Levels of storytelling, Part 3
     Master narratives and placemaking

The third level of storytelling is the level of master narratives. These are the large stories that shape communities and cultures.

The third level of storytelling is the level that postmodernists call “master narratives.” These are the large stories--such as those told by Karl Marx or Jesus--that sketch in the shape and meaning of human reality, and that thereby shape communities and cultures. The implication of the postmodernists has often been that these narratives are fictions, a conclusion that seems to follow from the fact that there are many of them, that they conflict with each other, and that we can to some degree enter or leave them at will.

It’s useful to draw on American pragmaticism here--the idea that our best approach to truth might be to select our beliefs based on what works. As pragmatist William James put it: “Grant an idea or belief to be true, . . . what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?”

By asking about experiential consequences, we can discuss the objective data of what happens to persons and groups who commit themselves to various values. We can use reason to assist our decisions about which virtues to live and teach: should we be warriors or merchants or saints? We can ask what sort of society has in the past emerged when most people lived the anything-for-profit ethic or the never-resort-to-force ethic. 

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Montana’s future: the movie
     What destinies can teens imagine?

Epic, 2014, a flash movie, presents a vision of a possible future, one in which the New York Times no longer exists because of personalized media and disintermediated journalism. The 8-minute movie was put together by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson.

The movie is qutie effective, though the techniques it uses are well within reach of high school students. I would love to see a series of such films imagining possible futures for Montana, made by high schoolers.

Tracks at Mollman Lakes
     Alone in the world

As soon as the snow melted enough for us to get in without skis or snowshoes, I hiked into an alpine lake with a friend I’d spent the winter taking long walks with.

He was giving me something of a gift, showing me a place that was special to him. He took me around the edge of the lake and followed a small inlet back into a deep canyon where small a marsh recorded the traffic there through footprints in the mud.  Deer, bear, rabbit, and bobcat had visited the springs. 

At one point, I slightly lost my balance and slipped off the clump of grass, stepping into the mud.  I was surprised at the sudden anger this provoked.  He glared at my footprint and swore.  “That’ll be there for weeks.”

He did not have the world to himself. The trace of human presence tainted the place. 

Winter and cabin fever in Red Lodge
     Gary Ferguson in the LA Times

Gary Ferguson has an essay in today’s LA Times (free registration required) about winter in the Rockies and the persistent Montana drought.

What I once knew in theory I now know in my bones: that the overpowering weight of a Rocky Mountain winter, the snowbound days that drive us to the edge of madness, are the price paid in one season for the flush of life in another. What can at first seem a terrifying silence in the winter wilderness is in truth the sound of possibility.

Ferguson’s latest book is The Great Divide: The Rocky Mountains in the American Mind, a book which I just read (after hearing his eloquence at the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula). The Great Divide tells what sort of people have been attracted to this place in the past, and of the changing role of the Rockies in the American psyche. In Missoula he was the only writer on a panel of environmental writers who offered much hope for the future. He said one solution to immigration into this state was to create a literature that attracted the sort of people we want.

Of course, he was assuming most people in the audience would agree with him about what sort of people those were. In American politics, things tend to go together in a way that it’s hard to support environmental causes without also supporting a lot of other causes. I would like to see a reshuffling of which issues the two parties claim as theirs, in the hope that one of them might put together a better hand than either seems content to hold at present.

In any case, his is the best kind of thinking about what placemaking means.  Ferguson lives in Red Lodge.

Levels of storytelling, Part 2
     Pursuing intentional purposes

The second level of storytelling includes the planned and structured stories we use to organize our lives. Politicians call stories at this level of narration “campaigns.� Scientists call them “experiments.� Teachers usually call them “unit plans.� They are scripts we intend to live, aiming at goals we consciously choose. They are the larger stories we want our lives to follow. They are the stories of our intentional purposes and of what happens as we pursue those purposes.

Because schools are ritual centers cut off from the real living places where we love and hate, we burden them with all the elaborate aspirations that our love and labor are too meager and narrow to bear.
Madeline Grumet

Let us answer this book of ink with a book of flesh and blood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Organizing around purpose

The second level of storytelling includes the planned and structured stories we use to organize our lives. Politicians call stories at this level of narration “campaigns.� Scientists call them “experiments.� Teachers usually call them “unit plans.� They are scripts we intentionally create, aiming at goals we consciously choose. They are the larger stories we want our lives to follow. They are the stories of our purposes and of what happens as we pursue those purposes.

What intentionally planned stories schools tell is a subject that every faculty should be able to discuss fluently. We know from experience that the most powerful learning occurs when we become protagonists in our own learning: pursuing desires, facing obstacles, meeting opportunities, making decisions, and arriving at conclusions. In many workshops, I’ve asked people to tell me the most significant thing they remember learning. The answer is always a story. Because we are made to live and learn through story, turning schoolinlg into a story requires neither pedagogical brilliance nor a complicated theory.

It mostly requires that we attempt something. A couple of years ago I visited with an unusually intelligent young man who had dropped out of school after ninth grade. “They never did anything,” he explained. Not doing anything, or not seeming to do anything, is a fatal mistake for schools. Getting ready for a test doesn’t count, unless the test itself means something.

