Editor’s note: Rabiah Khalil and Lauren Davenport met as neighbors on the shores of Lake Dunmore in Summer 2022, not far from their graduate study on the Vermont campus of the Bread Loaf School of English. This collaboratively authored article tells their story of a rich exchange between their high school classrooms during the 2022-2023 academic year. Lauren teaches in a Title I school in New York City with primarily BIPOC students of low socioeconomic status (SES). Rabiah teaches in a wealthy independent school in Owings Mills, Maryland, which historically served white students of high SES. Lauren’s Grade 12 AP Literature classroom of 18 students and Rabiah’s Grade 11 Memoir classroom of 16 students conducted an examination of the short story, “Farida’s Eyes” by Leila Aboulela. The story features a North African middle school student, Farida, whose eyesight is rapidly declining. While she experiences anatomical changes, so too does she grapple with the social pressures concomitant with adolescence and the legacy of colonialism. The exchange Lauren and Rabiah describe, supported in part by funds from Middlebury’s Conflict Transformation initiative, highlights the challenges and rewards of teaching and learning across differences. Reflecting the fact that most of their project design took shape via dialogue, Khalil and Davenport alternate between narrative and conversation. 

We – Rabiah Khalil and Lauren Davenport – engaged our students in a global literary study which grounded itself in a short story exploring personal culture, language, and identity. In this article, we narrate the development of our exchange via the Bread Loaf Teacher Network (BLTN), and reflect on our ongoing learning from this opportunity. We alternate between shared and individual observations, and we share some of the highlights from the students in their own words.

Lauren Davenport: 

Rabiah and I might not look the same on a superficial level, sure. She practices Islam while I am a lapsed Jewish woman who is, at best, what we call a “cultural” Jew. Her skin is brown; mine is oh so pale. She wears beautiful clothes with coordinated head scarves, while I wear week-old extra large t-shirts courtesy of some thrift store or corporate chain. She is not a pet person, and I can’t stand to leave my dog for more than a minute. She works in a boarding school in Maryland filled with students whose experiences and world views are very different from my students, who rarely leave their blocks except to take the subway to school. Yet, Rabiah and I love a good narrative, believe firmly in high expectations for our students, and express intolerance of educational fads which we feel aren’t always in the best interest of the students they are designed to serve. Life has thrown us challenges, and above all we are mothers, a bond which cuts through it all. The more we talked, the more I wanted to find a way for our students to meet, to unpack the surface differences, and to find the universal values we share as humans just as Rabiah and I were lucky enough to do—all summer long. 

Rabiah Khalil:

The allure of literature and of verdure and of the possibility to design and initiate positive change in the world brought me to Middlebury last summer. Throughout the pandemic I vacillated between fiery anguish and lassitude. I was impatient for the arrival of summer; I was eager for new and rewarding work. I met Lauren the day before classes began. Although we were each wandering the cottage grounds with a child in tow, we connected first as teachers and then as BLSE students. As we discussed our upcoming classes and the fate of COVID policies, it dawned on us both that our conversation was frank, exploratory, and humorous. We could not have predicted that a few weeks later we would sit on lawn chairs at a treed shoreline of Lake Dunmore discussing our application for a Change Action Grant. 

Where We Work: Two Schools, Two Worlds?

Lauren: I teach grade 9 and grade 12 AP Literature at The Urban Assembly Gateway School of Technology (UAG). UAG is one of the “…23 small, career-themed schools in New York City. UAG works with schools and districts around the country to implement innovative programs, tools, training, workshops, and professional learning communities.” A Title I school where free lunch and breakfast are available to all, UAG is also a Career and Technical Education School where students are able to graduate college and career-ready with a certificate in one of three technologically focused pathways.

Rabiah: I teach Grade 10 and Grade 11 English at McDonogh School in Owings Mills, MD.  McDonogh is an independent secular institution now celebrating its 150th anniversary.  The campus is on 800 acres and permits students resources such as a farm, horseback riding, a STEM center, a robotics center, and pickleball between classes. High school students can choose to board in the school dormitory. While annual tuition at McDonogh may exceed the cost of a new Lexus ES, robust financial aid packages are awarded to qualifying candidates.

