Notes from the Field

by Luray Gross

“I like the troll carrying her head on her arm!”

“Me too:  Butterball!”

“I like Elephant and Rabbit!”

"I like the troll carrying her head on her arm!"

My storytelling colleague Maria and I are back for another evening visit with children in transitional housing at Home Front, an amazing non-profit near Trenton, NJ.  The children’s exclamations are sweet music, for both stories the children mentioned are among those we told during our last visit, a challenging one that sent us both home exhausted. 

The children’s enthusiasm reminds me again that even when a workshop or classroom session is marked by disruption and detours, something valuable – sometimes something wonderful – is usually happening.

The difficulties that night had been due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control.  Our regular room was unavailable, and the only space left was a small nursery lined with shelves of toys.  Twenty children and several adults squeezed in at the appointed time. Within seconds, kids were eagerly grabbing things from the shelves, and we were hastily stowing others as far out of reach as possible. 

But tonight we are back in a spacious room with only a circle of chairs, a clearing that will be filled with story, with listening, with questions and comments and with the hilarity of games that engage us all in moving and imagining and laughing.

Tonight our theme is Clothing, with apparel either central or at least peripheral to the action in each story we tell.  We begin with a chanted tale from England in which a lonely old woman sits spinning by her fire.  Suddenly a mysterious visitor arrives, but it arrives part by part, beginning with two big feet that set themselves down by the fire.  Undeterred throughout, the woman sits and spins.  Finally she beats it out the door, then sits to spin once more, still alone, but at least not devoured by this apparition. 

   Although this story is a stretch for our theme, we’ve begun here confident that the rhythms, and opportunities to clap and tap them out, will engage the group.  Along with a sung refrain, they surely do keep us all together.  Most delightful are the grownups in the room wholeheartedly joining in. 

A few weeks later, I’m working at a small school where I’ve been doing poetry residencies with 3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th graders for many years.  Each day I have time to offer storytelling  - simply for delight  - to one group of first or second graders.  Today I’ve come to Mrs. H’s second grade room.  The children are ready, each sitting in his or her assigned spots on the carpet.  I say hello, ask if there are any children new to the school this year and meet Ryder. 

Then a boy in the back row pipes up, “You don’t look any older than when I saw you before.”   The remark strikes me as odd, especially because last year was the first time we met.  A veteran teaching artist, I’m a bit flattered as well; at home, the mirror assures me of the passage of time.   Soon I’m launching a troll tale from Norway, the comment nearly forgotten.

Later I remember the moment, and its larger significance occurs to me:  It is not that I haven’t aged, it’s that these stories do not age. Encapsulating universal dilemmas, challenges and joys of human existence, they are timeless.  I am just lucky to still have an opportunity to share them with yet another group of listeners.

ARTIST/TEACHER COLLABORATION: TWO HEADS ARE ALWAYS BETTER THAN ONE!

by Julie Della Torre

As those of you who follow the blog know, SAI received a grant to work in a school in inner city Paterson. We have written about the project before, but I thought I’d go into a bit more detail about my work with a remarkable Kindergarten teacher, Diane Rudd. We have worked together for the past two years and this year SAI will offer follow-up support. The following will illustrate how we developed our relationship and our lesson plans.

First, we had a year of getting to know each other. Diane needed to see what a storytelling session entailed. What would happen? How were students supposed to respond? How could storytelling fit into the curriculum? I needed to get a feel for her classroom environment. How much flexibility would be allowed? How rambunctious could we be?

The following year was more intense. Diane was going to become a storyteller and incorporate storytelling into her curriculum. We spent quite a bit of time planning before we started this two-pronged project. First, she looked at her reading curriculum and assessed her class. She decided she wanted to address, setting, emotions and feelings of characters, and ‘beginning, middle, end’. These were concepts she would be working on for the entire school year. The schedule allowed us to focus on one of these aspects each week. We fell into a routine in which I would tell a story and model a lesson one day and the following day she would tell a story and present the same lesson. The story repertoire for the class grew. Diane kept a record of every story told on big sheets of paper. Drawings, maps, story language hung on chart paper all around the room.

