The power of storytelling with children

Telling stories with K-2 students at my children's center

Soon after I arrived back in Seattle, I began looking for jobs in education to supplement my studies, and conveniently fell right into a great children's center that functions as a full-day preschool and houses an after-school program from preschool "graduates" in Kindergarten through 4th grade. Little did I know how soon and how deeply I would become enveloped into this new community of practitioners of education, young and younger.

The most fascinating aspect of this learning community is that it practices the "emergent" curriculum. That is, whereas I built my Five Senses Unit during my student teaching based on the curriculum standards of the State of Vermont - quite a hefty volume, to say the least - here at the children's center, the year begins with empty binders. Children play first, and teachers observe consistently and intentionally, looking for the clues that children's play offers as avenues into their thinking and patterns of interests. Once something is found to be of particular interest to the children, the teacher creates and/or designs a "provocation" for children to engage with - anything from a new material to play with, like colored sand or sea shells, to a topical exercise, as one classroom addressed recent difficulties in sharing legos. Continuously, teachers are developing their observations into "documentations": narratives that recall and begin to interpret children's experiences in the classroom. As the year moves on, documentations fill the empty binders, so that come the end of the year, the "curriculum" is a story of each classroom.

It is an exciting practice to engage in, myself! My first was on the use of stories as provocations with the students. I noticed I had quickly earned a reputation with my kiddos as "the one who tells good stories", so that I best have a new story to tell them everyday, or they'll be disappointed! This was my first clue that stories might serve as powerful thematic provocations - vehicles into discussion on any number of topics. I wish I could attach my first documentation here as a pdf-file, but I don't have that capacity with this blog. So, here's a taste of it:

I can’t think of a better way to begin getting to know the Big Kids and establishing positive relationships with them. My favorite part about telling stories is to watch to see what conversation comes out of them afterwards. What the stories mean to the kids means more to me than what the stories mean to me. That’s how I found out that David thinks of pride as “being really happy about something” and that Elissa would rather be the mouse that goes second to pluck a whisker from Coyote’s face when he’s sleeping than be the first. “It’s not as scary, but you’re still being brave,” she said.

Subsequent documentations have come out of the more lengthy conversation I had with David about pride, for example, and I'm working on one now that recalls the logical problem solving entailed in the story of a peasant who had to divide one goose among six members of the royal family!

Another selection from my initial documentation:

Stories used in teaching and curriculum in other schools have sometimes come under fire because parents feel that teachers are trying to indoctrinate their children with a particular ideology. This is an understandable position – stories are used for a variety of purposes and have differed outcomes. If there ever is a story that feels too uncomfortable – for a parent and/or a child – it is very important to me to address this concern. My pursuit in telling stories and talking about them is not to arrive at a final “moral of the story” for everyone to take home like a party favor; rather stories are like mirrors that offer us a reflection of ourselves, and it is up to us to decide what we want to see in them.

We shall see how they progress. More documentations to come!
(If you'd like to see the full documentations, just send me an email, I'll be happy to send you some as attachments!)

What is pedagogy, anyway?

Thanks to recent approval from my adviser, my Master's project study is now in motion! Taking a hobby I picked up in Germany, that turned into a passion during my time at IslandWood, I'm now able to go one step further with the topic of storytelling. Specifically, I will be extending on my IW independent study on Storytelling as Pedagogy to study and write about Storytellers as Pedagogues.

Howard Terpning's "The Storyteller"

What is a pedagogue, you ask? This is, as it turns out, a very good question - one that I found myself discussing with my housemate, a fellow grad student in Education. We found that this very common term - indeed, pedagogy is the very field we are studying - evoked different ideas in each of our minds. She equated pedagogues with teachers, and pedagogy with a method of teaching instruction. I - and this may be due to the immense amount of philosophy I'm reading for one of my classes - feel pedagogy goes beyond curriculum and instruction to examine underlying philosophical questions and ideas of our educational model. In other words, teaching instruction implies educational practice while pedagogy embodies educational philosophy.

