How It All Began
In Spring 2009, Liz Wuerffel, Assistant Professor of Art at Valparaiso University, returned from teaching in Beijing where she worked to academically prepare Chinese students who wished to enroll at Valparaiso University. Upon her return, she ran into one of her former Chinese students who reported that he had been out walking one night when a car pulled over and the occupants yelled, “Go home, Chinese dog.” Other Chinese students had apparently experienced similar incidents. That same week, Liz received an informal writing assignment from one of her American first-year students who reported on life in the student-branded “international dorm.” She wrote that she couldn’t stand the smell of “those” students’ cooking and the way “their” noodles clogged the kitchen sink. Liz was struck by the opposing experiences of these two students and began to wonder what Valparaiso University could learn about itself if she began to collect stories of people experiencing those who were different from themselves for the first time. In 2010, Allison Schuette, Associate Professor of English, joined forces with Liz, and from there, the Project, with initial support from Assistant Professor of Communication Phillip Powell, has grown into what it is today: a five-year project (2010-2015) to collect interviews and stories regarding the complexity of living together amidst increasing diversity and difference.
How We’ve Grown
Much of our time has been spent working and training students to participate in the Project. Liz oversaw graduate student Vicky Liu who interviewed several Chinese students and produced a twenty-minute video on their positive and negative experiences at Valparaiso University. Additionally, we have both worked with students in GS 180, a one-credit service learning course, which we’ve tailored to teach students how to interview others for the Project. Finally, Allison implemented a service learning assignment in Introduction to Creative Nonfiction. Like the GS 180 students, the students in this course are trained to interview people for the Project, but they are also responsible for producing two- to three-minute stories from the material they gather. Through the work of the students and our own endeavors, we have accumulated over 220 interviews and posted over 100 stories to our website for use in classrooms, exhibitions, study circles, workshops, and other artistic and pedagogical endeavors.
In addition to building up the archive of stories, we spend time introducing the Project. Much of this work happens on campus through presentations for Core 5th Hour, student organizations, faculty and staff meetings, MLK Day, and diversity/inclusion workshops led by members of the Diversity Facilitation committee. But we have also extended our reach by forging initial connections with interested civic partners through a 30-minute presentation delivered by the Community Outreach committee, and in 2014, we partnered with the Porter County Museum, which hosted an exhibition of our work. An earlier installation, Claudette Roper’s other state, we helped bring to campus in conjunction with the Brauer Museum of Art. This multimedia installation exploring the vestiges of racism through the lives of forty African-Americans both provides one model for the Welcome Project and initiates the kinds of conversations the Project is interested in facilitating. We are additionally indebted to StoryCorps and First Person American for serving as models of how to collect and share stories, and to the Center for Civic Reflection in modeling ways to use stories to enrich our understanding of self and community.
For a more detailed snapshot of our achievements, see our Welcome Project Report (2010-2014).
This interview by Purdue University Calumet’s Communications Department also gives a great introduction to our history and our practice as well as our latest initiative collecting stories in Gary, Indiana.
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