---

Telling stories has always been part of family life, with tales and traditions passed down from generation to generation. But family storytelling just got a boost from a community-engaged collaborative program offered by The Ohio State University and Bexley Public Library. The Bigger Than Me: My Story, My Culture series empowers children and their families to explore their unique cultural histories and heritage together, and ultimately share their stories as a published book.

The pilot program, co-sponsored by Ohio State’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion, College of Arts and Sciences Office of Engagement, OAA Office of Outreach and Engagement, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Humanities Institute, Center for Ethnic Studies, Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Themes “Archival Imaginations,” The Ohio State University Libraries and Bexley Public Library Youth Services, supported a series of workshops in autumn 2024 that allowed participants to explore listening and storytelling techniques, oral histories, material culture, library research methods, recording technologies and narrative strategies.

Led by Michelle Wibbelsman (Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Ohio State); Leticia Wiggins (Ethnic Studies librarian, Ohio State University Libraries), Hallie Fried (Ohio State alumna and local educator) and youth librarians at Bexley Public Library under Julie Perdue’s direction, the pilot program included a small number of families with children 8-12 years old and a wide diversity of cultural backgrounds.

The workshops were modeled on Wibbelsman’s children’s book, On the Wings of the Condor (2022), which celebrates her son’s Andean heritage and was featured on a 2024 WOSU segment of the Columbus Neighborhoods series. Bigger Than Me: My Story, My Culture thus far has been especially impactful for children who either don’t know much about their heritage or have grown up away from their families’ countries of origin.

One parent participant commented, “I like the idea of being in the weeds with something with my son, who keeps asking me ‘why do we have this Arabic stuff around the house?’ This program was the perfect way to open his eyes to the meanings and stories behind our traditions.”

Similarly, Davida Osei, another mom who attended the workshops with her 11-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter, says, “I loved the opportunity for them to learn more about their heritage. I am American, my husband is Ghanaian, and the kids have always been very interested in learning more about their heritage.”

Most importantly, the sessions were offered in a casual, not-overly-academic setting. “The workshops were loosely organized around how you create a story, while also making the sessions inviting, informal and fun,” explains Leticia Wiggins. Workshop facilitators introduced the children to analogue technology new to them, such as tape recorders and microphones and miniature printers. Children were equipped with research notebooks and special pens for notetaking. They also received small “expedition trunks” to store their research materials. As a special component, the program also brought in local artist Hakim Callwood to sketch “author portraits” of the kids while he listened to their stories and coach them on their book illustrations.

By the third workshop session, the books began to take shape in the minds of their authors, evolving as creative ways to tell their families’ stories. “They used their imaginations to come up with their books’ plots,” Perdue says. “One child is using a fictionalized version of himself as the main character who rubs a lamp that lets him travel back in time to his grandfather’s childhood. Another student’s book is a mystery, where the main character finds a wooden box from Ghana, and it’s a gateway to finding out about her family from there.” Other books feature sports themes, migration journeys and holiday celebrations. And one child entirely redefined the notion of heritage with a futurist orientation in the absence of family to interview.

Wibbelsman says the workshops also differed from after-school activities where parents drop their child off for a music lesson or sports practice and pick them up afterward.  “It’s really about the parents and kids coming together as partners, dedicating time with each other, and celebrating their shared heritage,” she explains. “We focused on the process of the books, of course, but also on forming habits of conversation, of collective imagination, of collaboration and joint problem-solving.”

As Osei comments, “More than anything, it turned out to be an opportunity for us to spend time together. We are a busy family, so it’s so nice to pause together. It turned out to be an opportunity for the three of us to foster our relationship … to talk about things like the history of our names and to have deep conversations. That has been the gift in all of this.”

Lena Feldman, whose eight-year-old son was the youngest participant, commented that for her, an experience that stood out was “watching mothers’ faces when their kids were retelling their family stories… seeing that look on other moms’ faces was one of the most memorable moments.”

The final result of the workshops is a self-published book creatively authored by each child and reflecting their family’s unique story. The books will be spotlighted at a celebration for the young authors at the Bexley Public Library this spring. Find more information about the program.