However, I may very well stand corrected! Consulting the dictionary, we found a definition that read: "1. The function or work of a teacher; 2. The art or science of teaching." Looking at the etymology of the word, the first paedagogio was a slave that served as supervisor of the education of his master's children (I'll avoid any connections teachers today might make to that historical example ...). And yet, when one thinks of historical pedagogues, a mixture of psychologists, philosophers, and teachers comes to mind: Benjamin Bloom, John Dewey, Paolo Freire, and Maria Montessori to mention just a few examples from the 20th century.

And so, perhaps we might better think of pedagogy as the link between educational philosophy and practice - that is, the sum of ideas about teaching and learning that inform how teachers and schools facilitate learning in their classrooms [or comparable learning environments]. However, I still can't, with confidence, equate pedagogues with teachers and educators, simply because of my initial philosophical slant.

Let's get back to my study on storytellers. The question of pedagogues originated from a question of framework: do I want to frame the study as an understanding of storytellers as practitioners of a pedagogy or as thinkers about a pedagogy? They are, undoubtedly, both, and I may, in the end, be making more work for myself than necessary. But, hey, what's wrong with a little mental exercise now and then? Please weigh in with your comments!

Those who care teach

This is the title of a little book my beloved great-uncle gave me recently - just a little collection of quotes about teachers and students, about teaching and learning, but that title really got me thinking. And, of course, when I get thinking, I usually end up talking to someone about it. So it really got my housemates talking, as well.

For those not in the teaching profession, perhaps you do not know the stigma that can plague us: "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." My whole life it has frustrated me that either someone tells me that they have all these grand plans for their lives, but if nothing works out they'll "just teach" or I have shared my plans to become a teacher and one responds "Oh, you're much to good for that! You could do so much more..." What do they think teaching is?!

Alas, the profession of teaching has slowly subjected itself to an identity crisis recently - although one might argue it has always been in an identity crisis. What should I be teaching? What do my students need? What are my administrators telling me to do? When can I just get a break to think? What does it mean that I get paid for "planning", but not for "reflection"? ... (sorry, I had to add that last one in there, I don't think many people have thought of that before)

For one of my courses at the university - it's a course in the Foundations of Curriculum and Instruction, fairly broad, but with avenues for closer critical work - I am in a book group. It has proven to be a great addendum to the regular course work, because there are 4 different groups, each reading a different book, according to our interests. The one I chose is Angela Valenzuela's Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Now, I have about zippo experience with U.S.-Mexican high schoolers, but it was the second part of the title that got me. The politics of caring? What is that?

(This is where I get to share how one of my favorite parts about staying here for Spring Break was that I got to peruse the University Bookstore textbooks for Spring Quarter pretty much all by myself, free of the chaos that is the first week of the new quarter, and alone with all of those neatly stacked tomes of wisdom, just waiting for me to open and peruse them, striving to be bought and loved to the point of highlighting, underlining, or - in extreme cases - being thrown against the wall to the exclamation of "What a great book!" ... )

So, I opened it up and skimmed the chapter titles a bit, then skimmed the heading titles in the chapters, and then started "dipping" as one of my professors calls it, reading a paragraph here and there to get some of the gist of it all. It was Chapter Three: Teacher-Student Relations and the Politics of Caring that I spent the most time "dipping" into. And it was what convinced me I wanted to join this book club. The first paragraph sums up well Valenzuela's survey of the situation of minority youth underachievement in this school :


"This chapter examines competing definitions of caring at Seguín [High School - her research site]. The predominantly non-Latino teaching staff sees students as not sufficiently caring about school, while students see teachers as not sufficiently caring for them. Teachers expect student to demonstrate caring about schooling with an abstract, or aesthetic commitment to ideas or practices that purportedly lead to achievement. Immigrant and U.S.-born youth, on the other hand, are committed to an authentic form of caring that emphasizes relations of reciprocity between teachers and students."

Valenzuela goes on throughout the book to argue that teachers need to take the first step toward an authentic caring pedagogy, that puts teacher-student relations before content teaching, before they can expect students to begin caring about their own achievement. In other words, what you teach is not as important as who you teach.

