Take it to the Community: Engaging Students in Project Based Storytelling

As many of you have read in this blog before, I'm constantly reflecting, wondering, and planning for ways to engage students while also making learning relevant to them. I am not a teacher who recycles lessons from previous years and plops them into present time. While this sounds like a lovely time-saving endeavor, it's not my style. 

For the past nine years, I have made many conjectures on how to get students to tell meaningful narrative stories. I've assigned many of these over the years in both ninth and tenth grade English, and each year I have run into the same problem: many in my population of students simply lack the experience to tell stories about their own lives. The projects I have given them--memory maps of their lives, This I Believe essays, or anecdotal accounts of meaningful events--have been a challenge for them for this very reason. 

With this in mind, a more experiential student experience was born: the interview narrative. While reading Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie about the author's experience with his dying professor, I began to see the wisdom and experience that comes with aging--and my students did, too. Admittedly, some of them didn't see it right away, as one student remarked: 

...I thought that it would not be a good book at all.  I thought I would just have to read the book and get it over with, just like it seems it is with most books I am assigned to read... As I started to get into it, the book kept growing on me more and more. After we finished the book, we were assigned to go interview an elderly person and tell “their story.” At that point, I thought “ok, well I will go ahead and interview someone and get it out of the way.” I then interviewed a lovely women and learned about her, her life, and and her story.  Here is her story which really touched me.

And she tells it exactly as I presented it to students: read the text, write at least ten questions about topics from the text ("death, fear, aging, greed, marriage, family, society, forgiveness, and a meaningful life (66)."), and interview someone in preparation to tell his/her story. 

Here is what happened next, as told by another student in class: 

On September 15, 2015,  my English class and I made a chilly journey on foot to the old folks home that was only a couple blocks from our high school. The early morning air and slight drizzle sent shivers down my spine. I expected this to be like every other field trip, not fun or useful, but still better than school. Little did I know that inside that brick building would be a wrinkled, warm-hearted 94 year old woman named Doris who would change my outlook on life forever.

That, my friends, is magic. In the 100 essays I have read, I stumbled upon varying degrees of similar accounts to that above: students who were nervous to interview residents in a local nursing home, those who were attending to just get out of class, and those who were concerned they would meet "cranky old people". In 92% of these cases, however, students reflected upon the joy they received by meeting with our community's wise residents. Likewise, the residents were filled to the brim with happiness and pride as they shared with my students. 

The affects of this project did not stop with just students and the residents. In one instance, a student who interviewed a resident allowed his mom to read his narrative before he turned it in. Half-way through the narrative, the mother stopped suddenly, a vague recollection floating in the back of her mind. Her son hadn't even mentioned the resident's name yet--he was writing in first person point of view--but his mom knew exactly who he was writing about. It was a former customer of the mother's salon who had stopped coming to the salon four years earlier. She and her co-workers had been wondering where the resident had been. Because of this project, they were able to visit the resident in the nursing home to catch up again like old times. 

I went into this project as a way for my students to connect with people in our community and a hope that they would emerge with meaningful narratives. What I left with was gratification from students, parents, and residents alike. And what of those narratives? They were wonderful, harrowing, intriguing, beautiful narratives that spilled tears onto my cheeks, down to my chin, especially when reading lines like this: 

I smiled at the thought of me and Betty being alike, because I have never thought about myself growing old. I started to imagine Betty as a reflection of myself and as I listened to her speak, I could hear more of me in her voice.  

To read more of their beautiful lines, that connect nicely to the standards of the rubric, click here. I promise you won't be disappointed! 

How have you taken students into the community? What experience have you had with this? Let me know in the comments below!