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Levels of storytelling, Part 1
     Everyday stories

Early in the twentieth century, William Graham Sumner in Folkways pointed out that stories such as Bud Cheff’s a person learns “what conduct is approved or disapproved; what kind of man is admired most; how he ought to behave in all kinds of cases; and what he ought to believe and respect.” He reminds us that “all this constitutes . . . the most essential and important education.”

This level of everyday narration may be thought of as a first level of storytelling. It goes on among us almost without pause. If the values we express in this level of narration aren’t consistent with what we say we believe and want, then we probably aren’t going where we think are.

Teachers who complain about administrators, for example, but also claim that students should respect their authority are, at best, incoherent. To get a grasp on what a school actually teaches, as opposed to what it merely espouses, visit the teachers’ lounge and listen to the stories teachers are telling about students, parents, and administrators. This will give you a better guide to a school’s moral intelligence and purpose than whatever is said in character classes or board meetings.

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America’s future depends on us
     Feeling young in eastern Montana

Ed Marston makes a point I’ve talked about before. The Rocky Mountain and Great Plains states are related to the eastern states in somewhat the way the American colonies were related to England in, say, 1770. Those who feel they are at the center of power feel we are rustic provincials. Marston suggests that nonetheless it might be up to us to decide America’s future:

. . .in the end, of course, the scorned, cultureless colonies triumphed and came to dominate the English-speaking world. They succeeded because the colonists had, in addition to several million square miles of land at their backs, aggression, pride and a genius for politics.

A couple summers ago I put on an institute for teachers, and all our speakers from out of state commented on the sense of desolation they got driving through the eastern part of the state. If you judge Harlowton or Chester by the standards of a Portland strip mall, it might seem to be lacking. But when I’m out there, my overwhelming sense is of a young world, full of possibililty.

When I visit Portland or Seattle, my overwhelming sense is, “My goodness. It’s too late.”

Building education communities with weblogs
     Staying in touch, thinking together

Craig Nansen’s report on weblogs in education includes links to the most often citied blogs that deal with schools.

Blogs are more than just personal journals. They can provide news information a lot easier than trying to create and update web sites. Political and War blogs allow people to publish information to those that are interested, often several times per day. Just imagine if Lewis and Clark had been able to publish their journals to the web on a daily basis…

Teaching and writing
     Better teachers are active readers

Over on Pedablogue Michael Arnzen discusses the relationship between reading and teaching.

Reading non-fiction can enhance teaching, even in ways we don’t realize. . . They outline a “process,” usually following the steps in chronological order one must take to put something together, or to go from point A to point B, or to simply arrive at some understanding of an abstract idea. Obviously. But the strategies the writers take teach us along the way about teaching. Whether it’s sharing a personal experience as an example, coaching us to do a little exercise in the margins, offering us insider secrets and tricky methods...it’s all teaching strategy as much as it is information. . .

A good deal of what I’ve learned about consciously planning a sequence of experiences for learners, I’ve learned from writers. Arnzen also mentions the relationship between teaching and writing, suggesting that writing is essential for teachers:

Of course, writing—the active organization of knowledge—really does the work to make such knowledge about the teaching process conscious, and this partially explains why educators must write theses and dissertations. If you can write a book, you can probably teach a course (and not just in the subject of the book itself), though obviously there’s more to teaching than just organizing ideas.

The nexus of being a learner and being a teacher and being a reader and being a writer can be a vital center: trying to organize our minds in response to the riches around and within us.

Attending to the Narrative Environment
     The importance of story in the Heritage Project

School comes alive when the work students are doing makes sense to them--in other words, when the story of school
fits the the personal story of their lives. Heritage projects at their best help young people become self-consciously part of that local history, adding their stories and their work to its legacy. Their presentations can become a permanent part of the town’s archives, saved forever in the local museum, where it can be added to presentations done by students in earlier years, and where other student research will be added in future years. 

Quests sometimes fail, are abandoned or dissipated into distractions; and human lives may in all these ways also fail. But the only criteria for success or failure in a human life as a whole are the criteria of success or failure in a narrated or to-be-narrated quest.
Alasdair MacIntyre

Reality is a story–not just a tale that is told but a story that is really so.
Robert P. Roth

Connecting with students means inviting them into a story

School comes alive when the work students are doing makes sense to them--in other words, when the story of school
fits the the personal story of their lives.

It helps when teachers remember--in spite of directives from afar--that students are particular people living in a particular place, and that the history of that place has everything to do with who they are and what their prospects are.

Heritage projects at their best help young people become self-consciously part of that local history, adding their stories and their work to its legacy. Their presentations can become a permanent part of the town’s archives, saved forever in the local museum, where it can be added to presentations done by students in earlier years, and where other student research will be added in future years.

Marsha, a blond girl from Libby with interested eyes, once told me that what she liked most about the Heritage Project was the team research and the friendships that were formed. Their research involved visiting libraries, interviewing people, and going to archives. While I ate a BLT she told me things she had learned, her stories of searching and finding.

Our lives have a narrative structure, and we not only learn in narrative, but, as Barbara Olsen said, we also dream, plan, hate, love, fear, flirt, teach, gossip, regret, recover, taunt and woo in narrative. 

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