Our Pedagogy | Herstory Draft

“To teach, write, and live to create empathy. That is our goal, whether we are working with third graders or with people who’ve spent their lives navigating the prison system. We all know our stories, but it is not until we shape them in writing that we begin to know
our journeys.”

Erika Duncan, Herstory Founder and Executive and Creative

Herstory’s Unique Pedagogy

At the heart of Herstory’s unique pedagogy is the belief that memoir writing at its most powerful can change hearts, minds, and policies, ultimately helping to conquer oppression and to create a more just world.

Not all memoir does this or aims to do this. Community memoir writing using Herstory’s unique approach, however, encourages writers to use memoir to explore deeper, to embark on a journey of self-discovery that requires bravery, honesty, and perseverance. The path that leads from self-discovery to changing the mind or heart of a reader or listener and to effecting social change and contributing to building a more just/better world is the process of creating empathy in a stranger-reader.

Empathy is the cornerstone of Herstory pedagogy. Because we know that compassion is not a given but something that is earned, creating empathy is what allows the writer to connect with the stranger-reader, the person who knows nothing about us until they begin reading or hearing our story. While all writing is potentially a vehicle for connection, writing committed to creating empathy is what most allows a stranger-reader to feel our common humanity. The more we collectively use the tools of writing that allow a stranger-reader to walk in our shoes—whether this person is a judge, a politician, a teacher, or an estranged family member—the less alone we will be in finding new solutions.

Workshop Experience

Each new Herstory workshop begins with the facilitator (trained in Herstory’s pedagogy) inviting participants to finish this sentence in the way that is most authentically them: “If my words had the power. . . .”

This then leads to the Page One Moment tool: “Where would you want a Stranger-Reader, someone who doesn’t know you, to meet you on page one? At what moment in your life would you begin your story, so that from the very first page a stranger could care enough to keep reading, to walk in your shoes as they read?”

The facilitator then invites participants to imagine aloud a few different page one moments, encouraging them to create scenes from their memories, thus launching the process of determining how to create empathy in the stranger-reader while also establishing from the outset a way into the person’s story that can accommodate different narrative structures. Once workshop participants have found their page one moment and the “container” for their memoir, they have what they need to set out on their memoir writing journey. In the workshops that follow, participants share their writing with the group and the facilitator, whose feedback and guidance ensure that each writer continues to keep empathy and narrative structure in mind in order to produce high-quality memoir writing that can stir the heart of the stranger-reader.

Herstory’s unique tools, techniques, and practices—many introduced in the first community workshops in 1996—undergo continuous honing based on input from workshop participants, fellows, facilitators, and facilitators-in-training. This produces a pedagogy whose pillars, while solid and tried and true, can also incorporate new ideas and terminology. Like Herstory itself, which works in myriad settings in the US and around the world, the pedagogy is fluid, adaptive, and participatory.

Whether deeply transforming how correction officers view the incarcerated people in their charge, how teachers interact with their students, how parents understand and respond to their children, or how domestic violence survivors understand themselves, Herstory’s signature approach to memoir writing has affected countless people’s lives by challenging and changing worldviews and behaviors. It has also led to profound transformation and healing for so many Herstory writers who, through connecting the dots of their personal history and viewing it as a trajectory rather than a random series of events, have learned to transform trauma into strength, silence into voice.

To learn more about Herstory’s pedagogy, please see our training manuals, Paper Stranger and Passing Along the Dare to Care and our curriculum and resources websites: