Jamaal Sharif Matthews and USC colleague Mary Helen Immordino-Yang help youth explore storytelling 

In their fall magazine, USC Rossier School of Education is highlighting the project. Rossier’s Katie Walsh writes, “The program is about diving into deeper emotions and ways of thinking and provides a comforting space for the students to reflect on and share their stories. Some program participants expressed that they struggled with anxiety but nevertheless leapt at the chance to immerse themselves in a new environment and push themselves outside their comfort zones.”

In designing the Belonging as Legacy program, Matthews and Immordino-Yang grounded support for participants’ transcendent thinking in the practical activities of storytelling as a way to back into an understanding of “belonging” and “legacy.” The intent was to give students “an opportunity to think about and define belonging in their own words,” Matthews says. “‘Belonging’ is a higher-level concept that I think everyone feels at a certain point in their life, but it can be difficult to articulate. We’ve flipped the script a little bit. We’ve tried not to use any of those words around ‘belonging’ or ‘legacy’ and have couched the project in the framework of storytelling.”

“Storytelling is a really powerful, practical frame,” Matthews says. In sharing his own story, he adds, “I’m saying something about myself, my own identity, but I’m also putting something out into the atmosphere that other people can think about, find inspiration from, can be excited about or might find humor in.”

Matthews hopes to continue the program at USC, as well as replicate it on the Michigan campus. But there are much larger potential positive effects that stretch beyond simply instituting a program like this on campuses, in both curriculum and research.

“This work really does change, or at least complicate, how we think about social-emotional learning, how we think about culturally responsive pedagogy,” Matthews says. “We’re honoring student voices, giving them opportunities to display their brilliance and their understanding of various and complex issues. Having research and papers and studies to document that could be a game changer in our field and beyond.”