The investment in story-telling is initially to be through comic-book art and spoken narratives that can be accessed on-line, or in-person on your phone through QR-codes. All of these new resources for St.Michael’s storytelling will be shared with our sister sites who share stories about the very same people. Just as importantly, we are adding to the continually updated Resources for Teachers maintained by the Sankofa Collaborative.
The Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian uses comic-books to provide cultural stories, and historical narratives, giving them out to the children as they give museum maps to their parents.
In creating the stories of the Brearleys (father and son), Colonel Coxe, William Trent, Pauline Savage, Zebulon Pike and others, St. Michael’s is rather blessed to have the talents of B.Earl, author of Spiderman and other Marvel Comic heroes, on the team, with access to a stable of the best illustrators in the world, to help in the layout and structure of our stories into the shape of a graphic novel. [and for many of us unfamiliar with the academic side of this 20th century artform, it has been given new analytical status through the work of Scott McLoud:]
Oral Histories – in first-person AUDIO re-enactments
To be tied in with the collector-card project envisioned by Crossroads of the Revolution, where you can collect cards of Colonial and Revolutionary War people by visiting sites which they are associated with, St. Michael’s will begin adding audio narrations of their stories, as told by “themselves,” through re-enactors. The stories below are from the webpage https://revolutionarynj.org/the-people/. Some of them, in fact are audio-enhanced. Tying them to QR-code “buttons,” at their graves, or other appropriate locations is still a novel application of our new web-based information capacity. If even moderately successful, it shall be a common feature of community education hubs throughout our state. But as Trenton is proud to re-iterate, Trenton makes, the World takes!
