Learn how to increase students' skills as writers and storytellers with an innovative, inclusive, and empowering framework for teaching writing that centers student voice.
Chapter 2. Why All Forms of Storytelling Matter
Chapter 3. New and Old Structures of Writing
Introduction: "Tell Us What the World Has Been to You"Mara was 10 years old when we first met. She showed us the picture of her mother she carried in the pocket inside her skirt. Each day, when she woke up, she carefully tucked that photo safe and close back inside her skirt and, on the way to school, would tell herself the few stories she remembered about her mother and herself, "to keep myself company," she told us. Mara's mother had died a few years before. The nurse in the hospice center had taken this picture for Mara so she could keep a memory of her mom. We saw her frail face in the tiny square Mara held so carefully in the palm of her hand. Her eyes shone through her gaunt features. HIV had taken its catastrophic toll on her, but in that photo, it was as if Mara's mother knew that this moment would be the permanence she would leave, her legacy. Her joy and her sorrow both radiated and reverberated there. Mara's story is contained in the photo she cherishes, but it's also contained in all the ways that Mara shared the stories: the games she played with her mother, the food they cooked together, and the way they held each other's hands on the way home from school and work. Children hold fast to artifacts—both in their hearts and what they tangibly carry with them. These are the emblems of their storytelling lives. We can teach our students to hold tightly to the power of story to sustain them and know we will always have it to fall back on when these feelings rush back long after our wounds have healed. Stories, lived and imagined, do matter. We must treat them with urgency and importance because they fuel our lives. We can ask, "What do you want your stories to do for you and those around you?" We can ask, "When you are lonely, what story is nearest to your heart?" We can get used to conversations like this, that don't skip too quickly to the window dressing of stories but, rather, get to the essence of how stories make us human. There is no better motivator to get our students writing than this one. With this book, we share the power of story in writing instruction to develop world-changing students, writers who learn the power of writing by seizing the power of story, using this power to hone their skills and apply those skills across their whole lives. The power of story will help them become self-reflective, empathetic, and courageous learners in their classrooms and in the world. Toni Morrison wrote, "Tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and the light." The darkness and the light are the lows and highs of the everyday. Story is not judged by one or the other, by its prettiness or grittiness. We are human more than we are good or bad or perfect or imperfect. This duality complicates the notion of the light. It helps us know as writers and storytellers that the light shines with shadows and that these shadows are another part of the light. As educators who care about our students, we can share with them the complexity of the human condition and how it is found at the intersection of both the light and dark. We can teach them how to use that realness, that authenticity, to become courageous writers and learners. This human condition—the beautiful, the challenging, the tragic, the miraculous, the complexities of how they live their lives, and how their families live their lives—is valuable and valued. We have seen in the hardest of times how the power of story can connect us, in spite of loneliness and separation, across time and space, from virtual universe to virtual universe, even when we are most isolated from one another. The power of story can also hold us to our most precious sense of self, the understanding we have that we are not alone. By reading about others' lives, and writing about our own, we can help our students learn about who they are and who they can grow to be, flourishing with narrative as a tool for transformation. We can help students learn that the everydayness of their lives is so powerful and will help them become lifelong writers, change themselves, and change the world. In children's stories, we should see the power of their neighborhoods, cultures, languages, and families as both courageous and ordinary. Toni Morrison, in her narrative storytelling, shines light on times and places that are grievous. Her writing shows the courageous and aching meaning of how people live their lives in a mode of storytelling that "comforts the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." In this book, we will discuss ways to teach writing that shows our students the great power stories hold. In order to build world-changing writers and storytellers, let's
When we celebrate the value of human potential, teaching writing becomes teaching story. By centering story, we are putting back into prominence the number one best way to get all kids writing and writing well. * * * We have been working and thinking together about the power of story, in a confluence of research and practice, for 15 years. Our work together began with the creation of LitWorld, a global nonprofit organization we built to ensure that young people would have inclusive spaces to tell, write, and read stories that reflect the worlds they come from, the worlds they are fighting for, and the new worlds they want to create. We have created ways for children and teens of all ages to tell, draw, and write their stories when they had little else to comfort them. We saw them gain power as storytellers and then as writers. In Ernest's work as associate professor of humanities and dean of equity at Notre Dame University, he is extending the research that shows the long-lasting power of stories in young people's literacy lives. Pam delivers her work through programs, such as LitCamp and LitLeague, that center stories, whether they are shared by reading aloud, sharing