02/14/2011
Vanessa Johnson, a griot or storyteller in the West African tradition, will present “Freedom Aprons” to current and future educators and others on Wednesday, Nov. 16, at SUNY Cortland.
Presented by the College’s Education Club, the Multicultural Life Office, and the Wellness Wednesday Series, the event will begin at 7 p.m. in Sperry Center, Room 205. The presentation is free and open to the public.
Johnson’s stories will encompass woman’s voices from the underground railroad: black and white, northern and southern, free and freedom-seeking, abolitionists and slaveholders. Her heartfelt tales are based on researched primary documents from the Onondaga Historical Association in Syracuse, N.Y., the National Archives, and WPA testimonies from former slaves, which are housed in the Smithsonian Museum collection. She dramatically reenacts the lives of female slaves, integrating African-American folktales and traditional spirituals.
She uses storytelling to present a model teachers can to use to manage classroom bullying. She will offer advice on how teachers and future educators can teach their students to understand why their peers bully, what those who bully are looking for in the responses of their victims, and how intended victims and witnesses can respond to bullying peers in a peaceful and non-conflict producing manner.
As a community educator, Johnson uses her years of experience directing social service programs for youth and providing direct service to teachers and future educators to demonstrate, through storytelling, classroom management skill models. She first began working with children at the Syracuse Model Neighbors Southwest Center as director of youth and teen programming. She captured significant grants for programs to prevent teen pregnancy and to support mentally challenged youth.
A writer, playwright, vocalist, fiber artist and teaching artist, Johnson established Mosai Village Enterprises as an important local resource for educational programming and performances for conferences, community celebrations, television and radio.
As an historian, she uses her voice to preserve the history of the past and the stories of the present. A former director of the J.P. Morgan Chase Interactive History Museum, Johnson founded and directed a youth drama group and developed interactive programs to bring historical themes to life. She also served the Onondaga Historical Society as director of education. In that capacity, Johnson developed and implemented educational programs and curriculums both in the museum and in a new school-based program that reached more than 300 students per week in 25 area schools. She also initiated history-themed youth camps.
For more information, contact Education Club advisor Karen Hempson, lecturer in childhood and early childhood education, at (607) 753-4209.