1st-Person Stories of refugees in the Granite State

Uprooted: Heartache and Hope in New Hampshire is a 30-minute documentary based on interviews collected during the New Hampshire Humanities Fences & Neighbors initiative on immigration. It tells the story of five refugees who escaped from war-torn countries to resettle in New Hampshire.

The film explores what it means to be a refugee and how it feels to make a new life in a strange place, often without English language skills, family, a job, or community contacts. The film leaves us pondering questions of belonging and citizenship. What does it mean to be an American? Once a refugee, are you destined always to be a refugee? What are our responsibilities toward one another?

To further deepen student engagement and understanding of issues presented in Uprooted: Heartbreak and Hope in New Hampshire, SPI encourages students to create their own oral histories of those in their community who have been uprooted or whose lives are in transition. To aid with this, SPI developed two comprehensive resources: an Oral History Guide and a Photovoice Guide.

Oral History Guide
This guide empowers students to connect with and learn from the lived experiences of others through structured interviews. It offers step-by-step instructions on how to plan, conduct, and preserve meaningful conversations, encouraging empathy and cross-cultural understanding.

Photovoice Guide
Photovoice is a powerful, visual method of storytelling that lets participants use images to communicate personal or community issues. In this guide, SPI provides students with guidelines for capturing and analyzing photographs that reflect the realities of resettlement, identity, and belonging. Photovoice encourages creative self-expression, promotes critical thinking, and gives students a unique lens to view and share stories that might otherwise go untold.

SPI wishes to thank the University of New Hampshire Center for Humanities for allowing us to make this documentary film part of its Learning Lab initiative. SPI’s Board Chair Sara Withers served as Project Manager on the Film.

About Story Preservation

Our Work: We are a leading producer and online distributor of original, content-rich audio-based narratives for K-12 students. SPI stories are the raw materials of history, roadmaps to scientific discovery, and windows to the minds of artists and skilled tradesmen and women.

What We Achieve: SPI brings listeners into personal contact with extraordinary people whose stories engage their hearts and minds, imparting content knowledge and fostering curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking as they open doors to possible career paths in professions associated with the arts, sciences, humanities, and skilled trades. We are fully open-source.

When educating the minds of our youth, we must not forget to educate their hearts.

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