Stories Matter

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. — Chimamanda Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story”¹ 

For the past seven years, my colleagues and I have run a project that brings the power not only of storytelling but of a multiplicity of stories to render a more vibrant understanding of the experiences of the individuals within the shared narratives of Canadian history and the histories of those in Canada. 

My students, from a number of countries with a variety of home languages and a connection to Canada that ranged from deep to superficial, had struggled to understand the iteration of Canadian history I was faced with presenting to a grade 10 social studies class. The typical story of Canada’s formation takes place close to European centers of power (eastern Canada), is dictated by men (from England and France) of a single race and religion (white, Christian), who were, most distinctly, dead. This was a world apart in time, place, and identity from that of these students. They were disengaged, uninspired, and not receiving any benefit from the course. 

I met with a colleague/friend one day who was teaching the same course, and we shared our mutual concerns. We wondered: How could we save our students’ interest in Canada? How could we make them not hate social studies? What could we help them learn that would actually be of benefit to them as citizens and residents of Canada? 

What came out of that meeting as a stopgap project remains, seven years later, a pillar of the course. We refer to it as the Oral History Project, and it is my favorite part of the year. 

What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. — Chimamanda Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story” 

Over the years, the project has evolved. It has shifted in scale from our original two classes to a whole-grade endeavor; in design, as we learned about project-based learning and guided inquiry and saw ways to incorporate new steps and new language from those frameworks; and in emphasis, from an original focus on the immigration experiences of students’ families expressed as statements (“My Family’s Immigration from Scotland/China/Vietnam/Mexico”) to multiple themes of identity, immigration, and interaction, expressed as questions (“To what degree will existing Chinese immigrants feel motivated to offer support to Syrian refugees who have just arrived in Canada?” and “What defined my family’s journey as they arrived to and settled into Canada?”). 

What has remained consistent is the nervousness we as teachers feel the day before the projects are shared; the personalized degree of learning the vast majority of students experience; the connections made to teachers, friends, and family through the stories told in the interviews (a key component of the project); and the effective scaffolding this project serves for students to have deeper understanding of the many economic, political, and social aspects that influenced historical Canada. What’s more, as global events continue to arrive at our doorsteps, we see students processing the headlines through this project and arriving at a deeper understanding, and perhaps even empathy, for those working through challenges of immigration and integration in our communities today. 

So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. — Chimamanda Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story” 

The Project 

We incorporate the power of storytelling using oral history — “a field of study and a method of gathering, preserving and interpreting the voices and memories of people, communities, and participants in past events.”² In the students’ projects, the gathering of memories of a person through an interview is the peak event, the one that all the preparatory steps lead to and from which all future steps stem. 

To begin, students design their driving question (the “topic” of their project) with the knowledge that their key data source is an interview, this practicing of oral history. Often, students begin with a question that is too broad. This is an important moment of intervention for me as a teacher, ensuring that the students get to a driving question that both focuses their attention and provides a real problem to puzzle through. When I see students get to questions like the following, I feel comfortable with them moving forward: 

• To what degree will existing Chinese immigrants feel motivated to offer support to Syrian refugees who have just arrived in Canada? 
• How has time affected the cultural identity of Chinese immigrants to Canada?  
• How did world events in the ’50s and ’60s affect immigrant workers’ lives in Canada? 
• What kind of impact does it have on the black community in Canada to be underrepresented in government? 

Students approach family members (often grandparents), family friends, teachers, coaches and mentors, and, at times, even strangers (through a cultural community center) to conduct their interview. Before the interview happens, students must show that they have done a certain amount of background research and have prepared their interview questions or conversation starters. We try to time the project so that there is a school break around the time when students are ready to do the interviews. This gives them time and perhaps access to family members they only see on special occasions. 

We work with the students to ensure that they are well-prepared, both to conduct an interview and to be able to engage in what is one of the crucial distinguishing features of oral history, the “dialogue between interviewer and interviewee.”³ It can be easy for the oral history in the Oral History Project to become sidelined because there are so many other moving pieces in the project. But in the end, it is in that dialogue where the “aha” moments come, where the increased connection between generations or the valuable insight from a lived experience results in the best learning: that we learn best by listening to those around us. 

Once the students have conducted their interviews, this becomes their primary source of data. We work with the students to help them place the experiences, memories, and insights from their participants within the context of the known historical record. This process of holding two “truths” simultaneously is often challenging for students, and it provides another powerful intervention moment to help decipher the multiple perspectives and experiences of history. In the end, we ask students to respond (rather than “answer”) their driving question, keeping central the oral history they have gathered from their participant and given context of time, place, and perspective with their secondary research of the written historical record, official government sources, other research, etc. This provides another key moment in using oral history with students as they consider the ethical dimension of re-presenting someone else’s story. They must wrestle with loyalty to the participant and their ethics as a researcher to question, prod, and then question what they discover. The culmination of their work is a public display of their findings in the school and a final series of reflections; Harkness discussions;⁴ and an essay to fully debrief, interrogate, and document their learning. 

One aspect I value about the project is that it is never entirely the same. In 2016 we shaped our processes along the Guided Inquiry model (promoting learning through student investigation). One aspect that we recognized needed work was the way in which we introduced the project to the students. At the end of the 2015 project, my colleagues and I agreed that we were asking the students to choose a question too early in the process; we needed to give them more lead in, more chance to dig around, and more reasons to dig around before we asked them to commit. Our process in 2016 looked like this: 

Step 1: Open Curiosity. Have students watch Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story” on YouTube. Guide students in drawing their family tree. We want to stimulate the students’ curiosity in two directions: knowing another and knowing self. We hope to inspire students to look for the gaps in their knowledge that require investigation, conversation, and research to fill. 

