Zoya Haq

HiStory Retold began thanks to a conversation - a conversation between friends who were tired & overwhelmed at the polarization tearing apart our country.

My co-founders, Lily, Makayla, Inaya & I met online during the summer of 2020. We were all closely following the widely reported hate criming & discriminatory bias that defined news headlines that summer and that had defined the US for centuries. We wanted to take a stand, but we didn't know how. So, we talked: about our shared experiences, shared fears, childhoods & classrooms.

During our conversation, we realized: none of us had ever engaged with classroom resources that reflected our identities. We laughed when we recounted our childhoods spent curled over at desks, never raising our hands, too afraid to speak up because we didn't realize that as brown or Black or LGBTQIA+ girls, we had anything important to say. Our classrooms taught us that - our curriculum burned it into our brains.

And it clicked - classrooms shape perspective. They have the power to shape students' senses of self AND to shape their perceptions of others. They have the power to dismantle hate both internal and external. In our experience, though, we knew that they weren't being used productively.

That day, HiStory Retold was born. It answered our greatest needs as students, & it worked to ensure a better future for the generations behind us.

More than 20k reported US hate crimes in the past 4 years.

Increases in suicide rates among students of color.

22% less engagement in the classroom.

Disillusionment, inequity, prejudice: this is the reality of America today. What has the power to transform that reality is a change in the way that American students understand themselves and the world around them-a change in the way that we learn.

As a Pakistani, Muslim girl, it’s no secret that my identifiers aren’t exactly celebrated in the classroom. Growing up, this had a profound impact on my social development. I was shy, afraid to speak up & unaware that I, as a brown girl, could make any kind of a positive difference in the world.

HiStory Retold, then, is a manifestation of everything that I needed as a kid. We work to empower students to recognize their capacity for impact by understanding their dynamic histories.

According to a 2019 Stanford study, when students engage with diverse & relevant curricula, academic performance improves, along with student attendance. We know that inclusive education has the potential to transform students' futures.

In the face of widespread hate, polarization & entrenched inequity, we must equip ALL students with a comprehensive understanding of all of the voices that have made an impact on our country, so that they can create a more empathetic, collaborative & connected world.

HiStory Retold empowers communities to share their stories, works with School Boards and national education coalitions to promote systemic education change & collaborates with teachers & administrators to create curricular resources.

1. We run on storytelling.

Through online & in-person events, such as our "Storytelling Hours" & our "Oral History Collection Circles," we craft spaces that enable communities to come together & to recognize the power of their stories as a tool for change. We collaborate with local community leaders like the Texas Historical Commission, the Dallas Asian-American Historical Society & the Dallas Mexican-American Historical League to scale our goals. Our online story database is used as a tool in 25+ classrooms.

2. We promote entrenched educational equity.

By connecting students with public testimony opportunities, hosting phone bank events & organizing conversations with local legislators, we work to adapt systems & to change cultures surrounding classroom inclusion.

 

3. We make inclusivity easy for teachers & administrators by crafting classroom tools.

Our online database of 250+ curated primary sources is used as a resource by 2k+ students, teachers, and professors. We've worked with Smithsonian Learning Lab, ReImagining Migration & OurTurn to create targeted lesson plans that cover themes such as changemaking, identity, & oral storytelling.

OUR RECRUITMENT PROCESS:

Our project is led by 50+ students across the US & the world. Our 30-student Leadership Board tackles national education-related issues & scales our outreach initiatives, while our 5 regional teams in Atlanta, Dallas, Cleveland, India & Norway organize local events & work directly with local classrooms/political institutions.

Our sustainable leadership model enables us to recruit new students for our national Leadership Team every three months, while our Regional infrastructure permits the creation of affiliated HiStory Retold boards within any community that has at least three student leaders who want to expand HiStory Retold's impact to their classrooms.

We purposefully engage with both middle & high school students to ensure the longevity of our project--our middle school leaders will continue our work into high school & beyond.

OUR IMPACT:

Our project runs on students & stories. Our three-pronged approach to educational inclusivity allows us to tackle the issue of mis- & non-representation in the classroom through both a personal & systemic lens.

Our commitment to storytelling & to inclusive lesson plans feed our project in the short term. They enable the students who engage with our workshops to recognize their capacity as changemakers.

Our political action feeds our long-term impact, ensuring that ALL students' stories are celebrated.

Our solution enables students who engage with our resources & our workshops to recognize that, by sharing their stories, they can be catalysts for change. Many students who have engaged with our story development resources have gone on to use their newfound skills to testify at State Boards of Education & School Boards. They've campaigned for such courses as Asian-American Studies, Indigenous Studies, and African-American studies--and they've often turned votes in favor of inclusivity.

Via our Leadership & Regional Board structure, HiStory Retold has also empowered numerous student leaders to embark on curriculum inclusivity change processes within their own communities. One Board member decided to conduct an audit of his school's resources to prove the need for change, & he presented his findings to his district. Another decided to merge her passion for videography with her work at HiStory Retold by creating a database of video-based curriculum resources.

Some of our lesson plans cover the intersection of personal histories & social innovation. Out of the 100 pilot students who have engaged with the prototypal versions of these lesson plans, over 50% have created some type of sustainable, changemaking-based project that works to address an identity-based issue--just like how HiStory Retold was born.

We believe in passing on impact & creating a legacy of shared leadership.