Greylcok Plays: More than a single story...

Student Art I'd Love to Own

I've been thinking about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story a lot lately: So about a month ago I wrote about TED talk that I had come to appreciate about the dangers of a single story: History May Not Repeat Itself... March 8, 2015. As I thought about it more and more, I decided to assign watching this talk to my students and get their input. Boy, do I love reading my students' ideas when they have something to say. Here is one of the many lines that resonated with me:

If someone wanted to know about me, and only asked someone who barely knew me, or asked someone who don't like me, they would get the wrong information and make that person think poorly of me. If they asked someone who knew me well or loved me, they would get a completely different story and hopefully their opinion of me or my story would be a good one.

Some Music Enters into my focus about story: I attended a student concert during a "directed study" block last week. It was glorious: I watched a math teacher and a newspaper editor become an Irish influenced folk duo. I listened as cross country athletes edged into pop/garage rock, I reveled in the student organized and hosted event that is quickly becoming tradition in my school. I heard one song after another thinking to myself, "Our students are so cool!"

It's a trap: While I listened to the concert, thinking how talented these kids were, wondering when and how they had tome to develop even more talents that I had not known about, I had a worry. My worry stemmed from how often I had tried to connect to my students over the years by getting to know them beyond their abilities in social studies class... but I had fallen into a trap. The girl who loves horses, the kid who lives to play D&D, the football player who turns heads with his abilities, the artist who makes me want to buy student art. Each of these kids who I had connected with, who accepted me in because I had taken an interest, had sadly become students with two stories; social studies, and their special thing. Although I made the correct first step to know more about my students than what they shared academically, I stopped once I found one passion. I had replaced a single story with another single story.

I have a lot of work ahead of me I think: The solution is simple, I think. What if I make my class more personal? What if the questions we ask both address the "content" and the "personal relevance"? Maybe I get to see more and learn more while still remaining the teacher...

Storytelling: "The Danger of a Single Story"...

I love trolling the interwebs...

Lecture is not dead: I like TED talks. I like the 10-20 minute kernel of presentation-ness that they are. I like that they are free-for-me. So from time to time I troll the TED pages looking for the talks that others believe are the best. There are nearly 2000 talks uploaded to date. It is nice when others can vet them somewhat for me. (If you are not familiar with TED: webite, wikipedia entry.)

Better late than never: The other day I searched "must-see" instead of "best" TED talks. There is some overlap in the two searches, but I was interested in the ones I had not seen before. It seems TED has put together a primer under the heading "must-see" for people just like me. The title of one talk, in particular, about story caught my eye; The Danger of a Single Story. I have sent a lot of time this year thinking about "story" and it features in much of my blog. The further I go, the more I am realizing how essential "story" needs to be featured in education. I am a little saddened that I seem to be just arriving at a conclusion that most teachers, writers, performers, probably arrived at much earlier in their lives. Well, Better late than never...

"The Danger of a Single Story": Chimanmanda Ngozi Adichie's talk is just under 19 minutes, enjoyable to watch, and poignant. Her demeanor is likable; her humor is on target; her insight is wise. I'm in love with this presentation...

I have included links: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story and the full transcript of her talk. I hope you will watch it, and not just read it. Her voice is part of this story; her pace, patient; her eyes, alive. I have not read her work, but now intend to. If any of her insight can be found in her fiction (how could it not?), it will be well worth the read...

I do not address them in my review, but it is in the details of Adichie's talk that you will find her humility and human-ness, her humor and bite, the stuff worth listening to... Stories about her development as a writer and as a person, her memories of childhood and experiences in college. Give it a listen, you will not be disappointed.

But beyond Adicie's story about story, there some meta insights that I wish to draw attention to. These are the pieces of wisdom that I wish to apply to different contexts beyond the one offered in her talk. Here are a few quotes I will be chewing on for a while...

Vulnerabilities:

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children.

Power:

It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

 Incompleteness:

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Dignity:

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

Paradise:

When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.