Project Design and Planning

As we applied for the Bread Loaf School of English (BLSE) Change Action Grant, we imagined how our students might respond to one another. The story (as prompt) had to do most of the work for us. It needed to be captivating yet conceptually complex with an accessible Lexile level. 

We discussed the rich value of Leila Aboulela’s collection of short stories, Elsewhere, Home. Aboulela is a compelling storyteller; her identity is equally intriguing. Her father is Sudanese and her mother is Egyptian, so Aboulela’s heritage includes two cultures of North Africa. She is a native Arabic speaker, a Muslim, and a renowned author. She resides in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she pursued higher education and raised a family. Further, and perhaps most importantly, Aboulela writes her fiction unapologetically. Her stories show her pride in Africa and Europe, Islam and Arabic, womanhood and motherhood. Aboulela’s identity and experiences contributed to the appeal of using her work in the classroom. Several of the short stories in her collection explore intercultural and interreligious relationships among the characters. We selected what we considered an interdisciplinary story–“Farida’s Eyes”–which chronicled the experiences of a teenage girl’s loss of eyesight at a preparatory school in Sudan.  

One of our first steps after receiving the grant was to schedule the online Zoom meeting with Aboulela for October 26th. For the week leading up to the meeting, we read “Farida’s Eyes,” studied maps of Africa, aggregated our understanding of Sudan, and met one another through Flipgrid. Students had to prepare quick videos with a range of questions from which type of cereal do you like to eat, to number of siblings, to what is life like at your school? The room sizzled with anticipation, combs and lip gloss appeared, sleeves were smoothed. Students really wanted to make the right first impression! Here Dylan and J’amya get the introductions started.

At McDonogh, Rabiah purchased map puzzles of Africa, and students raced to assemble the countries into the continent.

Meeting Aboulela and Each Other

The meeting with Aboulela was well-paced. The students had completed the 11-page story a few days prior and had formulated their questions. They annotated the text individually and collaboratively, and carefully prepared questions.

Meeting Aboulela also coincided with meeting one another for live conversation in Zoom. Students bustled with anxious enthusiasm. 

“Rabiah, one of the greatest moments of the entire project for me will always be the first day our two classes signed onto Zoom. The technical issues, the excitement of our first live viewing of each other, seeing our spaces and of course the opportunity of getting to ‘meet’ Leila Aboulela. My students were nervous and said so. They said, ‘What if our questions are dumb?’ and ‘Do I have to talk?’ I was nervous because I knew they were nervous. I didn’t want to reinforce any of those common tropes about ‘ghetto kids’ or ‘public schools’ and I feared that if my students didn’t sound intelligent, they would pay for it. So when you first signed on and I saw your students trickling into their seminar style tables, I was a flutter. But my students felt proud of themselves when it was over. They felt that their voices had been heard and that what they had to say was thoughtful and evocative. Aboulela responded so respectfully to their questions and stated several times that their interpretations were more profound than her intentions in the story.“

-Lauren

“Lauren, the tech department had been in my room for 20 minutes tinkering with the camera and audio before your arrival. We had to ensure that the call was recorded smoothly. And of course, I’d asked Aboulela to come early, so she sat in the Zoom room patiently as tech disconnected and reconnected cords.  My students and I contemplated how turn taking would occur with 16 students in my room and 18 in yours. Would everyone who wanted to ask a question actually get to do that? Would Aboulela enjoy meeting us? Most importantly, would the technology hold through the duration of the call and ensure a good recording? Ultimately, my students, like yours, felt good about the Zoom call.  They were genuinely excited about what they learned and how they learned it.“

-Rabiah

One dimension of the conversation students really enjoyed was Aboulela’s discussion of how she gathered plotlines for her stories. Kare’s comment about the mix of fiction and memoir techniques really underscores students’ burgeoning understanding of the craft of writing believable fiction. Similarly, Zoie wrote, “Finding out that Mrs. Aboulela wrote such a beautiful story that was based on true and fictional events made everything so much clearer.” It resonated with McDonogh students that writers can use memory, experiences, characters, and perspectives from their own lives as the fodder for their stories.

