6th Grade - Anti-Single Story Portrait

Author Chimamanda Adichie has a powerful TedTalk out there about what she calls the "dangers of a single story," where, in a nutshell, she describes her experience growing up in Africa and her move to the US.  Her idea of the "single story" - the notion that we might assume we know how Chimamanda grew up because of our preconceived idea of "African" - is an extraordinary message and can be applied to all sorts of backgrounds, cultures, or places.  Watch the link above.  Oh, what the heck I'll embed it here so you don't have an excuse.  She's awesome.

Anyway, I shared this video with my sixth graders and we set about making an artwork based on her ideas that we deemed "The Anti-Single Story Portrait."  The goal was to create a portrait of yourself that both addressed your "single story" - or what you think people generally know or assume about you (gamer, cheerleader, math geek, jock, etc.) and included things that help to round you out.  Maybe you're a cheerleader who also loves to play video games.  Or a mathemagician who rocks put on the guitar.  

It's not easy to confront these types of things when you're in middle school, but these examples did a really nice job building a more complete portrait of themselves.