Book 1: Herstory in the Classroom, Moving through the Curriculum
Book 2: Herstory
Across the Curriculum
Book 3:
Counselors Corner
Story Shaping from the Heart
Where each hidden story begins
There is something universal in the way that all people want to be told stories, that we can learn to detect as even our most timid students start to tell us their stories. As we begin to understand what that is, through a new way of listening, we will be able to help each student to shape a story that is compelling and unique. The hardest thing in the world for all of us, whatever our age or level of experience, is to hear our own voice in all of its power and beauty.
So imagine for a moment, a student who's words have never been cherished being asked to speak publicly or write.
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If we accept the fact that most people who haven't been heard tend to hide their beauty and power, how then do we listen in a way that will help draw this out?
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How can we help each of our student shape a story in a way that will build a connection and make everyone around so eager to hear?
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First, and perhaps hardest, for any of us to acknowledge is the way that some students make us care much more than others. Of course this makes us feel guilty, or feel like a failure if we've been teaching writing and can hardly read what so many of our students have written. How then will we dare the student who either withholds all connection or floods us to take a deep breath and learn how to shape a story that will make someone else care?
For most of us as adults, when we are in the middle of our own story, we cannot see it as dramatic. It is as if the forces that connect past and future have been hidden from our eyes. When we begin to connect the threads through writing, and a tale emerges, we see ourselves no longer as victims of whatever has befallen us. But as active, and often heroic movers in the plots of our lives.
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It is then that the spirit of each storyteller can shine through. The darker the reality, the more important it is to help each writer touch the spirit that took them through those darkest places.
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In our next section on finding your Page One Moment, we will be inviting you to find the drama you probably experienced when you were much younger that often becomes obscured from our view. How then, do we work with the younger children and even adolescents who tend to think that everything in their own story is equally dramatic and important? Or young people who think that nothing in their story is important at all?
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The trick will be in listening for the drama, but also the beauty and particularity of how each young person shapes a story in response to the dare to help somebody else on a journey.
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How do we get young people so excited about the process that they forget they hate writing and begin to take chances, sometimes only a few words or paragraph at a time?
A New Way of Listening: The First Step
Below are two related exercises that will help you to start to use this approach in your classroom or counseling sessions. They both involve listening to your students' stories with a view as to how they are actually constructed. This is what we will mean whenever we use the word structure.
Listening Exercise One
How do shape and structure serve your empathy and attention?
For several weeks before leading your first workshop, pay attention to the way your students talk to you or one another, whether you find yourself in a classroom or a counseling session.
Pay particular attention to those moments when you find yourself privy to those intimate details that usually are hidden from view…
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There are reasons why one student’s way of storytelling will be more moving than another’s, or why a story will be one moment riveting and the next moment hollow. Yet it is important to note that within each student's way is the potential to reconstruct a moving narrative. The more that you are able to understand what causes the fluctuations in your own capacity to be moved WITHIN each overheard story, the less likely it will be that you will favor a single way of telling or a single type of content when you begin to teach writing to evoke empathy and attention.
As you listen, ask yourself
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Does the student you had picked for this exercise build their story more or less chronologically?
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Or do they pepper their story with what we will be calling invisible backstitches, giving you background as they move their story forward?
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Do they weave back and forth in time, or do they weave several stories together, so that they are telling two or three stories at once? Or do they nest one story inside another, so that each one becomes its own long saga?
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Do thoughts and ideas drive their stories? So that they start out by musing and then weave in various tales?
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Do they tease the listener by stopping at the moment of maximum suspense and moving into another sub-story, so that one needs to continue listening in order to return to the first story’s climax?
In order to become the true Stranger/Reader or Listener, who will be able to dart from one style of telling to another, it will be necessary to note patterns in what is likely to work and what is likely to get the writer into trouble across many approaches and ways.
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Track stories that are much more raw and bumpy than those you would normally like.
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Track stories that are so smooth they almost drive you crazy with their constant control.
