and Online Settings

Centering Student Stories 4

Before anything else, teachers must consider the perspectives of their students to situate them right at the center of their own learning. That means educators, as excited and knowledgeable as they are about the content they teach, need to protect space for student voices as they plan and carry out their lessons. Teachers in connected classrooms are not mere dispensers of knowledge, spouting out wisdom and hoping their students catch it. They don’t want their students to, as some educators say, sit and get (that is, sit in their chairs, hear information, and regurgitate it for the sole purpose of a test grade).

Instead, these teachers want students to have ownership over their learning and to get excited about topics, ask questions, find meaning in their work, apply one concept to another area, and even challenge concepts and curriculum. What a mountainous series of tasks! How do you both effectively communicate learning objectives and foster critical thinking? The answer is (you guessed it) through connection. And making these connections requires storytelling—although not the type of storytelling you might be thinking of (as you’ll discover as you read on).

This chapter features narratives from five practitioners who have found their way to the online classroom. Jill Clingan, Lou Jobst, Megan Lilien,

Essential Question

How can educators cultivate connection through story sharing in online and blended classrooms?

Chapter Learning Objectives y Revisit your educator origin story and connect it to your current hopes and goals.

y Build opportunities for empathy with students.

y Incorporate music and poetry into content-based learning and student reflection.

y Support diversity, equity, and inclusion through class conversations and activities.

Key Terms

center. To bring into focus, to honor, or to cast as important. People can center identities,

experiences, ideas, voices, and individuals.

Centering is an important practice in inclusion and equity work.

classroom culture. The environment where student learning takes place. A positive

classroom culture fosters honest perspective sharing and respect.

empathy. The learned practice of actively listening to someone’s story and striving to emotionally connect with them.

equity. The practice of evaluating and understanding context and individual needs to determine support and resource distribution. (This is both in contrast and

in cooperation with equality approaches, where all individuals have the same supports and resources regardless of context and individual needs.)

margins. Metaphorically, people create margins through the circles they draw around groups to define them. Identities and

experiences inside the margins are included and centered by dominant cultures, whereas identities and experiences outside the circles are often excluded, unknown, feared, or made invisible by dominant cultures (related term: marginalized). story-based curriculum. Lessons that emphasize the beginning-middle-end (or continuation) of a topic for student exploration in this pattern: “What can we learn from the past, how does this affect our

community now, and what responsibility and roles do we have moving ahead?” Nina Sprouse, and Greg Soden didn’t start their teaching careers in online and blended classrooms, yet they have learned more about connection, story, and relationships in those spaces than they could have imagined. Teaching is a learning journey. Journeys offer opportunities to start anew while staying true to the lesson learned, shedding what was not useful before and adventurously weaving in new ideas and approaches.

As you read the educator narratives and strategies in this chapter, consider the perspectives, family knowledge, cultural identities, and lived experiences that your students bring to the classroom. How can you leverage your students’ prior knowledge and strengths to connect and also to deepen your class community? In this chapter, you’ll consider making space for student voices, thinking intentionally about interaction, and asking important questions about who you represent in your curriculum and how. To reference an educational conference that our school community led, and that Jill references in her narrative (page 109), these stories all point to the transformative power of connection through story sharing.

Connection Built Through Stories

Educators host groups of students in their classrooms for only short periods of time, always keeping in mind that the time they spend together is meant to prepare students for the next course in a content area, the next grade, the next education level, and their communities and lives ahead. What happens when students walk away from class for the last time? They still have more to learn. They still have challenges to overcome. They still have growing to do. Through the power of story and connection, empathy moves educators beyond a single successful year with students and into the lifelong learning journey they hope that young people have.

Most teachers want students to go beyond memorizing facts to pass the test at the end of a chapter; instead, they want students to wrestle with big ideas and connect to stories across course themes. Lifelong, impactful learning is all about the story—what students learn from it, what it means for them now, and how they interact with it. Table 4.1 (page 108) shares several examples of what this learning looks like across content areas in the blended school system.

All content areas can utilize a story-based design. Through stories, students learn to connect and communicate with others. As students think about the power of stories and look at course content, educators hope to engage them not through the lens of “Will this be on the test?” but with the perspective of “What can I learn about myself and the world through this story?”

Stories open up space for students’ voices to take residence in their classroom. Educators must take responsibility for protecting and keeping open the space stories work to create. How teachers and students come to a place of trust and acknowledgment, and a place that allows them to examine other stories and share their own, points again to the learned skill of empathy. Educators may not have an anxiety disorder that demands they turn off their camera in the middle of class to take deep breaths, but they certainly have experienced worry and stress. Teachers don’t always know whether a student has lost a parent or sibling to violence or disease, but they have experienced loss in many heartbreaking forms over the years. Teachers might not know what it’s like to struggle in their content area so much that doing well in (or even passing) the course seems out of reach, but they have faced other challenges they had to stare down and overcome. Like their students, sometimes teachers succeed, and sometimes they don’t, and teachers and students understand this about each other as well.