Program facilitators are already planning the next iteration of the Bigger Than Me workshops and thinking about how to sustain, develop and amplify this community-engaged collaboration. Adds Wiggins, “As a land grant university with all of these incredible resources that we can share with the community, it would be amazing to make this a model that other libraries could use throughout the country.”

But the best outcome of the workshop series may be a little closer to home. “Every family has a story. Whether or not it garners attention from others, it’s meaningful to your kids,” says Davida Osei. “I can’t say enough good things about the program. It’s been beautiful for us to bond as a family, and that connection is what truly matters.”

This autumn, Ohio State and the Bexley Public Library are collaborating on a series of intergenerational workshops to support children and their families research and write their own heritage stories.  Bigger Than Me: My Story, My Culture is a new children’s book series that nests personal stories within broader family and cultural histories, empowering children who have grown up away from their countries of family origin to connect or reconnect with their cultural heritage.  

This pilot program led by Dr. Michelle Wibbelsman (Department of Spanish and Portuguese), Leticia Wiggins (OSU Ethnic Studies Librarian), Hallie Fried (OSU Alumna and Educator) and youth librarians at Bexley Public Library is modeled on the children’s book On the Wings of the Condor featured in WOSU’s Columbus Neighborhoods segment “Genealogy for New Generations.”  

The workshops bring children and parents/grandparents/other family members together as partners in researching, gathering materials and conducting oral history interviews for their unique stories. Workshops equip participants with resources and research methods by “teaching on the sly” and approaching collaborative research as quality family time and fun.  

The program will culminate in a series of self-published books co-written by children and their families. Bexley Public Library will host a showcase in spring 2025 to celebrate the Bigger Than Me: My Story, My Culture series and allow participants to share their published stories and workshop experiences. 

This community-engaged initiative received generous funding support from OSU Libraries, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, College of Arts and Sciences Office of Engagement, OAA Office of Outreach and Engagement, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Humanities Institute, Center for Ethnic Studies, OSU’s Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Themes “Archival Imaginations,” and Bexley Public Library Youth Services.  

For more information on these intergenerational heritage workshops, collaboration with community partners, or the Bigger Than Me children’s book series, please reach out to Michelle Wibbelsman (wibbelsman.1@osu.edu) or Leticia Wiggins(wiggins.65@osu.edu). 

In summer 2024, Micah Unzueta, Alec Kingsley, and several other collaborators brought to fruition a full-scale model and implementation of the Muyuchina Quechua Verb Wheel—a long-term interdisciplinary collaboration supported by the Kawsay Ukhunchay Andean & Amazonian Indigenous Art and Cultural Artifacts Research Collection, Quechua Language Program, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The STEAM Factory, Center for Latin American Studies, Department of Design, Department of Art, Department of Engineering, Studio for Art and Design Research (SADR), College of Nursing Innovation Studio, Center of Science and Industry (COSI), Language Science Research Lab at COSI, Whitten Scholarship Fund, and an Ohio Sustainable Energy Partners (OSEP) grant.

The Muyuchina Quechua Verb Wheel is a hands-on language tool that encourages users to engage with Quechua by allowing them to construct verbs in the language. In Quechua, muyu is a seed or a circle. Combined with the suffixes /-chi/ and /-na/, Muyuchina means ‘that makes spin’ or, in Spanish, ‘que hace girar’. The wheel is a tool for student-led discovery and dialogue around Quechua as an agglutinative language where verb meanings and function are defined by the addition of suffixes.

(Alec Kingsley with the Muyuchina at COSI)

Quechua or Runasimi is one of more than 600 indigenous languages in South America. Today, it is most commonly spoken in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru—present-day countries that partially map the extent of the pre-Columbian Inca Empire, known as the Tawantinsuyu. Quechua is spoken by more than 10 million people, making it the most spoken indigenous language in South America.

There are many varieties within the Quechua supralect. However, native Quechua speakers across South America all use suffixes in agglutinative fashion, to construct the meaning of verbs. A single verb can accommodate more than a dozen suffixes!

(way’kurparimpuwankimanpischu means ‘and would you please quickly go cook for me?’)

As students interact with the Muyuchina they can learn about Quechua morphology in connection to Quechua culture. Long, continuous verb structures arguably mirror social values that characterize Quechua culture—extended relationships, elaborate storytelling, and intricately interconnected weavings are a few examples. As such the activity is also an entry point for conversations about indigenous Andean cultures.

