Magical Storytelling: The Teacher as Storyteller
Think of your grandma. The stories she told you about her rather curious life so different from yours. She spun her stories, and they all came to life like verbal puppets whose invisible strings she pulled with her words.
You were worlds and ages apart. Of course, you were. It was like being in two different universes, connected by a bridge of memories and stories. How can you not be so different from her? At least two generations separate you. That difference in time would amount to about fifty years.
Think of the stories of those five decades. The events in Grandma's life that passed without you. Her youthful days were perhaps carefree, her adulthood maybe a bit more troubled. Her marriage, motherhood. And then, grandmotherhood. During those fifty years, she may have lived through a war. Or foreign occupation. Or famine. Or poverty. Or distress.
But perhaps not. She may have lived through plenty and prosperity. Through privilege. Through purity and innocence. Hers could have been a pristine existence.
She may have sported silken black hair and porcelain skin. Doleful eyes that melted your grandfather whom she would marry and co-create a lineage that would include you.
She told stories during her idle afternoon hours as she taught you to play mahjong. She warned you of those boys with not-so-good intent, perhaps only thinking of their carnal desires, whereas she worried about your honor. Unsullied and virginal you should remain, she declared, her tiny fist pounded gently on the mahjong table.
She connected her past to your present. She saw continuity through her granddaughter. She saw her life uninterrupted even as she knew, through all her accumulated wisdom of some seventy years, that hers would end sooner than yours.
Through stories, we are transported to a different time and place, an utterly mysterious world unlocked by the power of someone's words. When told beautifully, they cause us to ponder and reflect and sometimes provoke us to weep by the sheer eloquence and elegance of how the story is told. Your grandmother and mine, their stories and ours would choke us with our tears and our laughter.
We all converse not just because we love to hear grandma's tales. But because conversation is what humans do. Language is our gift. Without it, we would all just be a grunting species, our lives a brutish, nasty, short, Hobbesian existence.
How did we live through that God-awful pandemic? We're still remembering and recounting three years after we've kicked and screamed as we were pushed back into our enclaves. We Zoomed, Webexed, JitsiMet, GoogleMet, Skyped, MicrosoftTeamed. No virus was going to shut us up. Our stories travelled across the globe when we couldn’t. Covid-storytelling has become ritualized.
We tell stories to make sense of the world's complexities and brutalities. Those bitter times and places confound our understanding. Journalists do that for a living, taking us to places many would otherwise not see or hear about. Without journalists on the ground in Ukraine, how could we even fathom the insanity of this ongoing war?
I've made sense of global conflict through my husband's work. Still a journalist and now an academic too, he recounts to me, frequently, the war zones he had covered, the stories that haunt him still: Kosovo, Bosnia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, Western Sahara, and Haiti. His stories opened up new frontiers in my thinking. His field experiences were, in equal parts, hair-raising and blood-curdling. Yet, I understand why he persists as a writer and a storyteller. If he did not write or the stories stopped, so would his reason for living.
In my long experience as an educator, stories are the spine of my teaching and research. Through them, I derive lessons to impart to my students. Or to open a wider world of analysis and interpretation. Or to stake a position. Or advocate for action. Or give voice to others who can't be in my teaching space. By giving them a voice, I give them life.
My favorite stories are those of Asia, where I've lived and worked for over half my life. I relished the stories of protests and protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo during the Arab Spring. The stories of Philippine protestors at the EDSA shrine during the people power revolution in the Philippines some twenty-five years earlier resonated with our Egyptian counterparts. Comparative research on protests in Myanmar and Eastern Europe inspired me to write about the similarities of protesters everywhere in the world at any given time. Ours was protest kinship. Story-telling infused a sense of purpose and personal efficacy, a power to create and redirect history, closing a global divide of time and space, a unity forged among strangers-turned-friends, comrades, and allies.
William Gamson, a scholar of social movements and my thesis adviser in graduate school, argued that protest storytelling is a "counter critique that focuses on the shortcomings of a discourse that privileges disembodied, abstract, emotionally detached argumentation as the normative standard for discussion of public issues." We venture into the streets armed with our stories of anger and frustration, but also of hope and the light ahead. Our ideas are stories of the future. Always a better brighter one. And so we forge ahead.
Other Asian stories are about our struggles for progress. In sociology and political economy, we call it modernization --- that overarching, overreaching, overbearing process of transforming agrarian societies into industrial (hence modern) ones. This comprehensive process would irreversibly alter, nay, overhaul, the economy and the political body. And with it, the values, beliefs, and ideational systems, that which social scientists collectively lump into the term “culture.”
Becoming modern remains a compelling story. It includes a toolbox of measurements. Quantitative measures like Gross Domestic Product and Gross National Income revealed the stories of prosperity or lack thereof. Adult illiteracy rates, life spans, maternal and infant mortality rates dramatized stories of poverty and inequality.
I taught my students how numbers are not just cold facts. Instead, they are storylines about the quality of human life, some better than others, some becoming worse despite technological progress, the generosity of donors, and the best intentions of policy-makers. Despite its promise of redemption from the forces of backwardness and ignorance, modernity put us in a Weberian iron cage. The disillusionment with modernity, lamented Marshall Berman in 1982, was "All that is Solid Melts into Air." A story that could very well have been a prophecy.
I converse with my students to connect ideas about modernity with their subjective experiences that are direct, immediate, and real. So that they may gain insight, judgment, and critical thinking. So that they may find their hunger. So that they might be outraged. So that these stories urge them to go out and change the world. The education specialist and scholar Sophie Haroutounian-Gordon of Northwestern University calls this teaching method "interpretive discussion."
Grandma's storytelling mahjong sessions and interpretive discussions in the classroom were a long leap in time. But our idle afternoons were threaded together over years of story-telling and remembering. Plus, my abiding faith in the wisdom of my elders, our traditions, and our diverse cultures and languages shape the multitude of forms and genres of our stories.
To all of you who teach:
May my teaching drop as the rain,
my speech distill as the dew,
like gentle rain upon the tender grass,
and like showers upon the herb.
The Book of Deuteronomy 32:2