Understanding the experience of story : a grade six classroom
Date
1989
Authors
Scharr, Doreen Edyth
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Abstract
What is the essence of story? What makes a story? What is it to listen to a story? What is it to become a storyteller? What is it that keeps us keen to story--that satisfies us, but leaves us contemplating more than simple resolution?
These are the questions of this curriculum study. Often, once children leave the primary school grades, we, as teachers, assume that they have the capacity to read for themselves and that it is no longer necessary to read to them. What happens when oral story is given a place in the intermediate and middle classroom? What can we learn from students' responses to and interaction with story? How do children make sense of stories that may have little or no resemblance to their daily reality? This study focuses on a grade six classroom. Research of the lived experience of the student in his/her encounter with oral story is approached as a phenomenological question. What happens when the child encounters story? What basic concepts underlie children's understandings of story?
How are these translated into reality? What kind of meanings do children seem to find in stories? Are these logical, rational, moral, affective? Do stories serve as more than a means for developing imagination? This research describes the experiences as reported and verbalized by children in a grade six classroom in order to understand how imaginary content transfers into real content. The research looks at themes as they emerge in students' writings and dialogues.
Phenomenological research is a matter of gaining insight--of investigating experience as we live it, rather than as we conceptualize it. Phenomenological research is a matter of careful and thoughtful reflection on the essential themes that characterize student encounter with story. It is also a matter of dialogue--a collaborative activity involving teller, listener, and text. The curriculum study is practical. It seeks to provide for the justification and legitimation of the use of oral story in the classroom--and not just for preschool and elementary children. It is practical in that it attempts to provide fundamental understandings of the student/teacher experience in coming to know story (the commonalities of the story experience). It is practical in being critical and reflective, leaning on interpretative and interpersonal understandings. The research focuses on what children say. The use of phenomenological research here is to study the world as we experience it, taking into account social conditions and historical situations relevant to genuine understanding of the students. It involves an awareness of sensation and concept--myself and others, teacher and students.
In this research, using story in the classroom is seen as a way of teaching--to keep communication and the creation of meanings as central activities. The use of story in the curriculum is seen as a way of allowing the teacher to become sensitive to ways children experience the complexity of the elements of story. Story is seen as a form of communication--as a way of inviting others into the listening and telling experience. What is the secret of story that captivates us? What is it that allows for dialogue of various dimensions? In inviting children to story, we invite a different response than that which results from calling them to task. Since teaching is in part the communication of meanings, story can play a significant part in understanding how children find or do not find meaning in the context of what and how we teach.