As we went along I was modeling storytelling techniques as well, which is how I learned to tell stories. We also met during the day for mini-workshops on specific issues. She kept a journal of her process for learning stories. A big part of the process was finding appropriate stories for her class. As she searched for stories w3e had good discussions about what story might be a good one to tell as opposed to read with the illustrations. The lesson plans we developed for her class were simply exercises I do myself to learn a story. As she watched and then practiced the exercises in her journal and finally presented them to her students she was learning the story.

The lessons included much acting out, usually parts of the story told, not the whole story. After working with the story orally, dramatically and demonstrating on the board the students went back to their seats and worked on paper. This routine of listening, speaking and then writing was a key component of the storytelling experience.

The exercises we developed could be used during the rest of the year no matter what story was read or told. Some of the exercises included:

Setting- storymapping. We actually made a masking tape map on the floor and walked the story, stopping to visualize the setting. After looking at real maps the students drew maps of the story.  

Emotions/feelings of the characters: Working from photos we gave the students vocabulary for different emotions. We practiced embodying these emotions. When we acted out parts of the story we encouraged the students to physically show us how the characters felt. Students drew their favorite character.

Beginning/middle/end: after telling the story we figured out what was the beginning, middle and end and we made tableaus. These were then drawn on paper in the proper order.

Working together with another professional is always stimulating and enlightening. I’m looking forward to a year of working collaboratively with colleagues, teachers and other professional artists.

Story Work and Play

by Gerald Fierst

Gerry Fierst telling to pre-schoolers at the Zimmerli Museum

“Gerry, hi Gerry,” the chirping voices of three and four year olds fill the halls as they and I arrive at Stokes Early Childhood Learning Center. Four storytellers from Storytelling Arts have been in the school through the winter into spring, and the impact of our work rings in the corridors as the children call our names in delight.  Today is a storytelling day.  

Preschool storytelling is a holistic experience, involving body, mind and imagination.  Stories teach numbers and sequencing, vocabulary and conceptualization, history, social studies and science, but also values and awareness of the world around us. 

One of my favorite pre school stories is a Brazilian folktale of Monkeys in the Rain.  Swinging through the trees the monkeys play.  When the daily rain falls, and they get soaked, the monkeys decide to build a house, but the sun soon comes out and the monkeys never build the house that they will need tomorrow.  Lesson:  Build Your House Today.  The words are simplistic, repeated n patterns of three.

Hand Over Hand Over Hand, Its Fun!

Hand Over Hand Over Hand, Its Fun!

Hand Over Hand Over Hand, Its Fun!

Rain

Brrr, I’m Cold

Brrr, I’m Wet

Let’s Build a House.

Sun

Tomorrow, Tomorrow. Tomorrow.

Next Day Let’s Play

But the language is only one ingredient of the experience.  Hands moving above one’s head in rhythm to the chant of the words.  Fingers falling to make the rain.  Clapping palms on the lap to make the sound of the rain forest squall.  Fingers connected to make the roof of a house.  Opening arms to make the returning sun.  Joyful hands in the air to proclaim play.  The whole child is involved in unison with his/her whole community.  Words, rhythms, and images are intimately connected to the affirming experience of organized and energetic activity within the classroom.  Emotional and cognitive experience is associated with verbal skill, and play becomes a basis for learning.

A story like this provides multiple beginning lessons: about environments- in this big world where do we live and how do we live; about the science of weather;  about the geography of the earth; about biology and the diversity of life.

Storytelling in the classroom is not entertainment.  Children who are placed into a rich verbal environment learn abstract thinking and become more self directed.  Storytelling is really about process, not product.  Most stories have familiar plots, but the experiential journey of listening and responding is the spark of invention that eventually can light a whole life.  An anthropologist once told me that the moment we became human was when we could imagine as if it were real and then set off to make it happen.  Every pre schooler should have a resident storyteller, not to read a book, but to tell stories and play and dream with words.

