February is the month for celebrating Black History in the USA. In this podcast episode Tracy continues with her virtual visit across 'the Pond' with her very first interview. The interview was recorded on New Year’s Day on the 'Facing Purpose Radio Show' in the US hosted by Elder Lakia Barnett.

In this the second part of this interview, Tracy shares what inspired her to create the multi-media platform that is ‘Stories to be tolled’ reveals the one thing that the stories couldn’t do without and what is the ‘ultimate’ learning journey for all her users.

If you enjoy these podcasts then visit the website https://storiestobetolled.com for the learning journeys and poetic narratives and why not join us on our mailing list and receive a free sample of each of the current story titles.

You can also purchase your copies of the poetic narratives related to this part of the interview ('Caribbean Wind' and 'Bite from the Big Apple - a story for New York') using the links below:

Caribbean 'Wind'

Bite from the Big Apple - a story for New York

At times, small parts of the recording are omitted and so the full transcript is provided below:

LB: Hello, hello, hello! We are back from our commercial break with the lovely Ms Tracy Williams all the way from the UK. So Ms Tracy, I was reading in your bio that you have multi-media platforms explain to me about how that works how you kinda started to expand from just being an author to doing other things that you do.

TDW: Well, I think the multi-media learning platform is really the educationalist side of me. The stories are the author element of who I am. You know, I spent about 18 months writing the stories, so I was just in a creative writing flow for about 18 months and you know, to be really honest once I had finished the stories Lakia, I had both a sense of elation and achievement but I also had a sense of deflation as well. Because the British Empire has such a lot of moving parts to it, I didn’t want the stories to sit in a vacuum. Because once I’d published them it would be ‘Well, who are the stories for?’ Who are your target audience? Why have you written them? Ok, I’ve written them because I’ve been inspired to write them but there’s got to be a proof of concept about it.

 When I was writing the stories which must have been back in 2017, 2018 there wasn’t really that much of a heightened awareness to learn more about the subject of the British Empire, it was very much a taboo subject (to be really honest, if I’m really honest about it). It was an ‘uncomfortable truth’ so to speak that nobody really wanted to talk about or look really deeply at. I knew that it was important enough to have a platform and that it should be taught in our schools. It should be read to children at story time or at bed time at home. I just felt that, the stories themselves, although they were good, it couldn’t be left in a vacuum there needed to be some context to it so that any learner from 9-14 years and upwards would be able to read and understand but within a context and so that’s why I decided to create a learning journey to go with the stories.

So, at the back of the stories there are various questions that the learner can then go upon, they can start carrying out their own learning journey, their own research after they’ve read the story. There’s a chronology, so a list of key dates that come up in the actual story and then there’s an activity that I call ‘build your vocabulary’ because vocabulary is such a difficult thing to learn and to teach. I decided to pick out phrases and words within the stories that children and young people would be able to go off and find out more about and understand how to build their vocabulary and be able to apply that new vocabulary to new learning.

I then decided to go a step further and create the learning platform which is initially where everything lives relating to ‘Stories to be tolled’ The stories can be purchased there (I’m actually on the website now) and we’ve got other things like mini-documentaries, which are just like mini films that I’ve created and learning journeys that continue, are an expansion or a continuation of each of the stories. If you went on the website now and clicked on the ‘learning journey’ menu you will see the titles of each of the four books that are out now as well as four new titles that I’m going to be planning to launch this year.

If you clicked on to ‘Caribbean Wind’ there would come up an alternative chronology, suggestions for biographies, historical sources, You tube videos and I’m developing an art gallery of alternative history. So, there’s something for all types of learner and it just feeds into my overall vision for ‘Stories to be tolled’ that we can take something that in a lot of ways is a difficult and emotive subject to explore and to learn about and we can deliver it, we can approach it in a way that is both thoughtful, engaging, imaginative, interesting and just to break down some of the taboos about the subject area because I feel when you’re ignorant about a subject area, the more you are ignorant the more fearful you are. The more prejudiced you are and the more ignorance there is around the topic and so that is what the multi-media platform is there to do, to help the ordinary person, help the ordinary learner engage and hopefully something on it will spark their interest to continue or develop their own learning journey about whatever aspect of the topic they want to find out about so that was the rationale behind the learning journey and it’s growing all the time. It’s something that I’m really proud of, its’ quite unique.

LB: So yes that is really, really interesting you have your background as an educator, a teacher and you’re really incorporating these things into everything that you do and it leaves no room for confusion when people see you and they hear about you, they know what you stand for. So when people are getting these books Tracy what do you want the readers to take from this? When they’re reading your books what do you want then to learn and take from reading this collection of books?

TDW: I think the one thing that I want them to learn about is to understand that the world is multi-faceted, the world is interconnected and it’s not interconnected because we have all this technology and we have all these social media platforms. The world is interconnected because this one phenomenon that took place over a period of 400 years is really the key to understanding how the world is today.

It’s the one thing that can provide that link to a lot of international relationships between countries, the way that countries define their foreign policies with each other. The way that various Diasporas have developed and emerged out of displacement of indigenous people from their home lands. I know that these are difficult subjects to look at but I feel that these are some of the main things that readers need to understand and to learn about as they’re reading the stories. I get so many readers saying to me’ Tracy I never knew about this or I never knew about that.’ ‘I never knew that the Empire Windrush used to be a German Nazi warship that was used in WW2. I never knew anything about the early period of European discovery and how Britain came about its first encounter of the Caribbean.’ ‘I didn’t know it was a failed colonial exercise carried out by Scotland that caused the unification of Scotland and England.’

 Many of us seem to think that it was when Elizabeth 1st died and James 6th of Scotland became James 1st of England and united the two countries but stories really do dispel a lot of assertions, a lot of assumptions that ordinary people like myself and like you make about history we are taught at school and then you realise that a lot of it is not necessarily fact, it’s just coming from a certain perspective and I thought ‘right, that’s my strapline.’ That is actually how I got the strapline ‘history is a matter of fact…or perspective?’ because there are so many perspectives in history. We only hear about the perspective of the conqueror, of the victor, you never hear of the perspective of those who have gone past and those who have died and are not here to tell their tale.

 So the stories is that balance of perspective and just lets the reader know ‘look, regardless of what you’ve been taught in school, regardless of your formal education, quite often it’s what we go out and learn for ourselves that helps us have a much more balanced view of the world we live in and a greater tolerance and a greater understanding of why things are the way they are today.’ Why there are issues and seemingly unsolved problems in certain parts of the world and more of an empathy for indigenous populations that are going through a tumultuous time because we can then use these stories to really un-pick and understand what the roots of these issues are. So that’s what I want readers to take away.

(Copyright Tracy D Williams 2022)