Stories to Remember was born out of a digital storytelling sabbatical project for winter and spring, 2009. After reading The Middle of Everywhere by Mary Pipher, I proposed to explore on my own the theme of resilience among the immigrant and refugee population whom I have worked with for the past 29 years. Since I am a storyteller myself and use stories in the classroom, I wanted to collect oral histories/stories to preserve in a digital format. As a published author, (The Basic Oxford Picture Dictionary Literacy Program, 1996 and Life Skills and Test Prep 4, 2009), I created a website to publish the voices of the students that I had conversations with or helped to produce movies.

After being a Program Chair in the Developmental Education Program at Bellevue College for the past nine years, I was ready to take a break from administration and return to my teaching �roots.� This project helped me to reconnect with my passion for storytelling and gave me time to explore the technology necessary to make stories accessible digitally. This was meaningful work in the deepest sense as participants openly shared their life stories to bring this project, and my dream, to fruition.

The first part of the sabbatical project concentrated on the technology needed to conduct the interview/conversations. I had to learn how to make digital recordings. Up until January of 2009, I had only used a tape recorder. Since I own an Apple computer, I signed up for the One-on-One tutoring available and spent hours learning to edit sound files in an application called GarageBand. I lined up interview/conversations to record with six participants whose excerpts are published on this website. The project report (sidebar) details the ups and downs of this part of the project, but the biggest disappointment was the quality of the sound on the recordings. I learned that a soundproof room is key to making recordings that people want to listen to, and that laptops have fan noise that can damage a sound track. In fall 2009, I will be able to work with our campus radio station KBCS (91.3 Bellevue) to produce broadcast-quality recorded conversations with students in my class in collaboration with the BC Reads book of the year, Listening is an Act of Love.

In a quest for better-recorded sound, on June 21, 2009, my father, Chester Templin (89 �) and I traveled to Wenatchee to join in the StoryCorps experience. The profound intimacy of our 40-minute conversation (excerpt in sidebar) recorded in a soundproof room in the mobile van created a high quality sound memory. Both of us were thrilled as our voices joined nearly 50,000 others in this national project.

In March, I moved on into digital storytelling by learning to make movies. I attended the standard workshop on March 19-21, 2009 in Berkeley, California at the renowned Center for Digital Storytelling. The story, Happy Mother�s Day (sidebar), was about the deep dread I had for Mother�s Day. The extremely personal experience the story told required me to reach deep inside of myself. Later on in the summer, I created another in honor of my father called simply, My Dad (sidebar). This method of preserving and sharing memories gave me such freedom to create and impacted my life with the same power as it has with thousands of other digital storytellers. As an educational tool, it starts with good writing and storytelling enhanced later with photos and sound.

Spring quarter 2009, I worked closely with Marcela Pop�s level 6 ESL class to teach them to do digital storytelling by making movies. The students were thrilled with the experience and those who completed their movies are published on this website.

While not proposed as part of the sabbatical, I traveled to Ireland on a literary tour from May 8-23. I prepared thoroughly by reading a variety of recommended book selections. I ended up in love with Ireland, its people, its literature, its history, its connection to the United States with immigration, its food, its music, its language, its landscape, its sheep�just everything, including the many wonderful stories I heard. I learned about the resilience of an entire people over hundreds of years of history.

For me, this project is only beginning, as I will continue to add to this collection of stories. The United States is primarily a land of immigrants and refugees. Honoring that aspect of our culture and remembering the struggles and the triumphs of these “newcomers” is an important study in resilience that informs us about how we, as individuals, and, collectively as people, continue to grow and change and adapt.

Update: Since 2009, two classes have made movies, spring 2010 and 2011. The topic of the movies made in spring 2011 was "My Mentor." I joined in with my students to make a mentor movie. My mother and father were my first mentors, but later in life, I met Shirley Brod on a writing project. My work with her had a great impact on my teaching. To honor her, I made "My Mentor, Shirley Brod." Click on her name in the sidebar to see the movie. In 2012, I made a movie in honor of my friend, Judy Roberts, who retired. We worked together for 18 years. And August 7-9, 2013, I once again attended a workshop at the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley to learn how to make movies using an iPhone. Check the sidebar for my movie, "True Confessions."