After Aboulela

Following Aboulela’s visit, students created six-cell storyboards in interschool dyads and triads on the Storyboard That platform that showed their interpretation and elaboration of themes from the short story.  Instructions were as follows.

“Work with your partner to choose one specific moment in the story that both will read closely and interpret. Determine together how you would like to creatively develop that passage in the Storyboard. 

Consider what might be another character or two who enters this scene.? What would that character or those characters say or do that might be an interesting spin on the story? How might Farida or other characters from the original story respond/react?

Remember that what you are designing is an interesting segment of story!

Each cell must include the following: A caption of narration below the cell, at least two bubbles of dialogue or thought (bubbles), a background scene, and at least two characters.”

Storyboards with peer annotations from the gallery walk at UAG. Advance the slides for the full collection.

The assignment was due November 22nd because we had different approaches to the continuation of our respective short story units (into which we had embedded Aboulela’s “Farida’s Eyes”). However, twice during the month of November students from UAG and McDonogh coordinated over Zoom during class time, but they otherwise connected through social media to work on their storyboards.

Seeing One Another

The project, which ran from October 17th through December 1st, culminated in the unification of our classes in New York City. On the morning of December 1st, McDonogh students boarded a private charter bus at 6:30 am and traveled to UAG in New York. Students met each other enthusiastically in the school courtyard and shared a few snacks before prepping the school library for a gallery walk of the storyboards they had created. Students then used post-its to comment on each other’s storyboards for about an hour. 

“Rabiah, while I wish we could have had more time together, the comments on the storyboards were reflective and the students seemed to genuinely enjoy reading each others’ boards. They hadn’t had a chance to do that, and several weeks had elapsed since this work was due, so these responses were authentic and enjoyable to watch. We had a very short collective debrief and students were most interested in the various interpretations of the father character as either bad guy, oppressed victim of society, or someone in between. They were also impressed that some humor had been injected into an overall serious story about blindness, colonization and the education of a young girl. Students enjoyed that a few people inserted themselves and their inner conflicts into the story and everyone thought that for the most part, the storyboards were a nice balance of the personal and the analytical.”

-Lauren

“Lauren, the storyboard assignment asked students to combine a series of skills. They needed to graphically represent the characters, determine the dialogue, and caption the picture with narration. They also had to work with peers they just met. What I loved about the storyboards was all of the various characterizations and plotlines. Students really brought themselves to the project and negotiated with their counterparts to design the content.  One encounter that students gravitated toward was the representation of the conversation between Farida’s parents and Sister Carlotta, the teacher most concerned about Farida’s vision loss.

You can note the difference in the first cell of two storyboard projects I have juxtaposed above.  Perhaps because Aboulela does not give direct voice to the nun in this scene, the students were able to liberally determine how the nun expressed concern. Interesting differences of depiction were noted in the gallery walk!”
–Rabiah

See the slides below for a collection of photos from the day.

After the gallery walk, students dined at the Queen of Sheba restaurant on authentic Ethiopian cuisine.  It was a new experience for almost all of the students. 