texts and deconstructing them together with students, or inviting students to create, craft, and mold their own personal stories to make meaning in the world. We have found that when children and adolescents see themselves not just as receivers of stories but as active participants and lead actors in communities and cultures that center their stories, their writing becomes powerful. There are new ways of braving story: authentic voice, resistance, freedom, transcendence. Canonized story structures contain unconscious and conscious biases against marginalized groups, and we can read these stories with a critical eye so that when students tell their own stories, they know they are putting their voices into a long yet imperfect tradition of storytelling. Our students come to know that they can share their stories in a multitude of ways that have an impact on the community around them. We read the past to write the future. We must work to make kids' voices louder, bolder, and stronger while they are in our classrooms so they are equipped to use them to change the world. Together we can flip the notion of story back to our students: their own voices will empower them as writers. For this reason, we have to teach writing differently now. We must lead with the power of stories. In this book, we will share principles and strategies to help students use their own stories, the stories they carry with them, to become lifelong writers. This is a different type of pedagogy that many in the education sphere are not used to, and it can be a significant adjustment to the English classroom curriculum. We advocate for this approach because we have seen the power that stories hold for our students. We have seen how teaching story can dissolve writing anxieties and resistance. We have watched students who previously didn't see themselves as writers fly through notebook after notebook, filling every corner with their thoughts. We have seen kids who lamented they didn't have anything to say grasp onto this story framework and learn to write masterfully. Remember: writing is a technology, a technique. But even the most proficient writers can't use their skills if they don't have a story to tell. If there's no story there, then the techniques do not matter. When we unlock the stories our students want to share, they become more interested in learning the techniques to share them. How do we generate writing ideas? How do we invoke a real audience? How do we use punctuation to emphasize themes? How do we show this character's flaws? How do we help students find their voice? All of these questions make much more sense in the context of a story. When our students know they have a story to tell, they have the intrinsic motivation to want to tell that story in the most effective way possible. If you found a time machine and went to a civilization in some different era, when you got back to our contemporary society, you'd have an award-winning story. It wouldn't matter if you had great diction or killer command of the Oxford comma; your unique story would hold all the power to make you an incredible writer. Once you have the power of story, you naturally start to explore what tools help you share this experience with the world in a way that authentically and purposefully depicts what happened on your journey. A vast vocabulary or skill with grammar does not, alone, make great writers. Learning the ways vocabulary and grammar can aid you in telling a powerful story is how students can become world-changing writers. Stories are empowering. Story itself is the engine of all great writing, no matter the genre, from narrative to nonfiction articles and poetry, from songs to the way we write social media. When people shape their narratives to an empowered perspective, they are happier and more confident. Stories are powerful because they build self-confidence and courage, build community when we tell who we are and what our core values are, and raise and amplify all voices to help people understand one another. Stories are good company. When we lose ourselves in the stories we read, watch on television or the internet, or play in a video game, the best thing that can happen to us is that we fall through the words or images into the power of the story itself. We lose track of time. We laugh out loud or even cry. Whatever it is that happens to us, stories transport us. In times of trouble or boredom, they uplift us and carry us out of time. Stories improve writing skills. As educators, we do not tend to connect what we mean by "good" writing with storytelling itself. We instead connect "good" writing to grammar and correctness, and when we miss this important step about the power of story, we miss the entire reason for writing and the greatest impetus to practice writing skills: because we want to make sense of the world and of ourselves. Because of this, our students often do not know why they are writing. They see it as a chore, as something they must do to please their teacher. All the skills of writing—the grammar, the polish, the vocabulary, the structures—come from practice. And we practice doing something when we love to do it and when we feel there is a pressing need for it. Tapping into story allows for the practice of writing to come naturally. In this book, we will lean into story as the heartbeat at the center of all great writing. Without it, writing is automatic and cold. Every genre, whether memoir, fiction, essay, nonfiction, or poetry, is grounded by the voice and heart of the writer; it's what makes writing come alive. If we center story as a priority for what we ask our students to do as they build their writing muscles, they will come to see craft techniques as meaningful and grammar and vocabulary as integrally important to their learning and growth. Their practice becomes encircled with meaning and purpose because they want their audience to hear them, what matters to them, and what connects them to one another. Stories build inclusive communities. Remember that many students may be part of a particular group, community, or family