The Eastside High students want to help teens adapt to American life.
When Emma Curtis and Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen were invited to create a comic book last summer to help migrant teenagers adapt to life in America, they thought they were one of many to have the idea. But after beginning the project, they realized they were the first to attempt such a thing.
"We didn't expect that other people hadn't done this before," said Curtis, a sophomore at Eastside High School. "It was pretty exciting."
Curtis and Hirschfeld-Kroen, a junior at Eastside High School, were asked nine months ago by the Migrant Education Program of the Alachua County School Board to create the comic book to be used as a teaching tool for migrant teenagers, many of whom travel from state to state in search of work on farms, and emancipated youth. Often the students are not enrolled in school and know little about the way things are done in America.
The book tells the story of four migrant teenagers who experience the types of things most migrant teenagers face like healthy eating habits, making a doctor's appointments, obtaining a driver's license, and drinking and driving.
"These are real issues, and these issues have real consequences" said Matthew Kaye, academic coordinator for the Migrant Education Program.
The project had multiple levels of importance, Kaye said. First, there are the literal issues like healthy habits and safety tips that anyone new to America needs to know. But there is also the literacy issue.
"It's a matter of putting the printed word in the hands and homes of people who we are trying to extend literacy to," he said.
Initially, the girls had a simplistic plot with little depth or cultural understanding, Hirschfeld-Kroen said.
"We were actually quite ignorant," she said. "It didn't even occur to us that someone might not go to school."
After getting more involved in the project, they began to understand the importance of cultural neutrality, Curtis said.
"Because they were open to observing from a non-critical perspective, they seemed very interested and open to learning and adjusting their perception," Kaye said.
Curtis and Hirschfeld-Kroen take art classes at Eastside and have drawn bits and pieces of their own comic books. This project was the first that either of the girls has finished and published.
There were certain limitations on creativity, and it was interesting learning how to collaborate," Hirschfeld-Kroen said.
"We're lucky we got along so well because it was a really intense process, she said.
When they finished the comic book, they took it to a nearby agricultural fair that catered to migrant workers to hand it out to young people. Neither knew how to speak Spanish at the time, but they were still able to connect with the migrant teenagers and gain an understanding of how different their lives were, Curtis said.
"What we learned after getting past all that cultural stuff is everybody acts the same," she said. "We just had to break down some barriers, like language."
Hirschfeld-Kroen said it was rewarding for them to step out of their comfort zone and see life from another point of view.
"We were scared at first," she said. "But as we were handing them out to the teenagers, we realized that they're the reason we did this, and we're really not that different."