What is the Humans of Oshkosh Beyond First Impressions Storytelling Project?

First impressions are powerful. You see a tough-looking-tattooed-and-leather-clad biker, a woman wearing a hijab, a man wearing makeup. Right away, you think something. That something could be good or bad or something in between.  As humans, we tend to put labels on things, people and places because these labels give us context. They help put order in our messy minds.

So how do we get past some labels that just are either wrong or only a small part of who we are? The latest “Humans of Oshkosh” project is about what happens after that initial encounter of strangers. 

For this project, I paired my students with people of all shapes, colors and sizes. Among the people who participated are an 80-year-old woman, a gay married couple, foster parents who adopted a special needs child after rearing three grown children, a transgender male, a refugee from Myanmar, a young woman from Costa Rica who escaped a violent family past, a couple of hard-core bikers, Native Americans, a transgender male, people from Iraq, South Africa, Mexico, China, The Gambia, India, Jamaica, Lebanon and other countries. All of them, humans of Oshkosh.

The idea was for my students to sit with these people, talk to them, hear their stories.

• What lessons can be gained from having a conversation with someone who looks nothing like you or dresses differently or have different life experiences?
• What could be gained from testing our preconceived notions, facing our unexplained apprehension or fear of strangers?
• Could our differences be a cause for celebration, rather than a wedge that drives us apart? Could these conversations be the start of a discovery that we are more alike than different?

Humans of Oshkosh Beyond First Impression Storytelling aims to answer these questions and, ideally, produce lifelong lessons that resonate beyond classroom walls.

“Telling Stories for Fun, Profit and World Peace” is an Interdisciplinary Studies course at UW Oshkosh that aims to teach students about the power of storytelling and how powerful their voices can be telling the stories of others and of themselves. Students are charged with producing the stories that fill the Humans of Oshkosh Facebook page, which highlights the people of Oshkosh and the stories that they tell. What began as a class assignment  back in the fall of 2014 to engage with the campus community and beyond through stories has turned into a celebration of us, the humans of Oshkosh.