who hasn't previously had the platform or the leverage to be able to tell real authentic stories about themselves, particularly in a school setting. If we can make that happen, we can shift these students' perceptions in major ways, helping them see themselves as more empowered in the world. Language itself is a large part of a student's identity and culture, and a storytelling community should center diverse languages and encourage students to write and tell stories in their home language. Learning the sound of diverse languages and seeing them written and featured in the room is good for all students. Story is a wellness practice and an affirmation practice of someone's humanity. Being able to hear enlightening and positive stories about yourself involving people who you identify with is transformational. It creates a more equitable plane, a more polyvocal plane, where more people have the ability to narrate their own existence. We can begin to tell stories in dominant modalities that can help change larger public perceptions. It contributes to intercultural understanding. It can help humanize the faces of those we don't know. It helps subcultures or nondominant cultures resist oppressive structures. With story, we can share in a mutual humanity and soothe one another's souls. Teaching writing in this context is far more than how we learn grammar or vocabulary, although these things matter too. It is also about how our students can use writing as a wellness practice for the rest of their lives, a habit and a benefit to their entire emotional well-being. * * * In Chapter 1, we will share essential qualities of an environment of belonging to help every student see themselves as a powerful writer. The work we do as storytellers starts at the story of ourselves, but it is connected to our deepest sense of community. The work of storytelling moves us through the world, to becoming world changers if we understand that this practice is powerful and it's ours. In Chapter 2, we will share how the forms of oral and visual storytelling are crucially important to the development of strong writing skills. We can honor the ancestors, ours and others', who have made story possible in this world and learn from them: from Indigenous communities that have passed down oral histories for centuries to diverse uses of language and conversation as tools and traditions to emulate. In Chapter 3, we will examine new and old structures of writing that can help guide our students through the use of picture books, graphic novels, and art, how story is everywhere and accessible to all, and what structure can teach us about effective storytelling. In Chapter 4, we will see how mentor authors can guide our students to learn powerful writing techniques, helping all students craft powerful stories and narratives with the thoughts, ideas, and techniques of those superb in their craft. In Chapter 5, we will investigate assessment and conferring to help improve student writing, including how we can identify strength in story and writing that is inclusive and structured, so that assessment is more than grammar on a page but values the life-changing work of story. In Chapter 6, we will provide ways for students to get activated with their own voices as young writers, from media creations to writing that will influence our students' power in the classroom and beyond, to become world changers themselves. And in our Conclusion, we will share final thoughts and a call to action for your own practice, a reminder that you and your stories are also at the heart of what your students will remember and recall about you for the rest of their lives. Writing instruction does not have to be held hostage in a literacy block; it should find its way into science and math, social studies, the arts, and physical education, from morning to evening. Story is the thread that runs through all of learning and life. We can increase writing and communication skills as scientists, historians, technologists, mathematicians, and more by centering stories. Each and every one of the prompts you will find in this book can be used at all ages and across all disciplines to boost your students' understanding of the power of story to amplify their writing skills. So, don't limit them to the 90-minute period you are focused on literacy. Literacy and writing should track everywhere. This model starts with the question in every subject area: "How can every writer and learner feel a sense of belonging here to take a risk and share in one's most authentic voice?" and then leaps to "How as courageous individuals do we use our own writing to make the world the place we dream of?" Storytelling isn't just awakening to the world; it helps us make sense of ourselves in the world, to find our voice and understand how we fill ourselves in the gap of what's missing in this world. Writing in our classrooms must be more than our students making simple marks. Teaching writing by centering the stories of our students' lives is to step into the worlds they author. Centering their story is to make sure our students will radically love themselves so they can radically love the world. Stories are our way to get there. Printed by for personal use only |
Mara was 10 years old when we first met. She showed us the picture of her mother she carried in the pocket inside her skirt. Each day, when she woke up, she carefully tucked that photo safe and close back inside her skirt and, on the way to school, would tell herself the few stories she remembered about her mother and herself, "to keep myself company," she told us. Mara's mother had died a few years before. The nurse in the hospice center had taken this picture for Mara so she could keep a memory of her mom. We saw her frail face in the tiny square Mara held so carefully in the palm of her hand. Her eyes shone through her gaunt features. HIV had taken its catastrophic toll on her, but in that photo, it was as if Mara's mother knew that this moment would be the permanence she would leave, her legacy. Her joy and her sorrow both radiated and reverberated there.