(Oh, and this is where I get to share some of my own developing pedagogy...)
This idea of teachers caring first, caring more for their students than for the content, resonates deeply with a notion I have long carried with me in my own teaching. I first recognized it while teaching English in Germany, where I felt I was observing a school phenomenon similar to what Valenzuela describes. The way I saw it, teachers and students were looking at each other as if looking in a mirror, looking to the other not to see the other, but to see what the other saw in them. (Is this not at the root of all communication? Do we not all look to others to understand ourselves better?) There's a whole page of stick figures and speech bubbles in my diary from that time that illustrate how neither teachers nor students felt acknowledged by each other and therefore did not seek to acknowledge the other in return, in traditional chicken and egg style. What I would argue - and what I think Valenzuela would agree with - is that teachers need to step up and understand that they can see through their mirror, but students cannot. The mirror of teaching is one-sided: students still look at teachers as if they are looking at themselves, but teachers need to look through their mirror at what a student's behavior says about the student, not the teacher. I feel like teachers can and should be mature enough to realize that.

Is that what caring is, then? Does caring mean we take the mirror out in front of us and look, for once, directly at the person we are caring for and about, without paying any attention to how we are personally affected by that person?

What does caring mean to you, whatever profession or community service you engage in?

There will be more to come on this idea, especially to the specific case of Valenzuela's study, which pulls in the political issues of Mexican immigration in the U.S. As our book group finishes reading, and begins to plan for our final presentation of the book to the rest of the class, I'll keep you filled in.

Sample lessons as of late ...

Often, when I learn something exciting, or am working on a project that excites me, I become most excited to share more about it with others. It occurred to me that this blog would be a great venue to share my academic papers, informal classes, and other little lessons along the way.

For example, my latest project: CHEESE!! A housemate of mine and I are taking a two-class cheese-making course, learning to make both soft and hard cheeses. I've already begun experimenting ... click on the photo below to find your way to my photos ...

In the meantime, I am working on figuring out how to make it possible for folks to access a few papers I've written for my classes. I find them very interesting, though it is frustrating to put so much effort and interest into something with only a judgment at the end, rather than feedback that could turn into an actual conversation. I suppose I can only consider them exercises for the real thing one day.

"What are your interests?"

In the world of academia, people don't break the ice by asking you where you're from, they ask you what your interests are, that is, what you are interested in researching and knowing more about. The way one of my professors explained it, "We all dig ourselves very deeply into one hole, but often enough, we come out and meet with each other to find out what each of us has found in our holes." The metaphor may be apt, but I'm finding that this hole-digging is a lot more public - and not as isolate - as I originally thought. "Publish or perish", they say - nobody's going to pay you to go so far down a hole you never come out.

Being back in the world of academia now, I'm wondering if there's a hole for me to dig somewhere. Not that I feel necessarily drawn to the ivory tower stigma, and don't hear muffled questions of "When are you going to get a real job?" from certain members of my family. I don't know what they think I'm doing here; I feel pretty exhausted at the end of the day.

But I'll tell you something: I love it.

I really do. I'm realizing that - stigma schmigma - this world of reading, thinking, writing, synthesizing, sharing, criticizing, revising, revisiting, developing, theorizing, *publishing* ... all of this may, at first glance, have nothing to do with how I understand myself as a teacher, but it has everything to do with how I understand myself as a learner.

This presents a certain predicament that I've been mulling over, namely, the question of how a teacher balances her calling to be a teacher with her history and fervor of being a learner? "No matter what profession you pursue," my mother has always said, "you will always be a teacher." It seems that, in following the call to explore how I am a teacher, I am constantly exploring how I am a learner, as well. There are two sides to the coin. Whoever I am as a teacher must be informed by, or at least complement, who I am as a learner; otherwise, I will never be completely satisfied in my work, and I will not do it well.

So, what are my interests? Well, that's a very good question. The easy answer is that I have a lot of interests, as most young learners do. But I am enjoying, still, walking around, looking at all the holes people are digging, peering in to see what I see, and moving on to see what others are up to. As I walk, these are the questions (and the fields of study) I'm pondering:

- How did education get to be the way it is now? (History of education)

- What are we doing in education anyway? (Philosophy of education)

- What does it and its effects look like on the ground? (Dual focus: Sociology of education (outward effects) and developmental psychology (inward effects))

- What light does knowledge about education in different cultures shed on our understanding of education? (Anthropology of education)

So, there's about four or five lifetimes worth of scholarship right there, but, like I said, I enjoy walking around between them at the moment. I think they are becoming like landmarks, like the numbers on the clock that I keep rotating between as I consider what I see and understand of education today. They are my table legs, so to speak, as I consider what I will do with this table top, what to create upon it, what to carve into it, what works to line along the edge, what papers to write upon it.

