Creating community through storytelling

Coskie, T., Trudel, H., & Vohs, R. (2010). Creating community through storytelling.Talking Points, 22(1), 2-9.

Here we are treated to a beautiful story of how a third grade class experienced a unit on storytelling. The unit culminated in a storytelling event during which the third graders told their practiced and polished stories to an audience invited from the surrounding community. The story of their experience is itself vividly told, and the reader can clearly visualize the event and the learning activities that led up to it. There is enough detail here that someone who wishes to create a similar unit with his or her own students could do so. A small sidebar contains a few helpful, well-selected resources.

In addition to the description of the storytelling unit, the authors make the case for including storytelling (and by extension other types of oral literacy experiences) in the elementary curriculum. They try to address several of the most commonly tested areas as literacy elements that can be benefited by a storytelling unit such as the one described here. They note that oral literacy is a type of literacy that is not always explicitly addressed in elementary classrooms, in spite of the benefits that can come from it. That is certainly true in my geographical area. Although “Speaking and Listening” is a section of my state’s Grade Level Expectations for Communication Arts, it is not usually included in the state’s testing program, and all public school educators know what that means when it comes to setting priorities about what gets taught and what does not.

On a related note, I found myself feeling wistful as I read this engaging account of a meaningful, student-centered literacy experience. I wondered to myself, “Where the heck is this school, anyway?” The urban public schools I’ve been in lately would not think they had time for such a deeply developed event that was not directly tied to testable skills. I have seen some of this kind of thing in early childhood settings, but never past first grade, and not in typical public elementary schools (though sometimes in charter or private schools). I’m afraid the authors would need to show actual test score outcomes for the storytelling unit before some of these school sites would consider allowing a teacher to implement such a unit. We certainly did not get that sort of evidence in this article; the outcomes were described mainly in observational terms, which would not be considered “scientific” enough these days. This particular journal is sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English’s Whole Language Umbrella, and that group is opposed to an emphasis on test scores. I happen to agree with them, but I fear that without hard data to support some of these wonderful approaches, they will only be “preaching to the choir.” Even so, my day was brightened by reading the account of one classroom that was a community and an oasis of meaningful literacy. Yes, this journal’s descriptions of classrooms tend to be rosy and a bit utopian, but they do give us a glimpse of what meaningful literacy development could look like.