The Art of Life Storytelling: Sharing and Exchanging Moments of Ambition in Summer Bridge Programs

Abstract

Life storytelling—as a vehicle for autobiographical self-disclosure—has the capacity not only to educate the listener, but also to enable thoughtful self-reflection by the storyteller. For me, life storytelling, a practice unknowingly instilled in me from an early age by my Iranian family, was something I was unwittingly engaging with my entire life. Everyone in my family is a storyteller of some kind, whether it is about our family’s past, the day’s events, the move to the US after the Iranian Revolution, or the repetition of a punchline that hits close to home (an Iranian practice that never fails to amuse or irk, depending on your mood). By listening to the stories of others, I often found myself musing over shared experiences, while also savoring their stark differences. Each was a story to treasure and learn from. It was not surprising, then, that I gravitated toward life storytelling when planning the curriculum for the Nepantla Summer Bridge Program at Nevada State College. My aim in creating the program was (and continues to be) as follows: (1) to create a six-week academic program to help support first-generation college students’ transition from high school to college; (2) to offer a curriculum that appeals to underrepresented students by way of ethnic American studies and post-colonial studies; and (3) to increase access to college resources and support services at Nevada State to boost retention and graduation rates. When creating the program in 2012, I knew that I would want the program to center around themes of liminality and in-betweenness, as Nepantla pedagogy so often does. Sprung from the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Nepantla pedagogy was birthed from the borderlands between Mexico and the US. It was from these physical and figurative spaces that Anzaldúa challenged American epistemologies about marginalized others, as channeled through specific examples of her own queer Tejanx identity.1 As Anzaldúa notes in This Bridge We Call Home, “Nepantla is the site of transformation. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2154453