partout: sharing cultures through stories by children

Abstract

The range of diversity in a country like the United States opens up a new brave world of global connections and multicultural relationships. While it brings greatest opportunity and choice about how we live our lives, there is a challenging side to diversity. In the context of sustaining their own cultural identity, how do families originally from other countries, blend their own culture over time with the dominant culture of the place to get a third mixed culture for raising their children?

Bicultural families often struggle in deciding the balance between a culture at home and a different culture outside home. It’s challenging for parents to explain to their children about why daily activities at home are done differently from their friends at school. Currently, sharing experiences and stories between parents and children is mostly conversational. What if the exposure and appreciation of multi-cultures with other children enable a child to accept and embrace his own cultural experience even at a younger age? What if a new and appropriate platform of storytelling is developed to share cultural stories? partout is a crowd sourcing online platform to share cultural stories by children for children. With partout, children can share visual narratives about a cultural tradition, ritual, food, event, artifact, language or architecture with other children across the world. The goal is to introduce interesting qualities of different cultures to children in the voices of other children.