach Jostad and Christine Stewart developed the memoir-writing project to better engage students, to provide them an outlet to discuss their life experiences, and to unify a diverse community.
It was Jostad who got the idea rolling two years ago with his junior English students.
"They had spent the first half of the year working on literary analysis and argumentative essays, but it was with these personal accounts of joy, pain, laughter, loss and regret that they began to thrive," Jostad said.
Students were carefully considering the structure of their writing, revising and editing their work, and doing research to confirm events happened the way they remembered them, he said.
"They were doing all of the things good writers do, but they were doing those things passionately for the first time all year," Jostad said.
Jostad encouraged his fellow English III teachers to try the assignment with their own students. They decided to use 10 weeks of this school year's second semester on the project.
Each student started by writing a six-word message upon which they could build a memoir, Neal said. Those messages -- ranging from heartbreaking to humorous -- were on display Tuesday, including "Dad said he would come back," "I am not the favorite child" and "Uh, Mom, we're lost in Mexico!"
Some students stood up and read snippets of their memoirs to the audience. Shelby Ellison tried to get through hers, but emotion overcame her as she recalled being bullied in junior high school. She called on Stewart, her teacher, to finish reading.
Later, Ellison said writing about her experience was therapeutic for her and brought her some closure.
"It was hard to get through (the writing) at first, but there are a lot of people who will support you," she said.
Paige Spychalski, another Bentonville junior, said her memoir touched on her battle with anxiety. Counseling has helped her. Putting her story down on paper helped too, but it wasn't the easiest process.
"I got emotional multiple times in class," Spychalski said.
Neal said the project allowed students to get to know each other much better.
"We laughed, we cried, and we got to know each other by more than just a name," Neal said. "We came to love each other."
NW News on 05/11/2016