Your Classroom Story

Learning through story-telling is likely to be as old as humanity; long before we had pen and paper, we learned through listening. Stories were passed down through generations and generated knowledge that helped us survive and flourish. As a result, our brains are wired to engage through stories and with the story-teller. In the preface of their book Learning through Storytelling in Higher Education, McDrury and Alterio make a compelling argument for why storytelling is an enduring learning tool:

      “Stories are everywhere. We hear them, we read them, we write them and we tell them. Perhaps on occasions we feel them. We use them to motivate others, to convey information and to share the experience. We tell stories to make sense of the world around us. As we tell stories we create opportunities to express views, reveal emotions and present aspects of our personal and professional lives. Frequently we engage in this uniquely human activity in creative ways and in doing so stimulate our imagination and enhance our memory and visualization skills. Our ability to communicate not just our own experience but the experiences of others enables us to transcend personal frameworks and take on wider perspectives. This attribute, together with its international, transhistorical and transcultural usage, makes storytelling a powerful learning tool. It is therefore no surprising that it has endured.” 

The book is a guide of how to use stories and storytelling as a compelling teaching tool in higher education. I often wish that I had the natural skills of a great story teller. Story-telling for me is work, but every time I’m intentional about it and tell some tale, real or fictional, to my students, I know that they are listening and exams often show that it was one of few things that they recalled nearly verbatim about a topic.  

Besides using stories as a teaching tool, I am always curious about the story that each student brings to the classroom. Story is what makes us different from each other. We each have our own individual story – in a sense, we are our stories. Our unique stories were shaped by our life experiences, but we also become who we are because of the stories we were told. If you tell children that they are worthless and will never be able to read, write or excel at math, those words often turn into the children’s own stories – stories that they tell themselves and the world. Ultimately, many projections of worthlessness or failure conveyed to children, turn into life-stories of underachievement.  In your classroom, you are likely to have students who bring diverse stories. The stories that you tell them about who they are – and can be – also make enormous differences for who they become. Our classrooms are filled with these stories; the stories that our students bring, spoken and unspoken, the ones that you bring, and the story that is woven when your story blends with those of the students’ and becomes the whole classroom’s story. I would love for my students to remember how to solve genetic linkage problems, when in reality, I know that they are more likely to remember the story I told them about a friend who had a late miscarriage because her baby had a genetic disease – if only I had a compelling story about linked genes!

It goes the other direction as well; the stories that I will remember from my favorite class may not have to do with mastery of learning outcomes, but instead the compelling life-stories about students’ struggles with tuition bills and imprisoned boyfriends, or the jubilant success stories of students accepted to summer internships and medical schools.

What are your classroom stories? Do you use story-telling as a teaching tool? What is the story that you tell your class about yourself and the world? What story do you tell the world about Lincoln?

Sensitive Topics in the Classroom

Guest Blogger: Heather Bennett

November 8^th 2016, a day that will live in infamy.  We elected Donald Trump as our next president. While some celebrated, many people were terrified.  For months the world watched as Donald Trump reduced races of people to negative stereotypes, marginalized many minorities and women, and indirectly promoted hate amongst American citizens.  For many, the election of such an individual to the most powerful position in the country brought about fear and terror. 

For many of my students, 60% of them international students, 98% of them women, and all of them African American, the election of Donald Trump instilled a deep fear, anger, disappointment and an overall lack of confidence in the workings of our government. My students seemed a little more discouraged the day after the election when they walked into class. It seemed awkward not to mention the election, as I could clearly see that my students wanted to discuss what they were thinking. I was hesitant to open up for discussion such a sensitive topic. I did not want lecture time to be consumed with discussion on the presidential election or the topic to lead to a hostile environment. However, I did not want to minimize their feelings, or fail to acknowledge the validity of their emotions. Simply not mentioning the election, I felt sent a message that I did not care how my students maybe feeling. I wanted to give students a safe space to share and elaborate on these feelings of fear and disappointment. I also wanted to encourage and support them.  I decided to address the “elephant in the room” and encourage students to disclose their feelings. I asked for students to take a few minutes and to quietly write down what emotions they were feeling after learning the results from the presidential election.  I then left it open for students to share, if they felt comfortable, their feelings with the rest of the class. I stressed that students must be respectful and listen to their classmates. I challenged them to try to understand each other’s views. After sharing, I had students ball up the paper with any negative emotions and throw them like a snowball at the front of the room. I then challenged the students to share how they could use these negative feelings for something positive. The activity only took 15 minutes of class time and several students thanked me for giving them an opportunity to voice their feelings. One student said prior to my class no teacher had mentioned the election results and it seemed as if no one cared how the students may be feeling or perhaps they too should just get over it.     

For many of us our performance on any task is tied to our emotional well-being. As an educator, I think it is important to realize that our students will be greatly affected by what may be happening in society.  We must learn how to engage students in meaningful discussion and try to understand how the emotions of our students may influence their learning. I am curious, how do more experienced educators discuss difficult and sensitive topics in the classroom? What are some techniques or strategies teachers use in the classroom to help students handle emotional topics? 

A Homecoming of the Activist Spirit: Students’ Rallying Cry for Faculty Support

Guest Blogger: Jamila Cupid

Tuesday, March 22, 2016 – Student at Howard University protest to increase awareness of rape culture at the institution, after a female student brought forth rape allegations. 

Saturday, September 24, 2016 – North Carolina students and Michigan State football players raise their fists in protest of the national anthem, following NFL football player Colin Kaepernick’s lead, after the murder of an unarmed Black man in Tulsa, OK. 

Thursday, October 6, 2016 – The Boston University School of Social Work Student Organization led students, faculty, and staff in a rally to support the Black Lives Matter movement.   

Monday, October 10, 2016 – Students at Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, South Africa staged a massive protest to demand free education. 

These are only a few examples of the student activism taking place on college campuses this year.  As students seek improvements in their institutions and the society at large, they find their voices and ignite change.  Over the past couple of weeks, at Lincoln University, we have watched our own students take a stand when they staged a sit-in and launched a campaign calling for improved conditions on campus.  The students have repeatedly expressed concern over their academic experience as well as the quality of campus living.  They are insisting on answers from the university’s president and board of trustees.  Customized announcements, such as the one pictured below, have been posted throughout academic buildings and dormitories to inform the entire community of their efforts. 

When I first came across the message on my office door, I noted something rather peculiar in the wording.  Students seemed to anticipate that their faculty would “threaten” their movement.  We are a faculty body at the first degree-granting historically black university.  We come from various eras of activism, from the Civil Rights to Black Power to Black Lives Matter Movements.  Collectively, we understand what it means to demand what we need in order to thrive in our environment.  I could not understand why our students would suspect that we, their educators, would not support them.  So, I held informal chats with a handful of them.  To categorize their responses, they expressed the following:

o   Students believe faculty are on the side of the administration, so it is unlikely faculty will support them.

o   It seems faculty are facing many of the same challenges and feel disempowered.

o   Students believe some faculty strongly support the students, but it’s not enough without the support from the administration and board of trustees.

o   Students feel that most faculty have not addressed any of the academic problems in front of the student body.

These conversations with students raise the questions of how Lincoln University faculty could become more in tune with the resurgence of student activism in our world and, particularly, the current efforts of our students right in our back yard.  I do not doubt that there is support for them among the faculty body, as many of us constantly assess and revise curricula for improvement, implement new programs, fight for more academic resources for student development, call for excellence and more.  Yet, we must hear them when they say that support has not been widely revealed to them.  How do we ensure those who look to us for guidance know we are here for them in their plight?