It is a powerful experience to feel as if on the threshold of something important, even if it will only ever be important to me. I know I have always been a learner, and always will be, but I have never felt this piece of me so strongly assert itself. It is confusing, and it is changing the way I think about my future, changing what I see of the path ahead of me. But I can tell it is a more honest path, so I'm not afraid in my confusion and questioning. I'm trying to stick to my landmarks, my questions, my interests, if you will.

... That is, if only to have something to say when they ask.

Miss Avery goes to school, too!

Apologies for the hiatus. I was a bit perplexed at how to keep this blog going, but after composing the following statement for a scholarship application, I realized that, though student teaching has ended, the learning continues! Enjoy the next chapter. You know I'll be having a grand old time ...

In front of my new "school": The College of Education at the University of Washington. Yeah, Seattle!

A friend of mine asked me once, “When did you know you wanted to be a teacher?” I was perplexed by this question. The more I thought about it, the more I knew: there was no moment when I “just knew”; I have always known that education is the profession, to which I have been called. My training has not been a journey of becoming an educator, but of understanding the educator that I am and want to be.

"The Quad": Surrounded by students, it's amazing how anonymous you can feel.

Before enrolling at UW, I was a Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant abroad in German public schools, worked and studied as an environmental educator at IslandWood on Bainbridge Island, and completed my student teaching for licensure. Amidst each of these experiences, I volunteered in local Kindergarten programs, participated in professional development opportunities that related to each position, and independently educated myself further on issues pertinent to my reflection on these practices. These valuable opportunities to build my practice as an educator inspired me to reflect deeply on the phenomenon that all educational institutions represent: the experience of learning intentionally. Now that I have enrolled in the College of Education, I have shifted my focus to more theoretical reflection on the meaning of such educational institutions for both students and the communities, to which they already and will continue to contribute as citizens.

It is here, at the College of Education, that I have met professors, fellow students, and scholars of all sorts that have all contributed to a significant realization in my journey as an educator. Having originally thought I would have to decide between being an education practitioner and an education scholar, I have since learned here that I can be both. Indeed, I am both and it will be an integral element of my career to balance both sides of the coin. Building on the insights I have gained from my prior experiences, I will devote my career in education to understanding the power of educational experiences, as they occur in both formal institutions and the plethora of alternatives utilized by schools and families. I want to know how educational experiences presently contribute to students’ attitudes toward learning and how these attitudes align with trends in student motivation and investment in life-long learning. Ultimately, my question is: What do children learn from their early learning experiences about learning and how do these experiences influence the attitudes they develop toward academic achievement, life-long learning, and their individual ownership of the learning they desire to pursue?

There is much to learn, both as scholar and practitioner, as I continue to tackle this area of interest. It is too early to say where I would like to go with it, but I am confident that my enthusiasm, commitment, and pure passion for reflecting and advancing on this topic will lead me in the right direction.

The C.o.E. is housed in Miller Hall. I'm beginning to move in, too.

My goal is always to achieve a deeper self-realization of who I am as an educator, and how I am serving both my students and my immediate and greater communities. However, this is not a goal that I can work toward independently. Therefore, as I continue my studies at the College of Education, it is my objective to contribute to the greater public discourse on the meaning of education as an experience, bringing with me serious reflections on and a deep desire to expand upon my growing scholarship and emerging repertoire of practice.

Miss Avery's portfolio is accepted!

After submitting my portfolio for review by my Teacher Education professors, I recently received the exciting news that it has been accepted! This means that I may now go ahead with the certification process, which entails a few more steps.

In the interim, I have taken the Praxis exam (think SAT for incoming teachers), and am waiting for those results. Let's just say I'm not expecting any disappointments on that end.

The decision I'm faced with now is where - in what state - I will pursue my certification. I completed my student teaching program in Vermont ... and am now in a graduate program in Washington State ... without any clear feeling as to where I will go from here.

Luckily, I'm not under any pressure to decide immediately. As I finish my studies, I can hone in gradually on my future, and make the move to apply for certification once I'm more confident as to where that will be.

As for now, though, I can add to the resume: CERTIFIABLE !!