Mara's story is contained in the photo she cherishes, but it's also contained in all the ways that Mara shared the stories: the games she played with her mother, the food they cooked together, and the way they held each other's hands on the way home from school and work.
Children hold fast to artifacts—both in their hearts and what they tangibly carry with them. These are the emblems of their storytelling lives.
We can teach our students to hold tightly to the power of story to sustain them and know we will always have it to fall back on when these feelings rush back long after our wounds have healed. Stories, lived and imagined, do matter. We must treat them with urgency and importance because they fuel our lives. We can ask, "What do you want your stories to do for you and those around you?" We can ask, "When you are lonely, what story is nearest to your heart?" We can get used to conversations like this, that don't skip too quickly to the window dressing of stories but, rather, get to the essence of how stories make us human. There is no better motivator to get our students writing than this one.
With this book, we share the power of story in writing instruction to develop world-changing students, writers who learn the power of writing by seizing the power of story, using this power to hone their skills and apply those skills across their whole lives. The power of story will help them become self-reflective, empathetic, and courageous learners in their classrooms and in the world.
Toni Morrison wrote, "Tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and the light."
The darkness and the light are the lows and highs of the everyday. Story is not judged by one or the other, by its prettiness or grittiness. We are human more than we are good or bad or perfect or imperfect. This duality complicates the notion of the light. It helps us know as writers and storytellers that the light shines with shadows and that these shadows are another part of the light. As educators who care about our students, we can share with them the complexity of the human condition and how it is found at the intersection of both the light and dark. We can teach them how to use that realness, that authenticity, to become courageous writers and learners. This human condition—the beautiful, the challenging, the tragic, the miraculous, the complexities of how they live their lives, and how their families live their lives—is valuable and valued.
We have seen in the hardest of times how the power of story can connect us, in spite of loneliness and separation, across time and space, from virtual universe to virtual universe, even when we are most isolated from one another. The power of story can also hold us to our most precious sense of self, the understanding we have that we are not alone. By reading about others' lives, and writing about our own, we can help our students learn about who they are and who they can grow to be, flourishing with narrative as a tool for transformation.
We can help students learn that the everydayness of their lives is so powerful and will help them become lifelong writers, change themselves, and change the world. In children's stories, we should see the power of their neighborhoods, cultures, languages, and families as both courageous and ordinary. Toni Morrison, in her narrative storytelling, shines light on times and places that are grievous. Her writing shows the courageous and aching meaning of how people live their lives in a mode of storytelling that "comforts the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."
In this book, we will discuss ways to teach writing that shows our students the great power stories hold. In order to build world-changing writers and storytellers, let's
Create an environment of belonging.
Value oral storytelling and visual storytelling.
Teach story structure and value counter-structure.
Assess student writers in specific ways.
Uphold a variety of role models and exemplars.
Value student voice.
When we celebrate the value of human potential, teaching writing becomes teaching story. By centering story, we are putting back into prominence the number one best way to get all kids writing and writing well.
* * *
We have been working and thinking together about the power of story, in a confluence of research and practice, for 15 years. Our work together began with the creation of LitWorld, a global nonprofit organization we built to ensure that young people would have inclusive spaces to tell, write, and read stories that reflect the worlds they come from, the worlds they are fighting for, and the new worlds they want to create. We have created ways for children and teens of all ages to tell, draw, and write their stories when they had little else to comfort them. We saw them gain power as storytellers and then as writers. In Ernest's work as associate professor of humanities and dean of equity at Notre Dame University, he is extending the research that shows the long-lasting power of stories in young people's literacy lives. Pam delivers her work through programs, such as LitCamp and LitLeague, that center stories, whether they are shared by reading aloud, sharing texts and deconstructing them together with students, or inviting students to create, craft, and mold their own personal stories to make meaning in the world.
