We collect school stories.
We explore the joys and the boredom, the friendships and the loneliness, the pride and the academic shame — what school actually feels like. Right now we're asking college students one question in particular: what happens when you read?
We collect school stories
Right now we are asking college students one question in particular: what happens when you read? We want to know how students feel about reading — what they finish, what they abandon, what they skim at 2 a.m., what they summarize with AI, how that makes them feel, how much they rely on audiobooks, and what they'd read if nobody were grading it.
Two ways to take part: fill out the survey, or sit down with one of us for a conversation.
About the lab
School Story Lab is run by students at the University of Notre Dame. We give people from anywhere in the world a place to talk about their experience of school at every level: the triumphs and the fears, the friendships and the loneliness, the curiosity and the boredom.
School is about what people learn, how they learn, what they never learn, and who they learn it with. We want to know what it feels like. Our current research analyzes students' experiences with reading.
School Story Lab is a student-led research lab under Susan D. Blum, Ph.D., at the University of Notre Dame. Our work is supported by the Department of Anthropology, the College of Arts and Letters, and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
All of our research is conducted under the oversight of Notre Dame’s Institutional Review Board (protocol #24-02-8372). Participation is voluntary, and you can stop or opt out at any point.
We take privacy seriously. Interview recordings and transcripts are stored on secured University systems and are not uploaded to general-purpose AI assistants. Every participant is given a pseudonym, and any name appearing on this site or in our published work is a pseudonym.