3. A Pledge of Allegiance… with Liberty… for All
We are offering this video as an introduction to Liberty. However, we feel that it is important to reveal, now, our reasons—all along—for making and sharing this video. Our mission is not to essentialize Liberty's experience of the world. Our purpose is not to provide a model from which a viewer may generalize the experiences of Liberty, her neighbors, or any other residents of Flint, Michigan. It does not attempt to speak to the generalized experiences of young women, or African Americans, or those who live in cities with crumbling socioeconomic infrastructures. Liberty's video—this collection of tiny, partial, appropriated portions of her life—is not offered primarily to direct your attention out to others. It does not aim to deliver facts beyond its immediate contexts. Rather, it is offered to direct your attention inward—to your own experiences of the world. It aims to deliver questions. It aims to spark inquiry. We share Liberty's video in order to help you ask questions about your own assumptions about the world and about what you imagine to be the experiences of students and their orientations to what it is that we do in the university. And, in these stories, we expect that viewers may, indeed, make generalizations. But here, we ask that viewers direct those generalizations back inward—to hear resonances and dissonances of experience in the pursuit of mapping paths of traveled and potential empathy. As such, we see that Liberty's video—and each of the others we have made—is not a representative of other groups of people with similar stories so much as it is a source for identifying new forms of identification and a potential foil for exposing deeply held assumptions that inform, shape, and sanction the decisions that educators make. As Julie is in the habit of saying to new teachers she mentors: "Your experiences are your best resource. They are also your most troublesome ones."
Consequently, the video you are about to watch will likely challenge your expectations. By design, it does not behave like a documentary—its closest generic model. Remember, the point of this video is not to tell Liberty's story, but rather to give viewers access to storyable moments or episodes from Liberty's life. By design, the video does not have an introduction or a conclusion—critical elements of any story that allow viewers to know where they will go, how they can expect to get there, and when they have arrived. That's because this video does not attempt to tell Liberty's story, per se, even though, and especially at times, it will seem to do just that. More to the point, it attempts to motivate viewers to tell their own stories—stories that they may have, otherwise, been less likely to tell. Think of this video as a story starter, a story continuer, a story redirector. You will recognize moments of narrative arc, chronological progression, and a persistent theme. These have been edited deliberately to facilitate the creation of a sort of story for viewers. But critically, the ends have been lopped off in order to invite viewers to participate in the critical work of invention necessary to make this story their own.
Let's meet Liberty.
Fig. 1: "LiteracyCorps Michigan: A Methodology of Practice." (Captioned, or read the transcript in the appendix.)