Step 2: Build Knowledge. We want to ground the inquiry in the three themes we teachers have selected as important to understanding the historical and contemporary nature of Canadian society. To connect to the theme of interaction, we explore the Syrian refugee crisis. To explore the theme of immigration, we present mini-lectures on the early waves of immigration to Canada and have students consider a local project that paired elders from immigration and First Nations communities in conversation and activities. To consider the theme of identity, we return to the family tree diagrams and the TED talk to consider what we know of ourselves and each other and how that knowledge is constructed. 

Step 3: Individual Exploration. Students have some time to recall what has happened in the previous classes and then follow up on ideas that interested them, confused them, confounded them, and otherwise made them take note. 

Step 4: Decide on a Direction. We ask students to further identify what resonated with them across their multiple selves: student, citizen, and personal. With this, we hope to emphasize that inspiration can come from a variety of places and that there are multiple aspects to their own identity that may inspire action. 

Step 5: Collect Data. Next, we organize a series of workshops that are inserted into lessons as the students come to need them. The workshops include oral history, research standards and ethics, interview skills, data analysis, and visual displays of information. We also set up deadlines for students to submit work through our online learning management platform. There is no doubt that monitoring 25 to 50 projects can be overwhelming. We ended up with a list of these milestones, which help us ensure that students are flagged for appropriate support at the right time:  

• Set up learning log 
• Weekly contributions to learning log (ongoing)  
• Driving question  
• Research questions
• Secondary research
• Interview questions 
• Primary research (interview)  
• Draft plan for sharing 
• Sharing with peers for feedback  
• Share day with public audience 
• Reflections and connections 

Step 6: Share Findings. Because we want to get students to focus on their process, we have deemphasized the final product. In 2016, I found that many of the projects weren’t as “pretty” as past projects had been, but I could tell the processes of research reflected were far more robust and authentic than anything I had ever seen. Students created art pieces and models, live one-person plays, photo essays, newspapers, storyboards and interactive games. 

Step 7: Reflect on Learning. As a final set of tasks, students reflect on what they learned about the three themes (interaction, immigration, identity), about being a qualitative researcher, about multiple perspectives, and about how history is recorded and learned. This is often done informally, sometimes with a chalk talk set up, where students respond silently on big chart paper. We also read a chapter⁵ that explores what is needed in a civil society as a means for students to apply what they have learned to a different text. And, finally, students complete an essay in which they are prompted to refer to their project, the readings, the early workshops and lectures, and then connect it all in response to a unit question. 

We are three months away from beginning this year’s projects with the students. I can’t help but wonder what I will learn about the students as they learn about their families, neighbors, and country. 

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. — Chimamanda Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story” 

Student Reaction 

Many students found the project to be rewarding:  

• After the project was finished even though it was a lot of work I was proud with my product and it was fun to present it. 
• Relationship with People is my favourite unit this year, and contains what in my opinion is the most enjoyable and productive project. The Oral History Project gave us an [sic] unique way to research and create a product like nothing I’ve done before, and the freedom given to the students on how to create our product allowed us to be creative. 
• I liked the way that the topic linked to current events, like immigration and refugees coming to Canada. 
• I liked the OHP project as a whole. I haven’t been doing projects that had artwork for a really long time so I enjoyed it. Although my design was not as good as others, I believe that I took the most out of the project in understanding my driving question. 

Other students struggled with some aspects of the project. Some struggled with the timeline: 

• We had too much class time to work and the project dragged on too long. 
• I didn’t have enough time to work on certain parts. 

Others did not appreciate the requirement of oral history: 

• I like it. The only thing that I didn’t enjoy was the meeting real people part. (Just me, from my humble opinion) 

For some, the level of freedom was “just right”: 

• I think it was incredibly enjoyable as we were given plenty of liberty to do … whatever project we wish. 

And yet others wanted more guidance: 

• Maybe it would help if there was more direct help from teachers [to] guide students. 

The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar. — Chimamanda Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story” 

Conclusion 

When we position the student as researcher, we shift the power back to the student. By emphasizing best practices in research (ethics, proposals, research, data analysis, conclusions, contributing to an open research community), we are treating the students’ work as original and with substance, and, consequently, we acknowledge them as original and with substance. In this process, we are advancing a culture of evidence-based decision making, of knowledge-creation, and of open sharing of this knowledge. 

Our world needs young people who believe in themselves, who see themselves as being worthy and capable. We need individuals who know how to learn and how to seek the learning of others, and we need those who can apply and share this learning as citizens. We need young people who have firsthand experience with gathering, generating, analyzing, and consuming evidence, so they can use this to leverage the most significant opportunities and the most urgent needs we have ever had. This is where, when we look for it, the line between school and the world can, and must, be blurred. There are many stories to tell, to hear, and to share. Our students are ready for them. 

Notes

1. Excerpts in this article are from a TED talk given by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and recorded in July 2009. The TED talk is online at https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en.

2. “Oral History Defined,” Oral History Association; online at http://www.oralhistory.org/about/do-oral-history/. 

3. Ibid.

4. “Discussion based teaching (also called the “Harkness method,” after the oval discussion tables designed to facilitate conversation) challenges students to sit at the center of education, making meaning of new information together, talking, listening, and ultimately thinking.” — Brian Mullgardt, “Introducing and Using the Discussion (AKA, Harkness) Table,” Independent Teacher, Fall 2008; online at http://www.nais.org/Magazines-Newsletters/ITMagazine/Pages/Introducing-and-Using-the-Discussion-(AKA-Harkness)-Table.aspx.

5. Clarkson, Adrienne. Belonging: The Paradox of Citizenship. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2014.