Belonging as Legacy

A project called Belonging as Legacy, developed by Jamaal Sharif Matthews from U-M Marsal Family School of Education in collaboration with Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of USC Rossier School of Education, engages high school students in intensive workshops combining storytelling with lessons in video production. Over the course of the semester, each student produces a video project exploring their life stories and family histories.

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. 

The seeds for the Belonging as Legacy program started with Matthews, who was interviewing students about the concept of “belonging” as part of his academic research. “The ways in which they were making meaning of belonging didn’t represent ideas or notions that were already out there in the field,” he says. “They were finding a sense of belonging in one’s ancestors.” 

Matthews and Immordino-Yang received a grant from the National Science Foundation to fund the project and a home for it at USC.

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.”