We have found that when children and adolescents see themselves not just as receivers of stories but as active participants and lead actors in communities and cultures that center their stories, their writing becomes powerful. There are new ways of braving story: authentic voice, resistance, freedom, transcendence. Canonized story structures contain unconscious and conscious biases against marginalized groups, and we can read these stories with a critical eye so that when students tell their own stories, they know they are putting their voices into a long yet imperfect tradition of storytelling. Our students come to know that they can share their stories in a multitude of ways that have an impact on the community around them. We read the past to write the future. We must work to make kids' voices louder, bolder, and stronger while they are in our classrooms so they are equipped to use them to change the world.
Together we can flip the notion of story back to our students: their own voices will empower them as writers. For this reason, we have to teach writing differently now. We must lead with the power of stories.
In this book, we will share principles and strategies to help students use their own stories, the stories they carry with them, to become lifelong writers. This is a different type of pedagogy that many in the education sphere are not used to, and it can be a significant adjustment to the English classroom curriculum. We advocate for this approach because we have seen the power that stories hold for our students. We have seen how teaching story can dissolve writing anxieties and resistance. We have watched students who previously didn't see themselves as writers fly through notebook after notebook, filling every corner with their thoughts. We have seen kids who lamented they didn't have anything to say grasp onto this story framework and learn to write masterfully.
Remember: writing is a technology, a technique. But even the most proficient writers can't use their skills if they don't have a story to tell. If there's no story there, then the techniques do not matter. When we unlock the stories our students want to share, they become more interested in learning the techniques to share them.
How do we generate writing ideas? How do we invoke a real audience? How do we use punctuation to emphasize themes? How do we show this character's flaws? How do we help students find their voice? All of these questions make much more sense in the context of a story. When our students know they have a story to tell, they have the intrinsic motivation to want to tell that story in the most effective way possible.
If you found a time machine and went to a civilization in some different era, when you got back to our contemporary society, you'd have an award-winning story. It wouldn't matter if you had great diction or killer command of the Oxford comma; your unique story would hold all the power to make you an incredible writer. Once you have the power of story, you naturally start to explore what tools help you share this experience with the world in a way that authentically and purposefully depicts what happened on your journey. A vast vocabulary or skill with grammar does not, alone, make great writers. Learning the ways vocabulary and grammar can aid you in telling a powerful story is how students can become world-changing writers.
Stories are empowering. Story itself is the engine of all great writing, no matter the genre, from narrative to nonfiction articles and poetry, from songs to the way we write social media. When people shape their narratives to an empowered perspective, they are happier and more confident. Stories are powerful because they build self-confidence and courage, build community when we tell who we are and what our core values are, and raise and amplify all voices to help people understand one another.
Stories are good company. When we lose ourselves in the stories we read, watch on television or the internet, or play in a video game, the best thing that can happen to us is that we fall through the words or images into the power of the story itself. We lose track of time. We laugh out loud or even cry. Whatever it is that happens to us, stories transport us. In times of trouble or boredom, they uplift us and carry us out of time.
Stories improve writing skills. As educators, we do not tend to connect what we mean by "good" writing with storytelling itself. We instead connect "good" writing to grammar and correctness, and when we miss this important step about the power of story, we miss the entire reason for writing and the greatest impetus to practice writing skills: because we want to make sense of the world and of ourselves. Because of this, our students often do not know why they are writing. They see it as a chore, as something they must do to please their teacher. All the skills of writing—the grammar, the polish, the vocabulary, the structures—come from practice. And we practice doing something when we love to do it and when we feel there is a pressing need for it. Tapping into story allows for the practice of writing to come naturally. In this book, we will lean into story as the heartbeat at the center of all great writing. Without it, writing is automatic and cold. Every genre, whether memoir, fiction, essay, nonfiction, or poetry, is grounded by the voice and heart of the writer; it's what makes writing come alive. If we center story as a priority for what we ask our students to do as they build their writing muscles, they will come to see craft techniques as meaningful and grammar and vocabulary as integrally important to their learning and growth. Their practice becomes encircled with meaning and purpose because they want their audience to hear them, what matters to them, and what connects them to one another.
