Graciela: I like stories, so when we're talking about that it's interesting, and you learn. (Interview with Graciela, 11/21/17)
Sonia: I like the stories where the stories have some suspense. Emily: You like the suspense.
Sonia: Suspense is, for me, really interesting. And you don't know what happen in the next part, just you're thinking what happen in the next part. I like the TV show, like telenovelas. […] My favorite part in English class is when we are doing, telling the stories. I am listen the stories from each person, because everybody has different stories. I really like that.
(Interview with Sonia, 11/21/17)
Teresa: I understand more the life. Well, I am here. Sometimes with other people when you stay in your country, you never imagine there are other countries and there are other people. When you stay here, you saw different future. You hear about what happened in their country and what is exactly their lives there.
Emily: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Teresa: I'm surprised, I'm lucky because I know now.
Emily: Yeah. So part of your positive experience [in class] has been learning about ... Teresa: The history. The life.
(Interview with Teresa, 2/22/18)
Processing class learning
I bring together the words of Sonia, Graciela and Teresa to meditate on what students identify as impactful about their learning in class. Using their words, I set up parameters for how I and my fellow educators sought to build opportunities for us as a
class to reflect on our learning. In each instant, students remember moments from class when they were particularly engaged and felt like they had learned something; centering the role of story sharing in each of their rememberings. Graciela began by sharing with me how she finds stories not only “interesting” to hear, but that “you learn” from them. Taken from a longer piece of dialogue in which she discussed enjoying reading articles in class, specifically referencing an article we read by a Navajo woman about the
importance of her indigenous language in her life, Graciela remembered fondly how we had engaged narratives in class to learn about new subjects and new languages. In other parts of her interview, she recalled reading the wordless picture book The Arrival by Shaun Tan as one of her favorite activities in class. She shared how she had not encountered a wordless picture book before and that it had made her think differently about reading and understanding stories. Through her interview it became clear stories had provided her with different ways to talk about and describe things that happen in the world. Putting both “interesting” and “learn” side by side, she equates the two. Stories pique her curiosity in addition to augmenting her learning about the world. While stories could be thought of purely for their entertainment value, she asserts that they offer lessons in language and new perspectives for seeing the world.
Sonia’s words build on this wondering, conveying that one of the things she liked about stories and why she found them to be one of her favorite class activities was the “suspense.” As a class, it emerged that many students enjoyed supernatural and spooky stories, which had prompted a dive into discussing stories and what makes them dynamic. Referencing the scary stories we had read in class in her discussion of suspense, Sonia describes the affective experience of reading these gripping stories. Connecting to the
appeal of telenovelas, she claims she likes suspense because “you don't know what happen in the next part.” More than words on a page, stories can stir emotional and excitable reactions in you that compel you to read further. She feels most connected to narratives where she is engaged at every turn, working to predict the next moment. Unlike the dry and predictable adult literacy texts I encountered that seemed to flood reading resources for adult literacy learners, Sonia — who also had told me her favorite text in high school was Crime and Punishment — named engaging stories as a
fundamental to her experience in class.
She also connects this interest in suspense to learning from her classmates, stating that hearing from different people in class is her favorite part of our time together. She notes “I am listen the stories from each person, because everybody has different stories.” Echoing sentiments expressed in the previous chapter about how students felt they learned from each other in class, Sonia explains that “everybody has different stories” that are worth listening to. While she doesn’t highlight learning as much, she states that she “likes” this listening, that she enjoys hearing other stories. Class for her becomes not just about processing new information but finding pleasure in class through our story- telling. Each person in class in this way becomes part of our curriculum, part of our course of study and part of the joy we get from class. Our class is particular because we have this mix of people and our learning outcomes would have been different had we been another group of learners coming together.
