Story to Action: A Conversation about Literacy and Organizing

Abstract

In the summer of 2006, Open Borders Project/Proyecto Sin Fronteras, a small educational center in the heart of Latino North Philadelphia, sponsored a six-week program to teach teens from Philadelphia public schools how to plan and conduct interviews, edit audio files, and write the necessary preparatory material to produce short pieces about people they know in their families and neighborhoods. In some ways the project was highly successful--46 students stayed through the whole program and produced audio files, many quite engaging and some truly stunning--but it was one of the hardest projects to manage and execute that Open Borders has undertaken in its short six-year year history. This article presents a conversation between Manuel Portillo (executive director of Open Borders", Mark Lyons (a teacher in the program), and Eli Goldblatt (associate professor of English at Temple University and chair of the board at Open Borders) that focuses on their experiences with the 2006 summer Open Borders program. ["Story to Action: A Conversation about Literacy and Organizing" was written with Manuel Portillo and Mark Lyons.]