By Nina Sethi and Gabby Arca
“WWelcome, welcome!” our ushers cry as family members, staff and students arrive. We give the ushers an encouraging nod, and smile to each other about how we had to explain that being an usher was different from Usher, the R&B singer and actor.
This is the final storytelling show for our fifth grade class at Sheridan School in Washington, D.C., and you’d think we hired a background drummer; you can practically hear 26 hearts thumping.
We love so many things about the end of school but our favorite is the culmination of our storytelling unit, which we’ve run for three years now. We put on a huge “Final Stage Storytelling Show,” and all of our students step up to the microphone and tell stories from their own lives. The unit is based on the amazing storytelling work of places like The Moth, StoryCorps, and Story District here in the District of Columbia. We might be biased, but we think our young storytellers are well on their way to being just as good as the performers on those programs.
The students who are not telling their stories today sit in the first row, ready to introduce the performers and cheer on their classmates. The first student goes on stage and, just like a pro, pauses for a laugh or two during her story. The audience is a bit reserved at first so we laugh our encouraging teacher laughs and soon the room warms up. Storyteller after storyteller, fifth grader after fifth grader, marches onto the stage and dives in.
We hear about runaway pets, broken arms, making new friends, and siblings going through puberty.
WWhile the art of storytelling is ancient, teaching it in high schools is current — it has become somewhat of a trend over the past few years. When we meet teachers across the country, they say that teaching storytelling as a Language Arts unit in elementary school is a bizarre but interesting concept. Seasoned storytellers and other educators routinely ask, “How could you possibly do true storytelling with students that young?!” Many people think performing stories is too advanced for younger students because it requires risk-taking, reflection, and a ton of craft. Our response? It certainly is hard — even for adults. However in our experience we have never met a group of people with a greater ability than our students to build tension, bring characters hilariously to life, and who are so full of STORIES! (If you don’t know what we mean, find a comfortable seat and get a 10 year old chatting.)
We understand the struggle of explaining complicated concepts to still-literal fifth-grade minds, but our students become more avid learners during storytelling. They are able to tell you the difference between a story and an anecdote, and they know that letting go of sweet memories in search of a workable story idea requires real thought.
There are so many reasons we believe it’s important to teach storytelling. It is rigorous, it allows for different perspectives, and it has the power to be incredibly personal and meaningful. We love how it helps draw out shy students and requires outgoing students to think critically about how they communicate.
We have seen students grow closer to each other because they are impressed by classmates’ stories of risk-taking and reaching out. We have seen students grow closer to family members because they have had to think through their roles in those relationships.
Really, storytelling has transformed our students and us in so many ways. Here’s one example: During a rehearsal, a student tried to memorize her entire story word for word, but when it came time to tell it she froze. Her classmates waited patiently, in untypical silence. Finally she moved, and ran out of the room crying. When she came back we passed her a note.
“Freezing up is frustrating. It happened to Ms. Arca, too. It is really hard! The best thing I ever did was try again. Do you want to try again?”
She sniffled, read the note and nodded. Then she got back on stage without any prompting from us, and one of the boys in the class started to cheer her on. This time, she made it through.
Afterward the students congratulated her for being brave and trying again. They left the room chatting about how terrified they were, too, and how even though they were nervous they felt camaraderie in the challenge of storytelling. Most importantly, they wanted to make her feel better. It worked. All that support made her feel like a brave risk-taker instead of a failure.
SStorytelling has changed the way we understand ourselves, as students and teachers. Beyond the buzzwords and phrases like “educating the whole child,” we watch the empowerment that comes with students sorting through personal experiences in order to transform them into coherent and cohesive stories. We brainstorm story ideas with the students — thinking over fights with siblings, moments of sadness, and moments of fear. We think of our own challenges and our “failure” or growth. In fact, we turn ourselves into students for this unit so we have to take part in the same intense risk-taking we demand of the kids. Every year, Ms. Arca tells a true story for a show with StoryDistrict. It’s terrifying.
So we all share in the agony (“I know! Figuring out how to bring a character’s voice out is so hard!”). We grow closer as we all put our heads down and work on creating the best story we can. We can empathize about how hard, and also how necessary, revision is for compelling stories. It’s a humbling and tumultuous process, and as educators, learning something new really does take you right back to your struggles as a student. We become a room full of students, not students and teachers, and when that happens the energy in our classroom becomes more dynamic.
We can’t know exactly what this process feels like for our students. However, we do know that it always helps the students become more aware of themselves and their relationship to the world around them. One of our students wrote,
“What I learned about me in this unit is that I have had really meaningful experiences that I did not think were important, and that I could not see the value in the experience. Now I see value in lots of experiences I have had.”
As teachers, we have also learned so much more about our students — about how to connect with them, who they are and who they want to be.
OOral histories have been consistently ignored by government institutions. We make sure students know this. In our room, we talk bluntly about the ways the federal government and school systems have, in the past, quashed the storytelling and oral history traditions of Native American tribes. Calling oral histories “only stories” and “not official” has been (and continues to be) a barrier to some tribes getting federal recognition. Stories are not adequate documentation, the tribes are told. They do not “prove” that the tribe existed in the past. We think of five Virginia-based tribes: the Chickahominy, Monacan, Eastern Chickahominy, Upper Mattaponi, Rappahannock and Nansemond that still fight for federal recognition.
We see this same pattern with enslaved Africans passing on history, folklore, and culture through storytelling, both because they weren’t taught to read and because of ties to indigenous African communities in which storytelling was a part of community life. Those connections continue in brilliant ways in African American culture today, through blues, spoken word, call and response, and even styles of preaching in black churches.
Because of this history of ignoring minority voices, and because storytelling is such a gift, we want our students to feel and understand exactly how valuable and difficult great storytelling is.
For students to truly get it, they have to experience it.
One of our students said about the section, “There were moments during the storytelling unit where I was mad, or nervous, or unsure, or rushed, or many other things. Now, I can see beyond that and I realize that this unit, even though it has probably been the most challenging writing unit I have ever had in my years at school, has helped me a lot. And I think I am learning from all the challenges that our storytelling unit presented.”
WWe’re almost at the end of the show. One of the last students hops onto the stage, breathing hard, like she almost forgot to inhale. Her story revolves around a summer day with a close family friend. All eyes are on her as she does the “badump, badump, badump” sound and goofy motion of a car bumping along on asphalt. Her eyes shine as she relives a beach day full of sandcastles, games, and candy. Then she brings her story to an artful close, her voice strong and clear: “Even though her body isn’t physically with us, her spirit lives on for infinity. Her spirit lives on in me because I now value life more, just like she valued life so much in her last few years.” Eyes mist. Students lean on each other. Some adults sniffle. The storyteller bows to the wild applause in the room.
Ultimately, we love storytelling because it belongs to our students. As they climb nervously onto that stage they can feel their power. Their bodies, their lives, and their perspectives are important and have meaning. They belong on that stage like anyone else. This unit, we hope, sends a message:
You have a voice.
Use it.
It matters.
We cannot wait until this spring when we start our storytelling unit with our new class. This year’s group seems to be simultaneously sillier and quieter than last year’s, so we can only guess what stories will emerge.
We’ll leave you with this quote, because the students asked us to share it and they wouldn’t be fifth graders without some spunk (and emojis):
“Can you please tell the people who thought that we were too young for storytelling that this was one of the best writing units ever and that I had so much fun telling my story and hearing others! Thank you. 😉”