“Rabiah, I think one of the BEST decisions we made in this project was to take the kids somewhere they were not used to. No pizza, no hamburgers but a culture unfamiliar to them with rules different to the ones they know and expect. Everyone was just a little uncomfortable, a little hesitant to try foods that they don’t normally eat at home, and not sure how to behave. Perfect. (Yes, obviously we know that Sudanese food and Ethiopian Food are not the same, please note that we just wanted something that was different from pizza and at least we got the right continent. So, forgive us and applaud us please!) Check out your face in this photo, Rabiah. What were you thinking? The picky eaters were polite and most of the kids admitted that the experience, while perhaps a bit disquieting, was pretty fun. Trent, who would find out later that afternoon that he had been accepted to the Culinary Institute of America, gave the place two thumbs up and said he was going to return. I also fully intend to go again– I can’t believe it is just three blocks from work–this shows you that I never leave the building.“

-Lauren

“Lauren, Ethiopia and Sudan are neighboring countries, so the Queen of Sheba restaurant was an ideal choice. As we entered the establishment, I was pleasantly surprised that the owner had reserved ALL of the tables for our students and no one else.  We had requested the space, but I did not know we would be able to secure the entire restaurant.  From the faint fragrance of Frankincense to the small placards announcing our names at the tables, we were welcomed.  I timidly asked for saucers as the food was brought to us–remember?  Our Ethiopian hosts immediately realized that they would have to show us how to dine Ethiopian style–sans saucers. Before long students were circulating the tables, deftly folding steamed cabbage and carrot into pieces of Injera, sampling lamb, and conversing with our Ethiopian hosts about their culture, about Aboulela’s text, and about how stunningly warm a day it was for December. You ask me what I was thinking?  I was thinking that since we were not able to travel to North Africa, the Queen of Sheba restaurant was indeed the next best thing.”

-Rabiah

McDonogh students reboarded the bus, UAG students hopped the train, and we reconvened at the United Nations Headquarters thirty minutes later for a tour of the building as well as conversations about Sudan with UN docents.

“Lauren, the Norman Rockwell mosaic struck a chord with me and the students in my tour group. Our docent sat us down at the mural shortly after entering the building and discussed the significance of the golden rule “Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You” in the global arena. He encouraged us to think broadly about the value of multiculturalism, multilinguality, and multiple perspectives. We also learned that each face Rockwell depicted in the painting represented an individual whose story inspired him.“

-Rabiah

“Rabiah, some tidbits I want to preserve from the experience start with my students being horrified at the costs that the world spends on the military in contrast to what is spent on peacekeeping. But the students were also pleased to see how many peacekeeping efforts there were all across the globe. They asked wonderful questions about diplomacy, medicine, health care plans and about the state of diplomatic efforts in the world today. When I polled students on the impact that the trip had on their sense of optimism about global relations, and breaking barriers in the future, 62% responded that the trip gave them, to quote Leo ‘a sliver of hope.‘”

-Lauren

Impacts and Reflections

We both believe that the largest impact, by far, was the face-to-face meeting that students had with one another in New York.  Although they expressed in their reflections that they enjoyed the author’s visit as well as collaboration over the storyboards, the most impact was in sitting together for lunch in the restaurant and touring the UN.  In both arenas, students were able to talk freely.  The prompts had been carefully selected, and each place we inhabited had been vetted, but the spontaneity of face to face interaction was the most valuable experience. We also noted that our students did not merely affect one another, all involved benefited from this project. Aboulela faced student questions and responses, our Ethiopian hosts delighted in sharing their food and culture, the docents at the UN grappled with student exploration of our collective history and future. We shared the roles of educator and student while feeling the freedom integral to authenticity of voice.

Insight on Sight and Conflict Transformation

Since our project was supported by Bread Loaf’s Change Action Grant, we see our work and learning as contributing to Middlebury’s Conflict Transformation initiative. Students of different socioeconomic status and school communities were able to spend weeks learning together. They animatedly discussed their experiences—such as a McDonogh student detailing the rigor of mandatory morning swim lessons that begin as early as 6 am (for members of the swim team), and his UAG counterpart describing an equally grueling morning routine of accessing public transportation to get to school on time. McDonogh and UAG student understanding of the story “Farida’s Eyes” also differed. For example, UAG students (generally) wanted to learn more about whether the nun in the story symbolized colonialism in the Sudan of the early 1900s. Whereas, McDonogh students asked more questions about how the author mixed memoir and fiction to create characters and plot. 

