... And Justice For All

by Julie Della Torre

The term ‘social justice’ has been used quite a bit this summer.  But what exactly is meant by ‘social justice’? I decided to explore a bit to learn and to figure out how stories fit into this whole discussion. I started my exploration wide for terminology and understanding and then tried to narrow the search to pinpoint individual stories that might be used to start a conversation.

Before I describe my search, I’d like to go into a bit of rationale. For SAI, I do work in the Paterson School District, a district taken over by the state. Many of the students are living with problems associated with life in an impoverished inner- city setting. In my freelance work, on the other side of the Passaic River, I work in affluent, well run school districts. Here we all are in northern Bergen/Passaic Counties, side-by-side, and every morning, around the same time, all of these students are uttering the phrase “... with liberty and justice for all.” How do we understand these words?

In previous years, when I have asked students what this word ‘justice’ means, they usually responded with the word ‘fairness,’ but I believe ‘social justice’ is a bit different. Last year at the Detention Center we explored Super Heroes and how they fight for justice. However, Super Heroes fight one particular evil entity to bring justice to the land. How would a Super Hero fight such things as voter rights protection, fair housing, industrial farming, and systemic racism?

As an individual I try to become more aware by reading and listening. How can I make a difference?  As a storyteller, I believe I have a unique opportunity to make a tiny, tiny bit of difference. Brene Brown says, “If we choose not to get involved or pretend it’s not happening, we’re going against the very sense of connection that makes us human.” Noticing is the first step.

Now, folktales are humble things, but they DO come from the folk. The folk know about these social injustices and have something to say about them, often in a delightful and charming way.  How are social injustices addressed in the old folktales? Maybe we storytellers CAN be an instrument for change, if just the very beginnings of change. We can bring awareness to ourselves and our listeners as we search for stories and as we tell them.

But, I repeat, folktales are humble things. They are not didactic. We can’t put too much on them. We storytellers can think about issues as we search and learn stories and become aware of injustices. Simply telling and listening to particular folktales gives voice to injustices. Helping students think about social issues while discussing folktales will deepen the experience. But we must remember to follow the students’ lead. Fortunately, they know more than we think they do. Students are always observing, listening, reading the world and engaging in discussions.

Any didactic approach to telling a folktale or even leading a discussion will be disastrous to the tale, to the telling and to the listener.

And so I started my search for tales. Many folk tales address individual justice, but I wanted stories that would speak to social injustices. First I enveloped myself in terminology and in the state of education on social justice issues.

Definitions from various dictionaries and the Department of Justice include:

• ·      Justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society
• ·      Promoting a just society by challenging injustice and valuing diversity
• ·      When all people share a common humanity and therefore have a right to equitable treatment, support for their human rights, and a fair allocation of community resources

While trying to define and understand social justice as opposed to individual justice, I discovered the following sites which proved helpful:

• ·      Teaching Tolerance website
• ·      Global Oneness Project
• ·      UN Declaration of Human Rights

As I read and learned more, I was reminded of collections of tales that I own. I pulled down four:

• ·      Fair Is Fair by Sharon Creeden
• ·      The Moon In the Well by Erica Meade
• ·       Once Upon a Time by Elisa Pearmain
• ·      Spinning Tales, Weaving Hope ed. Ed Brody, et.al

None of the tables of contents contain the specific term ‘social justice’, but they do list such terms as equality, fairness, justice and community. Each volume contained a story or two for my growing list of folktales.

Then I started reading more and more folktales.  Below is a list of stories I will use this year to help deepen my understanding and exploration of the term ‘social justice.’ This list is just a brainstorming list. I found many stories in which one individual helps a community, for instance “The Magic Porridge Pot” in which a young girl feeds a village with an unending overflowing porridge pot. I particularly wanted stories of community members doing good work together for the benefit of all of its members.

• ·       “Chief of the Well” (Haiti): any of the ‘keeper of the well’ stories would work. The water belongs to us all.
• ·      “Bringer of Fire” stories, particularly those with many animals working together to bring the fire to the community.
• ·      “Minu”: a wealthy man dies just like the rest of us. I found this in an old Cricket magazine. Julie P tells a version of this tale.
• ·      “Nyngara”: the children of a Nigerian village help heal the chief. Found in Lion on the Path
• ·      “The Magic Garden”:  a family (one young man in particular) help soothe the poor. Found in Stories of the Steppes.

I would love your comments and any additions that come to mind.

Anecdote of a Story

by Paula Davidoff

All storytellers have a list of stories that we can rely on: stories that always elicit the proverbial “ha ha” or “aha,” stories that are good openers and closers, and stories that are just the right length for social occasions. We tell these stories several times a year to begin a workshop or assembly, or because they can be discussed in ways that fit most character development curriculum objectives, or because, after hearing them, people always have something to think and talk about.

I also bet that most storytellers have a few stories that they tell again and again because, for the teller, the story has never quite resolved itself. Because each telling opens new windows that shed different kinds of light on pieces of the tale. Because each time you tell it, you understand or remember something new about yourself and the world.

The Goose Girl at Gruchy, Jean-Francois Millet

I have a list of stories like that. Some of them have been in my repertoire for years; others are relatively new. Sometimes I’m surprised by a story that I thought I thoroughly understood and I add it to the list.

A couple of days ago, while reading through the notes I took during the past school year’s workshops and residencies, I came upon this sentence:

“How did The Goosegirl get to be the story of my life?”

