Not Your Average Folktale: How Grade 4 Took Oral Storytelling to New Heights
The tradition of folktales and oral storytelling is centuries old, and while not as long, learning about them in school has been going on for quite some time. This year, fourth grade teachers James Hubbard and Stacy Tell partnered with World Language Teacher Omar Machado and Shore parent Stephanie Benenson to give the lesson a well-deserved revamp for the twenty-first century.
The shining star of the unit was a project where students interviewed an adult in their lives to learn about a story, lesson, or experience that they have carried with them. Students then took steps to retell the story to their classmates, and in a recorded audio piece, helping them understand oral storytelling and put aspects of the Community Code into practice.
With a long list of guiding questions from StoryCorps, a non-profit organization whose mission is to “preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world,” Hubbard and Tell worked with their students to pick questions to ask their chosen adult outside of school.
“They collected a really wide range of stories, from funny family memories to family traditions, and family heritage,” said Hubbard. “To emphasize that oral stories are passed down, we guided them towards retelling it.”
This is where Machado came in, said Hubbard. With a background in the performing arts, and a passion for the unit’s material, Machado individually mentored students to use expression and enthusiasm when retelling their stories.
“Because these are stories about their families, they are going to be connecting and honoring them and are going to be impacted by what they've been through. For me, that is the passion,” said Machado. “The better they can tell the story, the better the audience will connect with it and be transported into their own family and their own curiosity about their family.”
When Hubbard and Tell emailed parents and caregivers to explain the project and how it included their partnership, parent Stephanie Benenson reached back out to tell them about a project she was leading with her artist collective, Harbor Voices. 100 Voices, Our Collective Story is an immersive public artwork of light and sound created with community voices and their stories of ancestral and recent local immigration, migration, and origin stories specific to Cape Ann.
Benenson, who is the Artistic Director & Founder of Harbor Voices, said that upon receiving the email from Hubbard and Tell she was thrilled to learn that Grade 4 was exploring a storytelling unit, particularly related to interviewing elders. “Harbor Voices believes that intergenerational storytelling can have incredible benefits on young minds,” she said. “Students gain confidence, increased empathy, and are proven to be more engaged in social activism and community engagement when they feel part of the larger narrative of local history, even just family history.”
The installation and its proximity to Shore, in both location and relation with Benenson’s son in the fourth grade, offered itself as a perfect opportunity for a field trip. Hubbard and Tell spoke enthusiastically about, and with an appreciation for, place-based trips that tie into curriculum, partnerships with families, and special subject teachers, pointing to the value and importance of ties that are authentic and strong.
“We both always want to make sure that if we’re doing something, we’re doing it with intention, not because we want to check it off a box,” said Tell. “We want to make sure that we are committed to something that's really going to grow.”
In addition to being “super fun,” a fourth grade student said that collecting and retelling a story she had a direct connection to helped her better understand what she was learning. She explained that in the library she and her classmates would see books prefaced with the fact that they had been retold. “Once we started actually doing oral stories it was a lot easier to understand some of the things they [books] would mean when they say they’re passed down.”
The connection that this student made is the higher-level thinking that Hubbard and Tell say comes from students doing something that applies to them and that they care about. “We talk about thematic ideas in the context of literacy, but also thematic ideas that come from any experience,” said Tell.
“A lot of people will say ‘Oh, oral storytelling, isn't that just telling a story with your mouth?’ and it's a lot more than that,” said the student. “It's expressing in different ways, using different tones to be happy or be silly. You can really express yourself I think a lot better when you’re telling oral stories because you get to move around and be creative almost like a picture book.”
On the trip to Cape Ann, Benenson spoke to students about how through hearing the stories of others, you not only get a better understanding and appreciation for them but for yourself, too. The student reflected this sentiment, saying that she grew closer to her classmates as they continued to share stories and lessons passed down to them, outside of the ones they had initially collected for class. With vulnerability comes empathy, both of which are intrinsically linked to the lesson, as well as the Community Code.
The most prominent theme that Hubbard saw in the lesson is openness, due to students’ increased mutual understanding. His hope is that as his team continues to tweak the lesson, it can reinforce the social-emotional learning skills of social-awareness, self-awareness, and community engagement.
From the beginning of the lesson, Tell said that dependability and ‘being accountable to one’s community and oneself’ was vital. She and Hubbard discussed with their students that in order to share a story in a way that made them feel proud, the space had to be safe.
“They had to make sure it was understood that everyone is going up in front of each other and sharing what can be a really vulnerable story, what can be a really funny story, that there’s some sort of emotion that they are trying to elicit from their stories, and we really have to be careful as members of the audience with that,” said Tell. “It takes a lot of bravery to speak in front of people, even if it's folks you've known for so many years.”
Machado echoed the importance and power of vulnerability and the critical life skills that it teaches kids in and out of the classroom. For him, ‘Be True’ is the Community Code facet that stands out.
“You have to feel it,” said Machado. “In order to feel it, you have to have it in you.” While it’s not easy to do, Machado said that in order for a story to evoke emotion and provide a strong message, it has to reveal a bit about the storyteller. By doing so and sharing a story with the community, one can learn from the same community that they are sharing with.
“It will make you more vulnerable, but it will make you more reassured of who you are,” said Machado.
While the personal investment in the stories students told helped them to gain a better understanding of the curriculum, they also helped them learn more about their identities and values; lessons that will follow them far beyond the fourth grade and into their lives as citizens of the world.
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In the Janet and William Ellery James Center at the Cape Ann Museum, an eight-minute show featuring a “babble” of languages overlapping into the sounds of crashing waves was played on a loop, programmed to lasers to visualize the web of connectivity between stories.
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Students enter the Janet and William Ellery James Center at the Cape Ann Museum.
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'100 Voices, Our Collective Story' is an immersive public artwork of light and sound created with community voices and their stories of ancestral and recent local immigration, migration, and origin stories specific to Cape Ann.
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On the trip to Cape Ann, Benenson spoke to students about how through hearing the stories of others, you not only get a better understanding and appreciation for them but for yourself, too.
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Shore Country Day School’s mission is to provide an education that inspires a love of learning and encourages children to embrace academic challenge. We seek to build character, cultivate creativity, and value diversity as we help our children become healthy, compassionate citizens of the world.
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