Indigenous Narrative
Intergenerational Storybooks for Language Preservation
with Endangered Language Alliance
-
Telling through Making
Three workshop sessions plus a launch event with Mixtec, Tlapaneco, Mam, and Guaraní families in NYC.Mothers narrated; kids drew and collaged the stories
Multilingual Transcription
Audio captured across four heritage languages, then translated into English and Spanish.Tu'un Savi, Tlapaneco, Mam, and Guaraní transcribed in original speech
In collaboration with Dan, Claudia, and the Parsons team
Production
Workshop illustrations scanned and laid out into a printed storybook.Layout sequenced to the recorded narrations
Final draft approved by mothers and kids in Workshop 3
-
2024 Fall Studio, MS Design and Urban Ecologies Program, Parsons School of Design
Delaney Connor, Shivani Dave, Arooj Fatima, Molly Meng, Antonia Simon, Ruth Wondemu
Telling through Making
We designed the canvas and prepped a range of collage materials in advance — yarn, colored paper, paint, markers. Families played with the materials first, before making anything.
Intergenerational
Potluck meals at the start of each session. The process was designed to be child- and family-friendly: open-ended, procedure-minimal, flexible on participation times. Dance games between parents and kids came before any story-sharing.
Digitization and Editing Illustrations
This stage of production included taking high resolution scans of all the illustrations that were produced in the workshops, bringing them on to a digital software, editing them for making layouts and sequencing them according to the recorded transcripts. Post-digitising, we presented the stories to the community members in Workshop 3 for additional edits.
Transcription and Translations
In collaboration with Dan, Claudia and the Parsons team, we transcribed audio recordings into English and Spanish, as well as typing them out in the four original language.