I wrote it during an independent writing activity in a professional development workshop Julie Della Torre and I taught for sixth grade English LA teachers. (My thoughts about the answer to the question are also in the notebook, but they wouldn’t be interesting to anyone except, maybe, my imaginary therapist.) However, reading that entry made me think of some of the many times I’ve told the story, and gave me an idea for the first workshop of a summer program I’m co-teaching with my friend and fellow teaching artist, Carolyn Hunt.

For over ten years, Carolyn and I have co-taught Girls Surviving, a writing and theater program for teen girls that we created together. The program runs all year – one evening a week during the school year, and for an intensive four to six weeks in summer. In each of these ‘seasons,’ participants write, rehearse, and perform an original play about issues that affect their lives. We often open the first workshop of a season with storytelling. This summer, we opened with Grimms’ Goosegirl.

Because the program is community based and long term, many of the girls participate for five or six years. This summer, three of these ‘veteran’ troupe members, all going into their senior year of high school, are planning and directing workshop activities. Most of the other participants will be starting high school in September, so there is a big knowledge and maturity gap between the oldest and youngest members of the group. This was apparent on the first day when the older girls encouraged the younger ones to talk about themselves, their school experiences, and their thoughts about entering high school. The new girls were, understandably, shy, but they had also come in friend groups, clusters of two or three girls who sat together whispering and trying to sneak peeks at their phones during lulls in the workshop. Their focus and their conversation was all over the place. Until we placed The Goosegirl at the center of the discussion circle.

Almost immediately, the story began to organize both thought and activity. The thing that came together immediately, of course, was focus. This is something I’ve experienced, probably, thousands of times, but until I began reflecting on this workshop, I don’t think I have ever fully appreciated the power of having everyone in a group deeply centered in the same place, visualizing the (almost) same things.

After the story, conversation was more coherent. It became discussion. Which makes sense because everyone still had the story in mind and, although talk about story characters led to talk about personal experience, the story was still holding the group together.

What has surprised me, workshop by workshop, is how, although there have been few, if any, direct references to The Goosegirl after that first day, ideas from the story are reflected in the girls’ discussions and writing, and in the theme of the play they are constructing.  In an exercise in which we wrote dialogue between the inner and outer voices of a character, one writer had the inner voice say, “If my mother just saw the way I spoke to that kid, it would break her heart.” This nearly verbatim quote from the story was written days after I told it.

What happens when a heterogeneous group of people is given a story? Each individual enters the telling space with his or her own worries and joys, head filled with the events of the day behind or ahead, all very personal and specific to the self. Then, I think, the story speaks to each of those individuals in a way that connects some aspect of each personal experience to the characters and events in the story, and that, in turn, connects each person to the others in the group. In situations, like the Girls Surviving workshop, the talk that follows the story can make these connections obvious. But I think that even in situations where an audience hears the story and then gets up to go their separate ways, the connection still happens because the group had those moments of communal focus and, once the story enters the heart and mind, it stays there. Lying beneath the thoughts and events that push past it as people go through their day-to-day, the story helps give meaning and purpose to one’s inner and outer lives.

The effect that The Goosegirl is having on the work of my summer students brings to mind the Wallace Stevens poem, Anecdote of the Jar.*

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Placing the story in the workshop lent order to the ideas and experiences of the participants by offering a reference point for one’s own words and providing context for the words and actions of the others. It doesn’t change things in any obvious way. The big girls are still conscientiously teaching and the little ones, although they are getting better, still feel bereft without their phones. But the group is coalescing and all of the girls have begun to make art.

*This poem, from Stevens’s Harmonium, is in the public domain.

The Storytelling Incident

 by Julie Pasqual

         

Julie with some Littles

In a recent three day residency at a middle school, where I, and four other tellers, where asked to introduce the concept of folktales, and how students could relate them to their own lives, I played one of my favorite games.  I call it ‘Who has ever…”  It is a simple game where I read a list of questions, and if the question applies to you, you cross the room (or change seats, or raise a leg or an arm, depending on where I am playing it).  I played this game before telling a story that, on the surface, would seem to have nothing to do with the student’s lives, but after the story, when we looked back on the questions, we saw that quite a few of the questions applied no just to their own 2016 day to day living, but to the characters in the story as well.  Some of the questions I knew would be rife to get to the kids to talk about, and then write about their personal experiences, but I never expected the question, “Has anyone ever fainted?”  to  provide a PREFECT look at how folktales evolve and grow! 

       It all began in the first of the three classes, when someone mentioned that, like a character in the story, they had seen someone faint.  It was  during a choir concert in a nursing home.  IMMEDIATELY, hands flew up in the air.

“Oh yeah, “several kids said.  “I was there, too!”  Soon, details began to flush out and escalate the tale.  The story grew from it being just someone fainting, to other students seeing it and fainting as well, still others got nauseous and threw up, and the whole time the choral director told them just to keep singing!!  In each of the three classes more details emerged and grew – and I actually got to meet the young man who was the first to faint, who, of course doesn’t remember anything!!  The classroom teacher was stunned she had never heard anything about this before, and said, “And you all tell me you have nothing to write about!!”

           Besides all of us laughing A LOT about what we called “The Nursing Home Incident”, it was the classroom teacher who said, “Remember what JP (my nickname) was telling us about how folktales change and grow over time – this is IT!!!!”  I had to agree.  No amount of explaining, reading, or dissecting could have made the journey of a folktale over time, more tangible and relatable than what the kids had done in real time that day.  And, it all began with a really simple question!!!!