While teaching high school in rural California, I created a student-led storytelling troupe that traveled the country sharing stories in elementary schools. I remember Katherine* in particular, a freshman who spent countless hours with her peers developing a performance focused on nonviolence. She learned a ballad recounting the 1960s grape boycott and the work of United Farm Workers cofounder César Chávez, and she sang it for 400 elementary students. As she finished her performance, one of the school’s grill cooks, Maria,* wiped away tears and approached her. “I knew this man. Can we talk?”
Katherine and Maria sat on the bottom steps of the auditorium, deep in conversation. Maria recalled Chávez championing their cause as the local farmers argued. His pay was the same as hers. Sitting with Maria, hearing the story of someone with a first-hand experience of the song she’d just sung, Katherine was transformed. No history book could substitute for the power of the personal.
“Is My Story Worth Telling?”
Once, while collecting “American stories” for a performance, my student Cece* asked whether her story was worth including. She shared her history.
“Officials” had ripped up her legal papers in El Salvador before her family eventually made their way to the U.S.-Mexico border; they’d paid extra to be “first in line” to cross into California. They were told they were in the best place to cross, but in truth it was the first place La Migra snapped people up. Cece ate only a candy bar during the three-day journey. She contorted herself into a ball and hid in the space behind the glove compartment in an old, barely useable car. Her family made it. She asked again, “Is this part of America’s story?” Yes, I told her. The United States strengthens with each story like hers.
The next day, she handed me a seven-page, hand-written account with one simple request: “Please tell it.”
A Small Yellow Journal
One day, the janitor walked into my room and asked me to step into the hallway to chat. The hallway was littered with baby formula, old blankets, cereal boxes and a small yellow journal. He told me that he had found everything on the roof and wasn’t sure what to do.
I decided to look through the journal. It had belonged to a young female student who had attended our school 10 years earlier. Not a happy story, it detailed how she had escaped a physically abusive boyfriend and a verbally abusive father to the safety of school’s roof. I kept the journal and read.
My students became curious when I told them what I was reading. They asked questions. Could we find her? Could we help her? Should we take the journal to the authorities? The questions they raised led to authentic inquiry in writing and to intense conversations. Some of the best student writing in my class that year came as a response to that unknown student and her unfinished journal.
Questioning the Stories We Hear
A week after the Columbine shooting, the teachers at my school found a “troublemakers” list in our mailboxes with the instruction to circle and report those students we should watch. I threw mine in the trash.
Mark* was on this list. The same Mark who I knew loved writing, especially poetry. He would create fantasy worlds on paper, drawing fire-breathing dragons and captivating knights. Writing and drawing were his escapes, but he could not escape abuse from the school resource officer. The SRO did not know the Mark I knew. He never saw him as a student, but instead as a possible suspect for a crime he never committed. He followed Mark to make sure he reached his classroom. He questioned his every move. He yelled at him. This happened every day. Mark tried to go to school, until he had enough. He stopped coming. In fact, he disappeared.
As Teachers, We Hold Stories
As we teach, let us listen to our students. We will discover they have much to share and say. They have stories of their own. And let us remember that if we don’t take the time to listen, then some of our students—and their potential stories—could disappear.
Much of my most powerful teaching came from stories. Instead of relying on a textbook, we can encourage students to engage with the history of their country, their communities and their own lives through stories. When we ask our students to listen to stories, to retell them, to sing about and write in response to the stories of others and to tell their own, we encourage them to understand the world in a new way. And we give them a way to consider their place in that world.
See these pieces for more on empowering students’ stories:
Schooltalk: Rethinking What We Say About—and to—Students Every Day
*Names have been changed.
Cordi is a professional storyteller, assistant professor at Ohio Northern University, author and former writing co-director with the Columbus Area Writing Project at The Ohio State University. He is also a member of the Teaching Tolerance Advisory Board.
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Teachers have stories too, if you're interested in reading about mine visit my website eileensanchez.com. My story is about the mandated desegregation of public schools in Louisiana almost 50 years ago. Instead of writing a memoir I wrote an historical novel from three points of view. Freedom Lessons is based on my own experience as a white teacher in a segregated black school outside an Army base in Louisiana during 1969.
The resistance of local whites against nationwide desegregation exploded in November with the one-day’s notice to close black schools or lose federal funds.
It tells the fictionalized, true story of the traumatic integration through the eyes of Colleen Rodriquez. She is an outsider as a white teacher in a segregated black school and as a Jersey Girl living in a Whites Only Trailer Park with her Hispanic husband.
The sudden mid-year integration compels Colleen to take sides and her values are tested as she struggles with the culture clash of her sheltered northern upbringing and the reality of life in a small town in the Deep South for Evelyn Glover, a black teacher and Frank White, a black high school football star.
The unfortunate backdrop of headline stories on white privilege, racism, and segregation in our country today sheds an even more timely light on the historical underpinnings of this novel based on events almost fifty years ago.