Like Graciela and Sonia, Teresa brings up how people in our class have shaped their learning. As she frames it, other people’s stories about “what happened in their country” have impacted her way of understanding the world. She ruminates that
sometimes “when you stay in your country, you never imagine there are other countries and there are other people.” As she states, you see a “different future” when you are in one country versus another. In a space where adults come together with many years of lived experience, from a variety of countries and speaking numerous languages, the potential to learn about other ways of seeing the world is vast. Teresa confirms that this was an unexpected experience for her. She notes that she is “surprised” and also
considers herself “lucky because I know now”, evaluating her learning from others as an overwhelmingly positive one. Encapsulating exactly what was positive for her about our learning here, she names that she learned about “The history. The life.” Referencing both what we learned about together in class sessions exploring US immigration history (indicated by earlier conversation in the interview) in addition to the histories learned about through other students in class sharing, Teresa indicates that what she learned about is encapsulated by discussions of “history” and “life” rather than language. What
impacted her the most and what she found “lucky” to know more about is what life was like for others and how she might imagine new futures and ways of seeing the world through this knowledge.
Inquiry, for Teresa, also seemed to be a central aspect of her learning. Not only was she hearing new subject matter, but she herself was questioning assumptions she had previously and taking what might be viewed as tensions between her worldview and her classmates’ as areas of consideration and potential questioning. Teresa, whose story- sharing with Senait is central to my introduction, re-emphasized the importance of
learning from other students in class through sharing different experiences. While Teresa came to class in part to practice and build up her English knowledge, what she took away
from class what seem to be deeper shifts in her worldview brought on by meaningful class material and fellow classmates who pushed her in inquiry. Though she says that “I know now”, indicating some completion in her “knowing”, what she claims to know is that points of view informed by a variety of contexts expand beyond her imagination. While of course she might have “known” this to be true before coming to class, I
gathered that her “know”-ing was a sense of appreciation rather than a firm declaration of mastered competency. What it appears she is embracing is a sense of not knowing; being open to new ways of knowing from others.
Centering narrative in gauging our learning
In each of these quotations, students share what about stories have impacted them over their time in class. What students learned in class through story was connected to their sense of curiosity, to the affective experience of engaging exciting, new stories and to their own questioning of how they understand the world through hearing about the experiences and histories of others. Stories have been used by people across cultures to make sense of the world around them. Stories are told to share histories, to give
warnings, to teach lessons, to entertain. In our class, we often pulled stories from our own experiences in addition to the histories of our families and various communities to build relationships and share a variety of insights about language and life more broadly with each other. Teachers are also indicated in this story-sharing as a review of the data demonstrates that my fellow co-educators and I engaged anecdotes and stories frequently to explain linguistic phenomena and relate to students in class.
Story has also been used by education researchers to get at the nuance of individuals’ journeys through education and the way that learning is contextualized
within the longer story of students’ lives. As Campano (2007) conceptualized in naming the role of storytelling in an inquiry-based classroom, “Students (and teachers) write not only from experience but also for experience; storytelling becomes an ongoing process of inquiry and discovery that is potentially generative.” (p. 18) By understanding
storytelling as one way students and teachers connect their classroom learning to their life learning, we can understand storytelling practices as manifestations of students’ living literacy histories. Seeing narratives not as static, but subject to change as the people who tell them change, opens space for telling and retelling of experiences responsive to the changing nature of people’s realities.
The complexity of our learning from story was beautiful and illuminated when we conversed together in moments of reflection captured in the opening vignettes. However, as educators and students, we also craved moments where our learning synthesized across time and we developed evidence of what we had learned to reflect on and share with others. Many students on end of year feedback in other terms had asked for more tests, for ways of measuring what their progress was from the beginning of the term to the end. As teachers who also served as program administrators responsible for sustaining class structure, we knew that eventually we wanted to look to outside sources of funding to make the learning space more sustainably managed, to pay teachers better wages and to provide better resources for students in class; sources which often required formal illustrations of what class learning looked like and the gains students made over discrete periods of time (Condelli, 2007; Shin & Ging, 2019). Given our commitment to a contextualized and critically-informed approach to language learning, we had eschewed standardized testing tools common in adult literacy classrooms as means of assessments