By studying in partnership, jointly interacting with the author, co-creating storyboards, and then ultimately spending the day together for over eight hours, students really began to “see” and know each other.

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

As instructors, we reflected on the experience at several moments throughout our planning and action steps. We learned, for example, that the in-person interaction should happen much earlier in the collaboration. Partner selection and storyboard creation could have been better facilitated if students had enjoyed a day together first. As high school educators, we agreed that everything we understand to be true about adolescent development supports the idea.  Further, because the project occurred in late October and culminated in early December, we have considered the possibility of arranging a few additional conversations among the students before the end of the school year. We also learned that as Insight on Sight gained momentum, our school communities increasingly committed to the success of our endeavor.  Admittedly, in part, because we had the Change Action Grant and a definitive plan, our schools more actively conferred encouragement, resources, suggestions, and positive feedback.  We are both so appreciative of our accompanying chaperones (Daryl Burch and Zayanne Rifai), our hosts at Queen of Sheba and the UN, as well as our respective English departments and Upper School leadership.

Although we’re still finalizing plans for next year, we have secured another round of Change Action Grant funding, and both McDonogh and UAG communities anticipate building on this year’s collaboration.

“Lauren, when I was a child my favorite books were the ones with alternate endings. You could choose to ascend the daunting staircase or walk to the next door in the hallway. You could tread through the thicket with a cutlass or attempt the gaping chasm by traversing the rickety bridge. I would read those books again and again because a new ending was always awaiting. I have the same feeling now about the Insight on Sight initiative.  We have experienced one version with its myriad characters, plotline, and conclusion.  I am eager to re-experience the project with next year’s group of McDonogh and UAG students.  Maybe next time Aboulela can walk New York with us. Maybe we can reconsider how to visit the gift shop such that each student has funds for souvenirs. Maybe we can design ways for students to increase visibility of their experiences with this project within their respective communities. We are poised to turn this page together in the next academic year.”

-Rabiah

“Overall, Rabiah, I cannot help but feel that we actually inspired and made real change. My students felt that they were just as capable as private boarding school children. They felt heard and respected and in some cases and places (like navigating the city) they felt that they had the upper hand and the expertise. They made friends with people who had different stories. They shared someone else’s story to do that and they made a new story of their own. I had a lot of fun working with you. The project was born, in part, because of how much we openly embrace our contrasting styles and enjoy thinking through ideas together. I am excited to adjust the project next year and can’t wait to see what shape the 2.0 version takes.”

-Lauren

Our students had reflections of their own to share. Here are some examples of their thoughts which show what they learned, observed, and experienced.

“Something I learned that impacted my understanding of ‘Farida’s Eyes’ is how daily routines can be interpreted differently depending on the culture. For example, when we were at the restaurant, I was very uncomfortable with eating with my hands, but it is a big part of their culture so the chef insisted that we did it. Having an experience like this exposed me to the different ways things can be done. This affected my perspective of ‘Farida’s Eyes’ because it showed me that her life may be completely different from my own, but just as beautiful in its own way.” -Jaden

“It was really interesting to hear a completely different point of view on the story. We live in such a different environment than them and live very different lifestyles, so it was interesting how both us and them could bring our experiences into how we analyzed the story. It was also cool how most of us in some aspects of the story have the same views on things and interpreted it the same.” -Kate

“To collaborate with a Senior AP literature class from another school was very interesting. I felt that even though I knew there was a difference between us it was not prominent. They were welcoming and considerate, greeting us with open arms. The smile never left my face as we sat together and the conversation flowed like I knew these people my whole life.” -Ava

“I learned that despite the fact that we are a public school and they are a boarding school, we have very similar ways of retaining information” -Bryce

“We realized we were the only group who added someone else needing glasses and changed the story in that way which was cool. We also talked about ourselves while doing the project and it is so cool that my partner likes to play ice hockey.” -JJ

“I think a session just to talk after we did the flip grids would have been helpful because after the grids we were just so focused on the story and I wanted to know my partner better” -Alyssa