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Abstract

Storytelling in higher education allows us— as poor, single-mother students—to create crossing points where we transgress boundaries, reinventing ourselves, and sharing enlarged, plural views of human experience, and meaning. Through our nationally touring exhibit and storytelling installation, entitled “The Missing Story of Ourselves: Poverty and the Promise of Higher Education,” we work to transform private and idiosyncratic experiences into public meanings in an effort to render our shared world newly intelligible. In challenging student audiences to think from the lives of others, de-naturalize and de-stabilize social hierarchies, and produce more community-accountable and thus more ethical, and inclusive thought, we illustrate that telling “missing” stories in colleges and universities meshes with and parallels the most central and pivotal goals of a liberal education.

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