Sustainability Through Storytelling
Early this school year, I was walking home from the playground with my 10 year old daughter, Addie. She asked me something that she’s asked me before, about recess.
“Mom, is there recess in Middle School?”
“Yep. Dad’s students have recess. There’s a playground at his school.”
“Do High School students have recess?”
“No. We don’t have recess in High School.”
“When do your students get to play?”
“Well, High School students don’t really play in the same way. Some High Schools will have open gym time during lunch so kids can go play basketball if they want.”
“But when do they get to play their own games that they get to make up and control?”
“Well, there’s not really a time for that.”
“That’s really sad, Mom.”
My students don’t have time for play. Like I told Addie, high school students don’t really play in the same way, but could they, should they, would they, if given the opportunity, at least sometimes?
Maybe it’s not play, necessarily, but some form of creativity that holds their interest and stamina. Something they have some control over.
My daughters, Addie and her sister Charlie (7 years old) both spend a lot of time on play, often pretend games with legos or dress up clothes or other toys that sometimes go on for literally hours. I wonder, sometimes, about how long this type of play will last in our home. Will Middle School make it disappear?
I’m trying to remember what kind of play or creative activities held my focus like that as a child, and then as a young adult. I played pretend with stuffed animals and dolls like my daughters do now. I always loved writing stories, also like my daughters do now.
Stories have been an integral part of my life since I was born. Listening to stories, reading stories, watching stories, and creating my own stories.
Stories are a universal connector. How much space do we make for them in our high school classrooms? We definitely make some, but in my experience, at least in most core high school English courses, we could be incorporating stories in more engaging and immersive ways.
In Chapter 4 of their book Civics For The World To Come, Nicole Mirra and Antero Garcia describe storytelling as an activity that taps into identity, experience, and belief “at the deepest levels. . .These are not the qualities that mainstream models of schooling are built to develop, but they are the ones that our youth need in order to build compassionate and just futures.”
Focus and stamina are a significant struggle for most of my students. Engagement is often fleeting and quick, when it’s happening at all. If our students could engage in storytelling in the way Mirra and Garcia describe, would that engage students in personal connection? Would it hold their focus and stamina in ways we thought we’d lost in high school classrooms in today’s world of rampant social media and shrunken attention spans?
In their recent NY Times article, “Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can Fight Back” Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh and Peter Schmidt wrote:
“The lament is as old as education itself: The students aren’t paying attention. But today, the problem of flighty or fragmented attention has reached truly catastrophic proportions. High school and college teachers overwhelmingly report that students’ capacity for sustained, or deep attention has sharply decreased, significantly impeding the forms of study — reading, looking at art, round-table discussions — once deemed central to the liberal arts”
I feel this harsh reality every day in my classroom. A lack of capacity, and a lack of stamina.
Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt make a call to action, saying that this problem now requires “attention to attention” and dedicated “Spaces where we can give our focus to objects and language and other people, and thereby fashion ourselves in relation to a common world. If you think that this sounds like school, you’re right: This revolution starts in our classrooms.”
Revolution is a strong word, but probably an appropriate one. I clearly don’t have all the answers, but I know I am dedicated to continue to search for best practices, and to continue reflecting, as long as I continue to be an educator.
So what will I try next? It comes back to stories. Recently, my students had a Socratic Seminar where they discussed both harmful and helpful effects of cell phones and social media. It was possibly the most engaged I’ve seen my students all semester, and the most engaging moments were when students were making personal connections and telling their own stories.
We offer a lot of opportunity for personal connection in our English curriculum, but Mirra and Garcia’s work inspires me to dig deeper into those opportunities, to consistently center around personal experience and story within our work.
If students are going to feel engaged in their work, they must be able to see themselves in their work, to find their place in their work.
When the experience of story, either reading, watching, listening, writing, or telling, is involving and engaging our students in a meaningful way, that will prove sustainable for all of us.
