My holiday awakening
3 min readJan 6, 2021
Storytelling matters, to state the obvious. But storytelling in the context of teaching and learning might matter more than we acknowledge.
What do you remember: the things you memorized a day before an exam, or the things that were contextualized in a moment, in a larger narrative of exploration, discovery, and epiphany? You can already sniff my bias here, obviously. Here are a few moments this played out:
- Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom as written by Jourdain Searles, is the story of black masculine pain. And it is told in such a deep, cutting way. The stories of scarring trauma are sprinkled across one day in a recording studio — where we witness the men living out those traumas — the pain of their ancestors — the game to stay ahead of a culture of white supremacy built upon the black man’s back— the futility of their resistance to the subjugation of their bodies…
- Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between The World and Me” shares the stories he is telling his son — contextualizing the history of where his father grew up, where he found Mecca (at Howard University), where he made sense of how his body was written on with the past, how he learned to learn and then apply those lessons — to extrapolate and process AND CRITIQUE. Where he tells his son, “So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. (71)” Where he falls in love, exercises empathy for others (women), and carves out his activist soul…
- Then the storytelling in SOUL from Pixar — the latest in what must be a team of social scientists and activists writing scripts to make sense of the world. Is this for children at all? Brilliantly, they again create a movie that has different lines of engagement. Children can watch a story with cute characters; and adults, if they are ready, can grapple with the struggles of identity, personality, spark, lost opportunities, lost souls…
- And on a long walk with my wife, a conversation about just why we both found formal education so dry, so lifeless, so boring. Why isn’t education structured in this storytelling way, this method that is so compelling. Just how many students would benefit from this making education ALIVE? We learned so much from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, from Ta-Nehisi’s University life, from SOUL… And my wife says, “This is why Ken Burns is so brilliant. He contextualizes history in the storytelling of what was happening all around, so instead of “moment-in-time-event” you get the why, who, where did it come from. I’d like to watch another Ken Burns documentary — I’d like to watch something where we learn.”
- And so we dive into The National Parks: America’s Best Idea where again, the brilliant story teller situates it all: race, class, poverty, wealth, resources and ethics within the story of a few people struggling to put aside natural wonders for the enjoyment of ALL.