Teaching Aeschylus in 8th Grade

One my projects this fall has been a collaboration with 8^th grade social studies teacher, Darcel Deodato. Darcel is one of the teachers who participated in the long-term teacher education program that Julie Della Torre and I wrote about last spring. We are both back at the school, but this year we are each working intensively with only two teachers.

Eighth grade students in New Jersey study Civics. They learn about forms of government and, specifically, the organization of the United States government. When Darcel and I discussed how to embed storytelling into this curriculum, we decided to focus on stories that would help students think about why people need laws and how government serves society. Over the summer, I thought about a lot of stories: stories about justice being served, stories about the miscarriage of justice, and stories about people taking justice into their own hands. In the end, I decided to begin the year by telling the students the ancient Greek story of the trial of Orestes in Athens.

As I was preparing my lessons, I spent quite a bit of time trying to craft the myth into a tellable tale. This is always an issue when you’re working with a long and complex story, but with this particular story, I began my work with the goal of making it less graphically disturbing. The story of Orestes comes near the end of the Legend of the House of Atreus, a cursed family whose generations were blighted by murder, cannibalism, and incest. The horror begins when a first ancestor, Tantalus, cooks his son and serves him to the gods. It ends, five generations later, with Orestes in the court of Athens, on trial for matricide.

Orestes was the son of Agamemnon, the king who led the armies of Greece against Troy. The story of Agamemnon and his immediate family is beyond tragic. Not only was his sister-in-law, Helen, the cause of that bloody, drawn-out war, but he, himself, felt obligated to kill his oldest daughter, as a sacrifice to Artemis, before his armies even left Greece. While he was at war, his wife, Clytemnestra (Helen’s sister), took a lover (who was Agamemnon’s cousin) and plotted revenge for her daughter’s death. Upon his return from Troy, Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon and, in turn, their son, Orestes, killed her to avenge his father. 

The murders of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra are the subject of a trilogy of plays by Aeschylus. In the last play, Orestes, haunted by his mother’s ghost and tormented by her Furies, the Erinyes, seeks the help of the goddess, Athena. When Orestes arrives in Athens, instead of passing judgment, herself, Athena asks the help of the citizens of Athens to end the cycle of blood-for-blood revenge. She creates a jury to decide the case of Erinyes vs. Orestes.

At first, I thought I would follow Aeschylus and cut the pre-Agamemnon generations out of my story, but as I worked, I realized how important the stories of the early ancestors are to one of the most significant results of Orestes’s trial: Athena’s persuasion of the Erinyes, chthonic goddess of retribution and guardians of family bonds, to remain in her city. I began to think that a listener needs to hear about the horrible crimes of Tantalus and his descendants to understand why society needs the presence of these goddesses and, while Aeschylus’s audiences would have known the family history, my audience would not. Ultimately, I decided to tell the story from the beginning. 

The unit took five class periods. The story worked in the social studies curriculum. Not only did it introduce the idea of a judicial system based on trial by a jury of peers, it was also relevant to the lives of the students who live in a city where neighborhoods are torn apart by retaliatory gang killings.  As the story unfolded, we stopped to allow time for students to discuss the moral issues involved. For example, students debated Agamemnon’s choices at Aulis. Should he kill his child so that the Greek Armada could sail to Troy? This discussion raised important questions: Is it ever justifiable to take a human life to further a cause or ideal? What about if taking one life might save others? We also talked about ‘laws’ that seem basic to our human instincts, like those against murder and incest. Students spoke passionately about these questions.

Near the end of the story, before I told the outcome of the trial,  Darcel divided the class into prosecution and defense teams who presented arguments for each side based on the story and our related discussions. During the debate, six students sat as jurors. The outcome of the 8^th grade trial differed from that of the original. The jury felt strongly that Orestes should be punished for his deed. The next day, students did a dramatic reading of the trial scene from Aeschylus’s play (We used Peter Meineck’s translation which is easy to read and lends itself to performance.) and discussed its outcome. Much of this discussion focused on Athena’s appeasement of the Erinyes and why it was important for her to persuade them to become guardians of the city.