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The Tulsa School of Arts and Sciences’ journal project has created written connections between high school students, other Tulsans and writers in other states and abroad.
Like many high school students, Morgan Missel has struggled with depression. She wanted to confide the mixed emotions she was feeling with someone, but she was afraid of judgment or, worse, ridicule.
Her peers might have sought solace in Facebook or other social media, broadcasting their frustrations and fears via status updates and news feeds.
Missel, a 10th-grader at the Tulsa School of Arts and Sciences (TSAS), though, opted to find catharsis in another type of written word — not one found on the Internet but a more traditional form of communication.
It was a familiar black-and-white composition notebook but one decorated with cut-out magazine pictures and drawn images. This journal and others like it were places where Missel could share her thoughts and feelings freely and anonymously, without fear of retribution or critique. Instead, others would read her entries and respond in constructive ways.
“I would write in it and I would write about how I was feeling or what was going on,” she says. “And then … I would get teenagers’ opinions, I would get people from all different parts of Tulsa’s opinions, not necessarily like tips but encouragement throughout. That was really helpful.”
Missel’s journal is part of a project that emerged two years ago from TSAS teacher Ellen Stackable’s freshman English classes.
Stackable’s niece is an English teacher in Pasadena, Calif., and suggested that her aunt read the book “Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing” by Penny Kittle, a guidebook for helping high school students improve their writing skills.
One tactic in the book: interest journals in which a teacher assigns a particular topic, such as body image or politics, and students respond with their thoughts and then pass the journals to others to create a dialogue.
Although Stackable made the assignment, she says she wanted the project to ultimately belong to the students. So after presenting the concept and a few journal topic ideas, she encouraged them to devise the parameters for engaging in dialogue in the journals, which they called “Rules for Civil Discourse” and glued inside the front cover of each journal.
If a student writes something questionable, the students conduct a thumbs-up or thumbs-down vote to determine whether it should be removed. In two years, only three items have been removed from the journals.
“From the beginning, I felt that if it was student-led and viewed, that students owned it, it would make a difference,” Stackable says.
Although the journals began in Stackable’s classes, eventually students from all over the school were contributing. After a few months, a student suggested that the journals broaden into the Tulsa community as well, via placement in local coffee shops.
While the journals remained in Stackable’s classroom during the week, on weekends she took them to three local coffee shops so patrons could share their thoughts alongside those of the students. Each Monday, Stackable brought the journals back to school so students could see the additions.
Initially, students predicted that Shades of Brown patrons would be most responsive to the journals and KingsPointe Village Starbucks customers — mostly businesspeople from the local office parks — would be least interested. Now, though, Starbucks is the project’s sole local partner, and customers and staff write regularly in the journals.
TSAS students have even learned to recognize some of the Starbucks contributors, such as a customer who always writes in red ink and a Starbucks barista who calls herself “an interested observer.”
Starbucks Manager Briana Boley says the journals have been a welcome addition to her store, allowing her not only to get to know her customers and employees but also bridging a gap between generations.
“For our customers, it’s been so exciting — depending on how many years they’ve been removed from high school — just learning about what’s being experienced in high school now because it’s completely different,” Boley says. “And I’ve had more people than you can imagine say, ‘I wish I had, had this when I was in high school. I never got to do anything like this.’ It’s just been great.”
Joshua Lacy is a Starbucks shift supervisor and frequent journal contributor. A creative writing major at Oral Roberts University, Lacy says he particularly enjoys writing about poetry and sharing short stories.
“I just find it very therapeutic,” he says. “On breaks, it’s really nice to get away and sit down for 10 minutes or 30 minutes and journal. It’s just a good way to get away and get into my head rather than do all of the mundane store duties.”
Because of the popularity of the journals at TSAS and Starbucks, Stackable and her students decided to take the project a step further. This year the journals traveled outside Tulsa to classrooms in Pasadena, Calif.; Conway, New Hampshire (where author Kittle teaches); and Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Stackable says she and the students debated sending the journals to other states and another country because they would not be able to respond to the submissions, but they eventually decided that the pros outweighed the cons.
“A pro would be just to sit down and see how much alike you have with someone else so far away and just the fact that there are other kids out there who may be completely different from you and in a different region,” 10th-grader Rachel Luther says. “It’s interesting.”
Stackable says responses from the teachers in New Hampshire, Nova Scotia and California have been overwhelmingly positive and their students loved the journal project, prompting her to consider sending them to other locales — possibly another Tulsa high school or even overseas.
Back at TSAS, students are still writing their opinions, observations, poems and short stories in the journals, sharing advice with one another and engaging in passionate debate on occasion. Stackable says she continues to be surprised by how the journals have resonated with teenagers as well as adults.
“It makes me feel like we all have something in common,” ninth-grader Olivia Blankenship says. “We all have our own ideas. It’s kind of cool to learn about other people.”
Luther says the journals are different from a class assignment because they are laid-back and allow her to express her thoughts in a completely different way.
“It’s definitely a learning experience, just the fact that what you’re going to be writing is going to be read by anyone,” she says.
Stackable says that ultimately, the appeal of the journals is like the appeal of a pen pal — the excitement of receiving a handwritten letter and the physicality and permanence of putting ink to paper. She says the project has other benefits as well, such as improving students’ writing, encouraging healthy debate and allowing students to create written connections with one another as well as people of other generations and social, educational and economic classes.
“As an English teacher, I have a passion that people would leave our school writing eloquently, thinking critically and being men and women who have fallen in love with words and literature,” she says. “ … One of the things I’ve noticed as a high school teacher, a lot of adults are so out of touch with teenagers, and teenagers have a weird, skewed view of adults. So what I was really hoping for — and it truly succeeded far beyond everything I would have imagined — is that they would begin to see each other’s worlds a little more.”
