Stories

(In 2010 I was lucky enough to sit in on the Seven Valleys Writing Project's first Open Institute, a six-day intense hands-on technology seminar -- my experience from that first day stays with me and made me think about stories in a new way, which I share below). 


The Open Institute was devoted to MAKING: teaching strategies, practical knowledge, connections with other teachers, radical claims about technology, ways to teach writing.  What struck me was the deep way the participants, all teachers, were thinking.  At one point we were discussing whether speech transcribed was writing — that is, what’s unique about writing, what’s special about it.  What does it do that speech (or video) doesn’t do?  Lots: it makes the writer’s understanding proceed word by word, creating an extraordinary sensitivity to the meanings of words (or just driving the writer crazy with the complexity and the surging surplus of it all) — their rhymes, allusions, homophones, histories, syntax, etymology, and the like.  Walter Ong lists a lot more of this in his articles, and Bob Yagelski picks up on this in his (http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/3220).  R.D. Walshe also adds some wonderful thoughts in this vein in his "Learning Power of Writing" (English Journal, 1987).  What got me enthused from stopping in is that the group was able to grab on to fundamental questions, not just safe ones such as “Does spellcheck make writers lazy” or “How do we protect kids from pornography on the web?” or even "Does Google make us stoopid?" 

Yet what struck me then and still engages me is the discussion about stories.  The teachers were saying that classrooms are really story factories.  That stories are attempts to make meaning, to find explanations for complexity and to arrive at satisfactory endings.  How stories are all we really share when we talk about process, history, development, reflection, and learning.  How stories are really the big challenge of FORM: finding a beginning, a buildup, a payoff.  I racked my mind looking for a genre that had no narrative.  A time-less collection of data with no beginning, middle, or end.  I guess painting might not “tell a story” sometimes.  An index.  A grocery list.  But just as any circle, no matter how un-face-like, will become very face-like if you put two eye-dots anywhere in it (try it, you’ll see), any list of more than one item starts to become a story, something that Stanley Fish discovered in his essay “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One."

So the real issue becomes, for us as teachers and students, what do we want our stories to do?  Whatever the answer, I am pretty sure everyone wants their stories to be memorable, sticky (pace Malcolm Gladwell), even transformative and restorative.  But what would such a story look like?  I can be sure that it’s a story that develops over time and grows up—that is, starts to accumulate a history, the callouses and shine that comes from frequent re-telling.  It starts to play a role, the characters become mythologized, the act of telling the story is socially sanctioned (or creates a social situation) that is recognized by others.  In other words, our stories start to tell stories about us when they are taken up as a collective, not just by one storyteller in first person.  One way to think of the purpose of the classroom is not as a tarmac for developing skills or knowledge, but as a campfire meant to elicit the art of storytelling in teachers and students.  If we do this through technology, great.  But whatever medium we use, the problems ultimately are of storytelling, not of spellcheck or pornography (though those are the sorts of stories that are more convenient and lurid to tell).  This Seven Valleys group was able to push for better stories regarding technology, and I found that thrilling.


And this is my story of that event.