If you look back at what I have put down already, it’s mostly prologue, not so much story. It’s been about how the city of the future will be built on the foundation laid by the people who are here now, how we all come with our Forest City dreams from other places and other people and what appear to be other realities. How what looks like the beginning is really a continuation of a story that has passed from view. How we carry on the story of the people and the places we come from, and how we have an opportunity to start over with the best of what we were given to go on. How we believe different things about what is possible here and where it might go. How privilege and opportunity look through the lens of race and cultural diversity. How death has been part of life here from the beginning. How when we die, what anyone will know about who we were will depend on who we are in the lives of children, on our fearlessness in saying what we actually think, what we actually believe - and how otherwise what anyone really knows about us when we are gone will be what we said instead of that.
It's been about my hesitance to include the names of people in my story, or any identifying information beyond what is already in the public domain, because I believe that those names and those stories do not belong to me. They are not my stories to tell. So I have been sharing my impressions. I have been sharing my thoughts and intuitions about what is happening, anonymous ideas that could belong to anybody. And today I woke up with the idea that it might be possible to share the story of my experiments with encouraging the first people to live in Forest City to tell the story from their perspective.
Stories are the way people have passed on wisdom and learning before there was written history. Stories are a record of the meaning people have made from their questions about the world and everything in it, and how that is carried forward. Mostly I am interested in their questions, what they are learning and want to learn, what they think and what the changes in their thinking look like, what songs they sing, what is the poetry that speaks to their heart. And I know that leaving a record of all that takes courage, because every good story involves a struggle or a challenge, something that has to be overcome to achieve resolution and reveal a deeper meaning.
The writing process, or what used to be the cave painting process, is far from straightforward. There is so much prologue to account for, so many impressions about the meaning of life and death. So many feelings to explore about who are we to be telling a story and what our relationship to the story is and how we feel about sharing it, about making our learning visible so that everyone can see what we struggle with.
One reason that the process of teaching and learning is mostly invisible is because it takes a while for anyone to make meaning of what they are learning and share it with others. Making learning visible means telling the story of what we think is happening, what we are wondering about and interested in, what we want to try, what we think about what someone else said about what we want to try, and what we learned from what we tried. In other words, it means explaining how our thinking has changed and is changing through our persistent efforts to develop new skills, understandings, and interests. Our lives are “learning stories” and writing them down makes it possible for others in the future to learn from what we are learning. We are not just passing the time here, and then passing away. Something real is happening.
I was fortunate to be invited by Dr. Annie White and the amazing Wendy Lee to join a Learning Stories Intensive Study Group in New Zealand last October. Our study group was invited into the homes of the Māori people, and we were honored to visit a Māori immersion school where we were welcomed and included in their traditions with a traditional welcoming ceremony, or pōwhiri. Speeches from the elders told the story of the creation of the world and its first people, the ancestors of the Māori in the stars, as it has been passed down to them through the generations. As children echoed the elders’ words with singing and dancing, we learned of the long journey to Aotearo, Land of the Long White Cloud, New Zealand. We sang our songs for them and shared the story of our native lands. We pressed our noses together in the hongi. In that way we introduced ourselves and our people to each other and became a part of their story.
We visited early childhood programs designated by the Ministry of Education as Centers of Innovation, and immersed ourselves in learning about how stories can be used as formative assessments to recognize who children are, who people are, and our responsibility to recognize the power of words in constructing learner identities. We also learned about how the educators considered teaching and learning as inseparable, and how evaluation of their teaching was woven together with their own identity as learners. We saw how they used questions as the basis for assessment of their teaching, and how they shared their learning process with each other by reflecting upon, sharing, and adding to each other’s stories.
On an island that was made in one year from the ocean floor, the idea of a creation story is fascinating to me. I am inspired by the possibility of creating a culture of kindness and inquiry in a place that didn’t exist before. I want to explore what it would be like for us to share our stories with each other. Stories that are in-process evaluations of the meaning of our time together, stories of students and teachers developing their interests, skills, and understanding. Stories about our curiosity and questions. Stories about qualities and dispositions we aspire to nurture in ourselves and others. Making the heart of our teaching and learning visible to each other, and passing all of this on to those who will come to this school and this city in the future.
Comments
Post a Comment