I will admit to very slight disappointment when Angela Maiers began her presentation on storytelling in education Thursday during The Reinvention Summit: A Virtual Summit on the Future of Storytelling. I’ve long been interested in using story in teaching — college students. Angela’s focus was very young children. But I quickly became captivated by her passion and ideas. I also recognize that fixing our broken education system should be one of America’s top priorities, and positive approaches like Angela’s contain some of the answers we need. “Saving education requires understanding that the most powerful quality we hold as teachers, leaders, and change agents is our power to tell new stories,” she said in describing her session, entitled “Story Power: Reclaiming the Place of Story in Education and Life.”
“The individuals who are going to change the world are sitting in school now,” Angela began. “They don’t know their voice matters.”
The “big idea” that Angela intended to drive home in this session: “Children have world-changing ideas, and we haven’t given them to tools to tell their stories.” She cited the “miracle of literacy,” embodied in the top left photo in the montage below, in which one little girl excitedly reacts to a story being told and written/drawn by an older little girl.
She noted that “story is a somewhat unnatural conversation in education” and that storytelling is often seen as a time-filler in lower grades.
“Stories aren’t meant to be just received but to be told and shared,” Angela said. “Technology today is all about ways to tell and share stories.”
She asserted that the 21st-century competencies most in demand (see graphic at left) can be enhanced by honoring value of stories. We don’t couch the most important skills as stories, Angela said, but stories are vital because because it’s biologically impossible for our brain to process facts unless they are wrapped in stories (“Our brain cannot process what our heart has not processed.”) “When we answer the question, ‘Why do we need to know this? Why do we have to do this work?, we are telling a story,” Angela said in her description of the session. “When we describe science or explain an algebraic equation; we are telling a story. When we write, when we read, when we dream of a desired future or struggle to understand our past, we are using storytelling to shape learning and lives.”
To illustrate the world-changing ideas of children, Angela told the story (and I hope I’m retelling it accurately) of finding pieces of paper — story fragments — plastered along a bike path in Iowa, all about saving the lives of animals. Angela located the storyteller, Hayley (I’m guessing at the spelling). Hayley (second photo from top in montage below) invited Angela to her bedroom, which Hayley called her “laboratory.” The little girl was on a quest with her bike-path posters to save a sick panda in China, and she had raised some $400. She even had a Plan B.
I was stunned when Angela stated Hayley’s age — four and a half!
“We grow out of being comfortable telling stories,” Angela observed. Children’s storytelling tendencies get beaten down by teachers, whose red pens bleed all over their written stories. “Your story isn’t good enough until your writing is good enough,” is the message many teachers communicate to children, Angela noted. Thus, creativity is quashed. (See the shocking Creativity Index graphic at the bottom of the montage of images below). “Technology should be used in service of helping kids telling their stories,” she said.
Angela has developed a framework — a work in progress, she says, called the “Teaching and Learning Cycle/The Story Cycle” (see graphic above). It’s about the “pattern-seeking/meaning-meaning part of curriculum,” she explained.
Angela went on to describe two ways she’s used story in education, one with children and one with adults:
The project with children began with the book Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, a work of historical fiction about the Holocaust. The students went out and discovered other stories about the Holocaust. They broke into groups and studied the time of Holocaust. They narrowed the stories they’d collected down to four compelling stories and were to find a way to compel the rest of the class to vote for their story. I’m a little fuzzy on this next point: The students found a video with compatible subject matter but decided it was deficient, so they reinvented the video and uploaded it to YouTube, garnering 161 comments in 24 hours. Based on a horrible comment from a white supremacist, one teacher wanted to bag the project. The students contacted a Holocaust survivor, who said, “You live in a time where your stories matter. You can tell the story, and the world will listen.” From the supremacist’s comment, the students learned that sometimes the story told is not truthful. The entire school then did deeper research on hate groups. The approach Angela described here seems a lot like “story across the curriculum.”
The adult project Angela worked with looked at why parental involvement is critical in education. The project organizers collected stories from parents and teachers using the prompts “Tell me a story of the last time you interacted with a teacher” (with parents) and Tell me a story of the last time you interacted with parents (with teachers). Using Wordle.net, they made a word cloud from the texts of these stories, to show which words popped up most often in the stories. As you can see in the third image from the top in the montage at right, the parents told rather negative stories (word cloud at right) that were very different from the positive stories told by teacher (word cloud at left). Together the groups created a word cloud (top right image of montage) based on a new story for how parental involvement in schools should look.
“We need to be excited about the contributions and passion of children,” Angela said. We need to “teach kids to become the storytellers they were meant to be.”
We need to tell children what Angela told little Hayley: “You are a genius, and the world needs your contribution. Your ability to get your story out there is something I don’t see adults doing.”
That moment when a child realizes someone values his or her contribution results in what Angela calls “smiling eyes,” (embodied in the photo of Hayley, right column, second from top in the montage above), and the recognition of the valued contribution motivates the child to be better.
After the heart of Angela’s talk, she and Reinvention Summit organizer Michael Margolis talked about fixing education. “Education must be reinvented, not reformed,” Angela declared.
“Let’s go back to the core fundamentals of how we experience and interpret the world,” Michael said. “We’re stripping away our ability to live in narrative.”
Angela explained her concept of education reinvention: “Start with what kids can do, not the negative about what can’t be done or what they can’t do.” She noted that the lack of desire to go to school used to hit kids in about the eighth grade. “Now 5-year-olds don’t want to go to school,” she said. She talked about the audits she conducts in schools, noting that she can predict by the classroom environment whether kids will be successful. She looks at the materials and what’s on the walls. (I wish she’d said a little more about what kinds of materials and wall hangings indicate a successful environment.)
“To find out what kids can do, you have to hear their story,” Angela said. “It all comes down to hearing someone else’s story.”
“If you can’t imagine the possibilities,” Angela concluded, “go to a playground, go to a mall. See children.”
Some resources:
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