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Track stories that are much more sentimental than those that normally attract you,
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Track stories that are so skeptical a part of you cringes just to know that the teller might one day tell a story about you.
If You Were the Puppeteer
Whatever the quality of the story, whether you love it or hate it, when you see an obstacle that seems to get in the way or when you see an opportunity you’d like to seize, we would like you to imagine that you are the puppeteer rearranging the pieces, not in one way, but in many possible combinations. You are trying to hear through the lines, not what most interests you, but what seems to be propelling the teller.
No one will ever know you are listening with the goal of rearranging, so no one will be hurt. For now you are practicing the art of making mental bookmarks.
Later on, in our section on working with actual text, we will return to our various storytelling structures in a more analytical way. For now, listen almost playfully as you let yourself notice what works and what doesn’t, without yet paying much attention to why.
Becoming an imaginary puppeteer in a situation in which you can do no real mischief, will help you to get used to evaluating your own solutions without jumping to impose them on another before you understand a lot more.
Listening Exercise Two
Tracking the Fluctuations in Your Empathy as You Listen
Once you have developed your own method of tracking narrative structure, you will want to pursue the same exercises while observing with free-wandering attention what happens to your empathy as a listener. Allowing yourself to know when you are aroused by a moment of beauty and similarly, when you find yourself shockingly indifferent, might well be a first step.
Pursue this empathy-charting work not only with your students, but when you are visiting with close friends as well as with strangers. Although with friends you are no longer on your Imaginary Page One, since you already have a lot of history and caring under your belt, track the moments when you come alive as a listener.
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Track when you are really moved and why.
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Track the moments when you feel your mind wander. Try to remember the last images that wafted over you, before you drifted away. Then try to reconstruct what was missing in between.
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If you put your mind to it, you will generally find that you can retrieve not only what you missed, but also what happened within the narrative that jarred you.
It is critical to be completely honest with yourself as you listen and not to judge where your mind wanders when the teller no longer has your attention. This will help you to find the moments of promise and power as you move into working with imaging Page One Moments for each of your students and later as you begin to work with written text.
Beauty as it Becomes a Clue
Once you have developed your own method of tracking narrative structure, you will want to pursue the same exercises while observing with free-wandering attention what happens to your empathy as a listener. Allowing yourself to know when you are aroused by a moment of beauty and similarly, when you find yourself shockingly indifferent, might well be a first step.
Pursue this empathy-charting work not only with your students, but when you are visiting with close friends as well as with strangers. Although with friends you are no longer on your Imaginary Page One, since you already have a lot of history and caring under your belt, track the moments when you come alive as a listener.
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Track when you are really moved and why.
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Track the moments when you feel your mind wander. Try to remember the last images that wafted over you, before you drifted away. Then try to reconstruct what was missing in between.
​​
If you put your mind to it, you will generally find that you can retrieve not only what you missed, but also what happened within the narrative that jarred you.
It is critical to be completely honest with yourself as you listen and not to judge where your mind wanders when the teller no longer has your attention. This will help you to find the moments of promise and power as you move into working with imaging Page One Moments for each of your students and later as you begin to work with written text.
Ongoing Tools for Teachers and Counselors
Preparing Your Listening Log to Track Student Stories
Keep an ongoing journal of the things you are learning about storytelling structure. Include phrases or events from your students' stories that you remember, writing down any thoughts that come up about why you remembered each one. Note factors that you feel moved a particular story from here to there.
Set aside several pages in your journal for moments that are obviously important to the narrator in the stories you are tracking and several more pages for moments that seem less important.
Under each category, keep a free-floating diary of when your own caring ebbed or peaked.
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When did your response feel out of sync with what the teller obviously felt?
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When did it seem in harmony?
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When, at an important moment, did you turn cold or even angry?
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When did you feel that you were being dared to dismiss or look down on the speaker?
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Are there narrative patterns that cause these reactions?
As you work with your journal, in whatever shorthand you decide to use, make sure that you deal with your own and your students’ moments of discomfort. Try to guess whether they came through embarrassment about revealing beauty, or anger or shame.