The Community Stories Curriculum will soon be available for purchase through the VOICES, Inc. website, www.voicesinc.org.

The Community Stories Curriculum compiles our best practices from the two World War 2 oral history projects, the WW2 Stories Project (this website) and the book, They Opened Their Hearts, along with other VOICES community storytelling projects. The Curriculum will serve as a guide to help others design and implement community story projects.

For more information, contact Deborah Dimmett 325-4092 or 545-4829, deborah_dimmett@msn.com, or Rachel Villarreal at 622-7458 x209, rachel@voicesinc.org.

Community Stories Curriculum Project Background

There were five major motives for the 2006 creation and on-going dissemination of the “The VOICES Community Stories Curriculum.”

1. To respond to the many middle and high schools that call VOICES each year seeking to have their students mentored in the unique VOICES’ community-storytelling process.
2. To benefit students in the short-term and the long-term. As the students interact with community members to document community stories, they build leadership, cognitive, emotional, and artistic skills. Youth who are civically engaged, confident, intellectually curious, and creative are more likely to grow up into healthy and community-oriented adults.
3. This curriculum also maps out a meaningful service-learning opportunity. Students will serve the many Tucson community members who want their local stories and historic photographs to be recorded, published, and shared.
4. To document the best practices of our four-year collaboration with Sierra Middle School and our one-year collaboration with City High School. The first project culminated in the book, They Opened Their Hearts: Tucson Elders Tell World War II Stories to Tucson Youth. The second project resulted in a website focused on Pacific Theater vets—www.ww2stories.org.
5. To train teachers in this unique curriculum during summer professional staff development trainings starting in Summer 2006 in order to increase the number of teachers able to implement community-stories projects with their students.