(Micah Unzueta explains how one verb in Quechua can equal more than a dozen in English)

As an undergraduate at The Ohio State University, Micah Unzueta developed the idea for the Muyuchina and presented it at the 2021 Kawsay Ukhunchay Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Art and Cultural Artifacts Research Collection Tukuypaq Open House. Students gathered around and built their own Quechua verb wheels to learn more about Quechua language and culture.

(Micah Unzueta presenting the Muyuchina at the Tukuypaq Open House 2021)

The original Muyuchina workshop connected users to a space of inquiry and oriented them within the Collection by centering language. By analyzing Quechua, participants were introduced to cultural takeaways that led them to a more profound understanding of the art and cultural artifacts in the workroom. This educational intervention, focused on Quechua morphology, demonstrated the intimacy and interconnectedness of the language, a motif present throughout other Andean traditions and meaning-making practices.

Funding from an Ohio Sustainable Energy Partners (OSEP) 2023-2024 grant allowed Unzueta to return to OSU post-graduation to work as a research consultant for Kawsay Ukhunchay and develop a full-scale Quechua verb wheel for implementation with diverse audiences at COSI (Center of Sciences and Industry), as well as other venues.

(Unzueta captures a photo of the mounted design of the Muyuchina)

Unzueta collaborated with engineering and advanced Quechua student Alec Kingsley to fabricate various full-scale verb wheels based on Unzueta’s initial designs. Together, they worked with Elivia Andia, Quechua language instructor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Josh Gagliardi at the College of Nursing Innovation Studio and Paul Tenwalde at Ohio State’s Studio for Art and Design Research (SADR) to develop the final products.

The Muyuchina design features an empty space for the placement of a verb root at the center of the wheel. This space is surrounded by multiple outer rings containing different suffixes in Quechua that can be rotated into place to create increasingly complex meanings.

(T’usuchkani means ‘I am dancing’)

(Kingsley tests the Muyuchina at SADR)

The table-top design of the Muyuchina is paired with a miniature computer that generates a simultaneous translation for the verb wheel using distance sensors and indicators of varying depths to register each suffix’s location on the verb wheel.

(Kingsley assembles the wiring for the simultaneous translator)

Kingsley designed two Quechua to English translation programs for the Muyuchina. The first is a program for simultaneous translation. The second is a program that requires manual input.

One of the challenges of the project was adapting the Muyuchina to reach beyond its original context of the Kawsay Ukhunchay Research Collection to tap broader audiences. Ohio State’s STEAM Factory was integral to connecting Unzueta and the Muyuchina project to a broad interdisciplinary network including Laura Wagner, Director of the Language Sciences Research Lab at COSI. Dr. Wagner guided the team in terms of implementation with diverse audiences and, in summer of 2024, invited a pilot of the project at COSI’s Language Lab.

(Kingsley shares his translation program with Dr. Michelle Wibbelsman, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of Kawsay Ukhunchay)

Micah’s ingenuity and his vision for collaborative interdisciplinary work have contributed an exceptional resource for ongoing student research, classroom application, and public outreach and engagement opportunities with Quechua language and culture.

(Anais Fernandez Castro examines the Muyuchina)

The future of the Muyuchina includes plans for Quechua language students to present the Muyuchina and facilitate public interactions once per semester at the COSI Language Sciences Research Lab. Beyond this, the project lends itself to presentation at conferences centered on education, pedagogy, Andean and Amazonian studies and Quechua language. As Micah heads to The University of Texas at Austin for graduate school, inclusion of the project in AILLA-UT (Archives for Indigenous Languages of Latin America) might be a possibility. And eventually, Micah looks forward to implementing the Muyuchina in educational settings in the Andes. 

Congratulations to Micah and his team of collaborators for this exciting project, and stay tuned as the project goes out into the world!

Tinkunakama

---

A big congratulations to Anais Fernandez Castro, who was recently rewarded with the Savko Undergraduate Research Grant!! Her proposal, “Exploring Religion Through the Lens of Colonial Latin America,” is an ongoing collaborative project with some of her peers that came to fruition while taking History 3100-Colonial Latin American History. Her project will examine the dynamic religious histories taking place during the Colonial period to construct a collaborative anthology that will take shape as a zine. She hopes to create a reference guide for those interested in Religion and Latin American history and encourages us to keep an eye out for when it comes out in a physical form!

