Short Stories of Hope aim to give Langley students sense of community while apart

LANGLEY (NEWS 1130) – In order to help students who’ve been forced into at-home learning, away from teachers, friends, and resources they’ve come to rely on, two Langley Secondary School teachers have spearheaded an initiative to bring community to them.

“Where we have members of the larger community that have been connected with our students, in some way, to share something that’s very positive; a poem, or a story, or, because I teach math and science, maybe they wanted to share a math puzzle or riddle or something like that,” Gwen Thornburn, who teaches at Langley Secondary School, explained of the Short Stories of Hope program.

The stories are being collected and shared with students who may be feeling significant mental stress during the pandemic, especially while being forced into self-isolation.

“In the midst of being at home and not being able to connect person-to-person with our students, we wanted to find a way to stay connected with our students, but to also remind our students that they’re also connected to a greater community, and that as we walk through this really unprecedented, in our lifetime … situation of time, how do we remain connected while we are apart?” Thornburn said.

“So, my work partner and myself have come up with the idea of doing what are called Short Stories of Hope.”

Both she and Laurence Greeff are part of the Focus program at Langley Secondary — a program designed for students struggling with anxiety, depression, trauma, or other types of stress.

The program provides students in need an alternate learning environment to help them build confidence, trust, and their own identitiy,” Thornburn said.

“We conduct our program for Grade 10 through Grade 12, and a huge part of our program is that connection and that trust and that relationship we build with students,” she told NEWS 1130.

However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, students have been forced to stay home, with many now missing that vital in-person connection.

That’s where the Short Stories of Hope idea came about.

The need to connect with students is what really got Thornburn and Greeff going, with Greeff saying they just wanted to remind students that, while they may not be able to see the larger community together, it is still there.

“We as teachers have a responsibility to ensure that we are reminding [students] we will get through this particular crisis, and we will get back into regular school settings,” Greeff said.

The response has been positive, both teachers note, with submissions already flooding in.

“What we did was we reached out to former students, we reached out to district management and school trustees — and they’re all very positive,” Greeff told NEWS 1130. “And then we sort of went out to the community, so for example Vikram Vij, he’s agreed to write something that has a personal impact on his life. So it’s been coming in steadily, the various poems, essays, and stories.”

University of British Columbia President Santa J. Ono shared his submission this past weekend.

“He has shared two stories — one was a personal story, and one was of the story of the butterfly and the man helping the butterfly emerge from the cocoon too early,” Thornburn said.

A local school in BC asked me to record videos of #ShortStoriesofHope during these challenging times. Here’s a clip from one of those stories. Full story here:https://t.co/VKzMx8LCdn pic.twitter.com/JVcEtTekYj

— Benoit-Antoine Bacon (@ubcprez) April 19, 2020

While Ono tweeted his submission for everyone to see, the majority of the submitted stories will be collected and shared with students through a district-approved means.

The students will then have an opportunity to either respond to the person who created the file, answer a question, or just reflect on what they’ve observed.

“We know that this is a time of very high anxiety,” Thornburn said. “I’m hoping that we can stay connected with our students, and that we can have a broader conversation about the world at large, as opposed to just curricular or personal between what the student is walking through in a day-to-day, and actually bring in bigger perspective.”

She hopes to help students find some light in what have otherwise been dark times.

“It’s not a complicated idea, and so the important thing is we want to connect with [students] and we want them to connect to our community and the larger world,” Greeff added. “And we want to make sure that they know that there are people within the Langley community and the broader community who do care.”

If you’d like to share a Short Story of Hope, you can contact the Langley Secondary School.