This tool facilitates meaningful discussions on equity through the lens of storytelling. The goal of the tool is to help science and technology students use narrative as a method of quickly testing ideas. As Jeremy Ackerman claims, “Telling a story is a much faster way of rapid prototyping than actually trying to create prototypes.” By creating and shaping stories we can learn more about ourselves, others, and the problems we seek to solve. As we know, “the United States is rich with the stories of the diverse groups that make up this country. […] Not all stories, however, are equally acknowledged, affirmed or valued.” (The Storytelling Project, Lee Anne Bell and Rosemarie Roberts). By creating and shaping stories to serve the goals of their discipline students will acquire a better understanding of what equity means, where it lacks, and how to foster it. This tool embraces those concepts so that students are able to see how their discipline intersects with equity and also so they can see how storytelling can be a useful tool for progress.

The first draft of this tool was developed by Kent Linthicum, Jeremy Ackerman, Julie Hugonny and Michael Nitsche (Kendeda Building Teaching Fellows Spring ‘20) with the help of https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/stp_curriculum.pdf