For the past year, Michelle Wibbelsman and Anaís Fernandez Castro have worked on an article that attempts to capture some of the alternative pedagogies and practices of the Kawsay Ukhunchay Collective. This collaboration started out as a panel presentation at the 2022 Curriculum and Pedagogy Conference in State College, PA, where Anaís was the only undergraduate panelist at the conference. Feedback from participants at that presentation encouraged them to develop their paper toward a publishable article.  

The article titled “Pukllay Pampa: Andean-inspired time spaces for learning and unlearning” came out in published form in October in the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy! With support from OSU Libraries it is now available online with open-access 
https://doi.org/10.1080/15505170.2023.2273538. 

Co-author Anais Fernandez Castro shares some of her thoughts on the experience: 

“I am so grateful to have been able to work alongside Dr. Michelle Wibbelsman. This has been a real catalyst for my academic journey! First, I was part of a panel with Dr. Wibbelsman and Amanda Tobin Ripley (Doctoral student in the Arts Administration, Education and Policy Department), which allowed me to experience conferences from the point of view of presenters. This was the start of really understanding collaboration in academic research projects and allowed me to gain skills that I am now using in my more recent research. After the long hours of work to now seeing the project in published form, I can’t help but be proud of the work I am doing and, prior to this experience, really had no idea that I could do it. This mentorship has allowed me to understand the innerworkings of research rigor culminating in a publication, shedding light on the kind of work I might be interested in pursuing further as I continue my academic journey.” 

Congratulations to Michelle and Anais on this article and for their many contributions to Andean and Amazonian Studies at OSU! 

 

We welcome Kareen Darwich as a new member of our team! She is a third-year undergraduate Health Sciences student, hoping to pursue dentistry. She comes from a science background and is eager to implement this into her undergraduate thesis. Upon joining the team, Kareen remarked upon the contrast between her structured courses in the hard sciences to the alternative learning and unlearning space of the Kawsay Ukhunchay collective. Her Spanish minor and this new dynamic influenced her to pursue work with the Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Art and Cultural Artifacts Research Collection.

In her early weeks as a researcher/curator, she dove into Andean and Amazonian journals, books, and articles on health and wellness from the perspective of indigenous cultures. Other members of the group helped with references and sources that could potentially inform her project. After weeks of searching, the mental and physical maturation a girl goes through as she embarks on womanhood sparked her interest.

As of now, Kareen is researching ways in which indigenous girls are welcomed into the next stage of life. She is exploring the many rituals and beliefs surrounding the changes girls go through during puberty. A series of rare Tukuna bark-cloth pieces from southeast Colombia amond our Collection holdings specifically pertain to girls’ rite-of-passage ceremonies, where the transition from girlhood to womanhood becomes a metaphor for the social well-being of the community. Kareen is also immersing herself in reading about recipes centered on the consumption of guinea pigs during this phase of development, as well as the relationship of women’s cycles with the moon and its phases, which also connects significantly to lunar observations for both agricultural and cultural practices. We look forward to this unfolding research that connects Andean and Amazonian studies, art, and health and wellness!

 

 

As we reflect on our unique model of collaboration, which is experimental, unstructured and purposefully not a class, we have come to wonder what sustains our productivity as a group. 

After all, in this space of learning and unlearning we do not operate according to typical institutional incentives or pressures for academic production. There are no grades or objective assessments, no prescribed outcomes or expectations for producing results or final products, no teacher/student hierarchies, no defined timeframe for development, no tests, no assigned readings, not even a requirement for regular attendance. And yet, participants keep showing up regularly, contributing to projects in self-motivated ways, engaging with our collaborative endeavor, investing significant time, and, in fact, producing more, and often more meaningful work than students in a typical classroom, undergraduate or graduate alike.

We continue to ponder and also celebrate the conspicuous productivity enabled by research approaches centered on playfulness, relationality, interdisciplinary collaboration, emergent processes and critical inquiry.

We are excited to share Kawsay Ukhunchay’s collective CV!   Collection CV 2023 update