Your Story, Our Story: Celebrating Bread Day
Dear GUS Families,
We are excited to share a new virtual project that GUS will be participating in through the Tenement Museum in New York City. The Tenement Museum tells the stories of immigrants, migrants, and refugees in the ongoing creation of the United States; as a history museum, they believe that we all create history and we all have history in our lives and experiences. GUS has a special connection to the Tenement Museum, as our 8th grade students visit each year as part of their fall trip to New York City.
As part of their work, the Tenement Museum has created a website of stories about objects and traditions that explore migration and the cultural heritage of people in the United States, called “Your Story, Our Story”. It is a national project in which museums, colleges, schools, and community groups across the United States contribute stories to this online collection. This project aims to help us understand others through their stories, objects, and traditions, and explore the role we all play in the United States and American identity.
With GUS’s Bread Day tradition coming up, we felt it was the perfect time to launch a GUS group page on the “Your Story, Our Story” website and invite our community to contribute short stories about the importance of a particular bread to your family’s traditions and cultural heritage. Though we will begin this project by sharing stories about bread, we hope to continue using “Your Story, Our Story” going forward to highlight the diversity of cultures, traditions, and identities within the GUS community.
We hope you will help us kick off this project, and we are so excited to read your stories! When you are ready to share your bread story, please follow the instructions below to get started.
We thank you for joining us in this exciting project! Please feel free to reach out to me at ebuchanan@gus.org with any questions.
Best,
Emily Rabinowitz-Buchanan
Assistant Head of School for Community + Student Life
Director of Lower School
Instructions + Resources
Visit the GUS Your Story, Our Story group page
Click “Add Your Story+” to find instructions for uploading your bread story + photo
For “Object” write the name of your Bread
For "Category" click on “foodways”
You will be asked to contribute one photo of your bread; it is optional to add up to three additional photos
You can add an optional audio file
Your story can be up to 1500 words. Here are some prompts to help write your story:
What is a bread that is special to your family?
Who in your family would make this bread?
Share about a memorable time you ate this bread.
Why is this bread important to you?
Do you know how this bread is prepared?
After writing your story, you should see “Glen Urquhart School” selected underneath. This will ensure your story is posted to the GUS page.
You will be asked if your story connects to particular places, and if it includes a relationship to an immigrant or migrant.
You will be asked to share your name, zip code, and email (which will not be shared publicly), and you will be able to grant permissions and read the Terms of Use for the website.
Once submitted, your story will be submitted for approval, where Emily Rabinowitz-Buchanan will review it and then post it to the group page.
If you would like to see some examples from other students + schools, check out some of these links:
The Tenement Museum and its partners take your privacy and safety very seriously. Your story will be published on the Your Story, Our Story website, and no personally identifiable details (full name, photograph) need to be in the story when it is published. Your story will be archived by the Tenement Museum in their digital collection, but they will never share the story without permission. At any time, if you want the story removed from the website, write to yourstory@tenement.org and the Tenement Museum will remove the story from the website.