Literature and the Power of Storytelling

“The story is the basic unit of human understanding, and we will never understand each other and we will never understand ourselves, if we do not tell our stories every chance we get.”

James Maskalyk/Drew Dudley

"We know our literate learners and our literate learners know themselves." - Dr. Frank Serafini

There are so many excellent reasons to share our stories - ranging from expressing our ideas/emotions/understandings, to building empathy, to learning from each other's experiences, to enhancing self-esteem, to strengthening the development of language and ideas - I could fill this entire blog post with reasons to share our stories!

 Stories are at the heart of all the work we do at Eric Harvie School - we use stories to build our relationships with each other and to offer opportunity to listen well, experience language and find our common ground. We use stories to push our thinking, capture new ideas, question old ideas and describe our innovations. We use stories to make sense of things that seem senseless to us and to wonder about the things that make the most sense. We use stories to laugh and cry and celebrate and try on new personality qualities we didn't know we had - like bravery and curiosity and risk-taking. 

 As our first year as a school enters our final two month-wrap up zone, we are using our stories to amplify the learning journey we have ventured on together this year. We have shared so many wonderful stories - picture books, novels, non-fiction texts, news articles, tv clips, movies - the ones we shared AND the ones we made together, youtube videos, cards, oral stories - that we wanted to find a way to capture them all and celebrate them together with our families. We have some exciting adventures in storytelling ahead of us for sure!

Our first adventure with sharing the power of literature and storytelling begins this Tuesday, May 9th, with our Student Led Learning Walk #2. This learning walk is focused on the curricular mandate " ‘Literature is used to advance student learning across the disciplines”.  As our families join us in the school gym, there will be beautiful examples of our work - evidence that literature and stories are helping us make sense of our world and how to best function as agents of kindness, generosity of spirit and changemakers. There will be evidence of solid teaching based on the latest and most effective research; evidence of how students are learning in different ways and evidence of the tremendous growth in reading, writing and applying critical thinking to learning students have experienced this school year.  As Serafini noted - we know our literate learners and they, in turn, know themselves.

Our next adventure in storytelling has really already been launched with the introduction of Jeff Stockton to our children.  Jeff is a master storyteller himself and he is also skilled at supporting the youngest of learners to become vocal, powerful storytellers in their own right. Over the next eight weeks, students will be gathering together as well as independently to capture, render and share their stories in a wide variety of storytelling styles and genres - capturing all the adventures shared and experienced in our first year at EHS. We are excited, a little nervous and captivated by the possibilities of our risk-taking - how amazing can we really be if we take the time to shape and craft our stories with care and attention?  We think:  PRETTY AMAZING!

To finish this blog entry, I would like to quote Frank Serafini one more time:

"Because of the pressure from federal and state legislatures to raise test scores, public school classrooms may become places where children learn to read well enough to score higher on standardized tests, but may not be places where you learn to love to read, discover great authors and pieces of literature, or learn how to read in order to succeed in the “real” world.

…Reading instruction in schools should develop students’ passion to read, support their engagements with texts of all sorts, and encourage them to become lifelong readers capable of fully participating in a democratic society…."

This particular passage caught my attention because I believe it honours the enormous work of school - to educate for life, not just for test scores. Students need to know reading is a strategy for storytelling and story sharing, that reading also allows us to to understand the world and helps the world understand us, that we all have amazing stories to share and that becoming lifelong readers - story tellers - story receivers - story shapers - is the only true way for us to successfully support each other in a social world.

We have literature. We have each other. We have stories. And voices. And courage. We are all storytellers :)

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal