ABSTRACT
We have described three different community media projects, arguing that such projects can create and are fueled by an intersubjective listening that emerges in the transitional space between self and other, imagination and external reality. We have explored the roles of setting, audience, and teacher. In this chapter, we examine what might happen next, after the media project is over, in the form of curriculum. In Chapter Five we discussed the challenge of limited distribution for the stories created in community media projects, often not seen by anyone other than the participants and their families. Here we look at an initiative that showcased a collection of digital stories through a bilingual curriculum package, the We Are Here/Nous Sommes Ici (2012) curriculum guide designed to disseminate these stories to high school classrooms. As mentioned in Chapter Five, We Are Here and the Going Places bus and school tour are both initiatives of the larger Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and Other Human Rights Violations (Life Stories of Montrealers) project. As with the Going Places bus and school tours, the curriculum-writing process was shaped by worries about an unknown listening audience’s potential reception of the stories. For the curriculum guide, the audience is intended rather than actual, composed of students in classrooms across Quebec and elsewhere who would never be met by those writing or contributing to the curriculum. The curriculum had important work to do: ensuring that the digital stories would continue to be listened to, with a continued public life after the project was over. More specifically, the stories hoped to preserve, diversify, and enrich historical memory in Quebec and Canada by bringing to the fore the life stories of immigrants and refugees to the province. These tasks raise the challenge of how to create the conditions for intersubjective listening when the storyteller is no longer present, and in busy, noisy classrooms.
