The Post

What do Veterans and English majors have in common? . . .  Stories.

Since antiquity, literature has told stories of war, from the journey home of Odysseus, the returned soldier unrecognizable to family and friends, to contemporary war poetry like that of veteran Brian Turner’s “Hurt Locker” and “Here, Bullet.” This semester, students in ENG307, The Modern Age Through Contemporary Literature, while reading literary responses to the First World War and its centenary, interviewed NU student veterans and dependents to hear their stories of the military, homecoming or life at NU. Following models provided by the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project and NPR’s Story Corp, English majors used digital storytelling, weaving narrative, images and audio to learn about and share the experiences of others.

Videos will be shown around campus this week, including prior to the afternoon speaker event at the Castellani Museum on Veteran’s Day, Wednesday, Nov. 11.

Please direct questions to Dr. Jamie Carr, jcarr@niagara.edu, ext. 8544.

With such thanks for help from veterans services coordinator, Robert Healy; and assistant veteran coordinator, Karl R. Hinterberger; Kayla Jaehn, instructional support assistant; Brian Rock, multimedia production specialist; and Gabrielle Literman, graduate and commuter student affairs coordinator.

“… When we tell our own . . . stories and listen to those of others, then work together to process them deeply and critically, we connect in ways which enrich self, relationship and practice. Through these connections we construct new knowledge and advance our understanding of the relationships we construct and are constructed by. For these reasons we end our journey convinced that storytelling can, and should, be viewed as a theory of learning” (175).

—Janice McDrury and Maxine Alterio, Learning Through Storytelling: Using Reflection And Experience in Higher Education Contexts, 2002