Stories build inclusive communities. Remember that many students may be part of a particular group, community, or family who hasn't previously had the platform or the leverage to be able to tell real authentic stories about themselves, particularly in a school setting. If we can make that happen, we can shift these students' perceptions in major ways, helping them see themselves as more empowered in the world. Language itself is a large part of a student's identity and culture, and a storytelling community should center diverse languages and encourage students to write and tell stories in their home language. Learning the sound of diverse languages and seeing them written and featured in the room is good for all students.
Story is a wellness practice and an affirmation practice of someone's humanity. Being able to hear enlightening and positive stories about yourself involving people who you identify with is transformational. It creates a more equitable plane, a more polyvocal plane, where more people have the ability to narrate their own existence. We can begin to tell stories in dominant modalities that can help change larger public perceptions. It contributes to intercultural understanding. It can help humanize the faces of those we don't know. It helps subcultures or nondominant cultures resist oppressive structures. With story, we can share in a mutual humanity and soothe one another's souls. Teaching writing in this context is far more than how we learn grammar or vocabulary, although these things matter too. It is also about how our students can use writing as a wellness practice for the rest of their lives, a habit and a benefit to their entire emotional well-being.
* * *
In Chapter 1, we will share essential qualities of an environment of belonging to help every student see themselves as a powerful writer. The work we do as storytellers starts at the story of ourselves, but it is connected to our deepest sense of community. The work of storytelling moves us through the world, to becoming world changers if we understand that this practice is powerful and it's ours.
In Chapter 2, we will share how the forms of oral and visual storytelling are crucially important to the development of strong writing skills. We can honor the ancestors, ours and others', who have made story possible in this world and learn from them: from Indigenous communities that have passed down oral histories for centuries to diverse uses of language and conversation as tools and traditions to emulate.
In Chapter 3, we will examine new and old structures of writing that can help guide our students through the use of picture books, graphic novels, and art, how story is everywhere and accessible to all, and what structure can teach us about effective storytelling.
In Chapter 4, we will see how mentor authors can guide our students to learn powerful writing techniques, helping all students craft powerful stories and narratives with the thoughts, ideas, and techniques of those superb in their craft.
In Chapter 5, we will investigate assessment and conferring to help improve student writing, including how we can identify strength in story and writing that is inclusive and structured, so that assessment is more than grammar on a page but values the life-changing work of story.
In Chapter 6, we will provide ways for students to get activated with their own voices as young writers, from media creations to writing that will influence our students' power in the classroom and beyond, to become world changers themselves.
And in our Conclusion, we will share final thoughts and a call to action for your own practice, a reminder that you and your stories are also at the heart of what your students will remember and recall about you for the rest of their lives.
Writing instruction does not have to be held hostage in a literacy block; it should find its way into science and math, social studies, the arts, and physical education, from morning to evening. Story is the thread that runs through all of learning and life. We can increase writing and communication skills as scientists, historians, technologists, mathematicians, and more by centering stories. Each and every one of the prompts you will find in this book can be used at all ages and across all disciplines to boost your students' understanding of the power of story to amplify their writing skills. So, don't limit them to the 90-minute period you are focused on literacy. Literacy and writing should track everywhere.
This model starts with the question in every subject area: "How can every writer and learner feel a sense of belonging here to take a risk and share in one's most authentic voice?" and then leaps to "How as courageous individuals do we use our own writing to make the world the place we dream of?"
Storytelling isn't just awakening to the world; it helps us make sense of ourselves in the world, to find our voice and understand how we fill ourselves in the gap of what's missing in this world. Writing in our classrooms must be more than our students making simple marks. Teaching writing by centering the stories of our students' lives is to step into the worlds they author. Centering their story is to make sure our students will radically love themselves so they can radically love the world. Stories are our way to get there.
