We are committed to learning about school experience.

We collect school stories.

School Stories is a lab directed by Professor Susan D. Blum at the University of Notre Dame and carried out with a team of undergraduate and graduate students. We want to provide a place for people from all countries to talk about their experiences in all levels of schools: the joys and fears, triumphs and shame, friendships and loneliness, curiosity and boredom, and everything else that accompanies the experience of school. School is about what people learn, how people learn, what they don’t learn, who they learn with. We want to know what it feels like. Tell us your stories!

We are a team of anthropologists, designers, educators, and scholars.

Susan D Blum

Susan D Blum, PhD, is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She has taught at five different colleges and universities since the late 1980s. Her research initially focused on China but since the mid-2000s she has been obsessed with the nature of higher education. She has published several books and articles on this topic, including My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture (2009) and “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College (2016) and the forthcoming edited volume Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead). Follow her on Twitter @SusanDebraBlum.

Yuanmeng He

Yuanmeng He is an undergraduate student majoring in philosophy, and an International Scholar at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is interested in political theory and the power of storytelling.

Budji Kefen

Budji Kefen is a PhD student in anthropology and a Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is interested in education and learning, writing, intercultural interaction, and how communities construct, deconstruct, and use language, media, and other communication forms vis-à-vis political and socio-cultural interests/ideologies. She also loves working with children and young people and so has worked as a teacher, researcher, writer/journalist, and resource person, especially in the domains of education, communication and media, holistic growth, and reproductive health.

Brandon Moskun

Brandon Moskun is an anthropology PhD student at the University of Notre Dame. His undergraduate research focused on the daily habits of university students with ADHD as well as global variations and understandings of attention disorders. His master’s research focused on digital anthropology and discourse of individuals living with psychiatric comorbidity. At Notre Dame, his research focuses on the activity surrounding study drug use by university students to enhance academic performance. He seeks to develop cross-cultural comparisons of study drug use between North American universities and Nordic universities, seeing Nordic universities as potential rich sites of contrast and comparison in relationship between higher education, study drug use, university students, and health-care systems.

Claire Squire

Claire Squire is the web designer for School Stories. She is interested in creating meaningful user experiences with design through multimedia storytelling and multi-sensory interaction. Her past work has used ethnography to explore themes of learning, play, environmental philosophy, and conservation pedagogy. She holds a BA from the University of Notre Dame (2020). Her undergraduate thesis project, Let’s Play, was presented as a strategy for the Potawatomi Zoo in South Bend, IN to engage visitors of all ages in conservation education. As a practice, she often creates (at least) a sketch-a-day. Follow her sketching on Instagram @squire.jpg.

What is Anthropology?

Anthropology is the study of humans in all our physical, social, psychological, linguistic, and economic complexity, across time and space, with the first principle being respect for persons and societies and their differences. The anthropological perspective being assumed here is phenomenological and auto-ethnographic, which simply means that we seek experience-near, first-person accounts, which serve as the foundation for reflection and analysis.

Thank you.

This project has received generous support from the Department of Anthropology, College of Arts and Letters, and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, at the University of Notre Dame.