Story in Teaching

          Today another teacher read for us. We're in another room and another voice carried us into the story. Ms. A. read from I was a Rat. She read with expression and with a strong clear voice. When we went back to our room I asked Mila, "So, what do you think about Roger's being stuck in the circus now?!" Mila is an expressive and usually strongly engaged reader, writer and listener.
"I dunno. Well, actually I didn't hear it so good. Missus A. doesn't read it right."
"What do you mean?"
"I, well... I dunno. It's just... uh... I couldn't hear."
I feel puzzled. Mila clearly was quietly seated for the whole twenty minutes. And Ms. A.'s volume and diction were stronger than Linda's.
(Personal journal notes, November 2002)
          A story is part of a social oral interaction. It is grown in oral tradition even when it is held under book covers. In schools, framed by literary traditions, a novel or storybook is presented as the work of an author, the product of one mind. A book is an object in hand, free of the noisy, often messy social life that grew it. Two works redirect attention to stories in print as part of a "folk" conversation outside storybooks. In the first, Bakhtin (1981) identifies stories as part of oral folk-telling, a social interaction. In his essay outlining the history of the novel, he considers storytelling inside novel writing. He concludes,
the familiar strata of folk language that played such an enormous role in the formulation of novelistic discourse and that, in altered form, entered into the composition of the novel as a genre...the novelistic word arose and developed not as a the result of a narrowly literary struggle among tendencies, styles, abstract world views - -but rather in a complex and centuries-long struggle of cultures and languages. It is connected with the major shifts and crises in the fates of various European languages and the speech life of peoples (Bakhtin 1981: 83).
          In the second work, Foucault (1977:113-138) deconstructs authors as origins of writing works. He, like Bakhtin, describes a writer as one who layers and voices the myriad other storytellers in the writer's world. Thus, stories are less creations than collations, a gathering of the group's voices in one speaker. A storybook read aloud is the small frozen tip of a great berg of people, places and happenings.
Even as a story is privately engaged with, its meanings are made in the participant's conversations and situations of social interaction. A story is constructed and reconstructed in fluid collaborative work. A story is dynamic, bounded by its tellers and listeners, changing with every telling. The construction, meaning and form of a story is inextricable to the situation in which it is told, at every instance.(9) That organic aspect of a story is quickly understood if we think of how the outer life of the listener is made of every aspect of shared life (Cohen, 1989); their physical landscape and history (Basso 1996); and the group's social expectations and references (Cruikshank, 1998; Kermode, 1967). Stories in the works I have mentioned are social, interpersonal events in which lives are remembered, puzzled over, and used for mutual benefit (Coles, 1989; Cruikshank, 1990). In those stories and in the life of the classroom, it becomes clear that even the smallest passage of time between storytellings, in listeners' lives, and changes of circumstance change the story engagement. Changes of voice, place or participant grouping changes the slants of meaning offered by the story.
When Ms. A. takes up the voice of Roger or Bob from the children's usual teacher, Linda, something changes in the finely developed nuances of meaning, character, and connections made inside the story. The story on a page is a very small aspect of its meaning and form. A focus on text, as contained on pages, encourages an idea about a story as bounded by covers and a static object of study.(10) A story is a subject or topic, rather than object of study. In practice and at its root, stories are part of bodied conversations.
Again we see that the page does not hold a story engagement. It is deeply informed by oral and social interactions and the listener's experience of that present circumstance. Even sprung from the page, as in storybook reading aloud, a story is dynamic, relative to circumstance and moderated by its medium. Again, this aspect of a story conflicts with print literacy text-attentive postures for story engagement.
           I explored storybook reading aloud through a focus on the aspects of story listening and telling. This limited description demonstrates that a story engagement is significantly distinctive from other communications. Storybook reading aloud initiates a specific set of language abilities, a knowledge body and possibilities for application. It depends on imagination, facility with metaphor, social life, reflective abilities and the listener's situation. It is a way of thinking, speaking and interacting distinguishable from other interactions and language engagements (Bruner, 1990; Egan, 1997; Iser, 1993; Ricoeur, 1992). Bruner (1990) describes the difference in this way:
           There appear to be two broad ways in which human beings organize and manage their knowledge of the world, indeed structure even their immediate experience: one seems more specialized for treating of physical "things," the other for treating of people and their plights. These are conventionally known as logical-scientific thinking and narrative thinking (Bruner 1996: 39; italics his).
          He calls stories a way of "thinking." In Frye's discussion (1963) they are "languages" and in Egan's discussion (1997) they are "understandings." Whether there are two, three, four or more "ways," the language of a story is separated in each case, particular to itself. It is a "way" of thinking or talking that differs in organizing structures, uses and qualities of experience. It is understood by its own semantic and syntactic rules as well as the qualities of engagement with itself. A story has a particular system of meaning making. It is nearly immediately distinguishable within other kinds of communications like conversation or instructions or explanation.