Tell Me Your Story…
Have you ever met someone that tells a good story? As they tell the story, you are just pulled in and can imagine being there in the middle of it all? Sometimes the story is funny, while at other times it’s filled with challenges and tragic events. We all might not be gifted storytellers, but every single one of us has a story to tell that deserves to be heard.
As educators, part of our job is to tell stories. Some of us do this in the classic way of weaving together historical events to help students better understand what and why things happened the way they did. Other teachers use the written word through the perspective of various authors, past and current, to provide context that can be factual or fictional. As a biology and chemistry teacher, my goal was to tell a story by leaving out key bits of information. Missing information requires students to follow a path of scientific discovery to formulate a hypothesis and then conduct research to determine the most likely reasons why things happen the way they do. The same process can be applied when assisting students to uncover their own feelings and stories.
One of the most significant tasks for every educator is building a connection with their student while helping them to uncover, understand, and appreciate their own stories. While we might experience some similar events during our lifetimes, each of us has our own unique story. As human beings, our brains evolved to look for patterns. The concept of “average”, or a single typical example representing the whole, comes from our need to identify patterns, even if they are wrong. This concept seems even more prevalent today. If someone falls on either side of debate, they are either a Republican or a Democrat or pro-this and anti-that. Once they are categorized as one party or the other, far too many of us assume that everyone in that party thinks and believes the same thing. Every person put into a pattern grouping is the exact same despite their inherent differences and personal stories.
As someone who grew up in a rural farming community in Western New York, almost everything was homogenized, whether we realized it or not. Only after being exposed to the greater world, did I begin to truly realize how different each of our experiences can be. Differences from one community to another, from one neighborhood to another, and one person to another provide us with much needed varied perspectives and understanding. These perspectives come from the different stories each of us live. Some of the components in our stories will be similar, even when we come from very different places, geographically and culturally. The challenge is to listen and truly hear the stories of those with different lived experiences, without being dismissive, even if we may not agree with some of their perspectives, opinions, or ideas.
When we don’t acknowledge the stories of others, we do irreparable harm to not only the people who are sharing them, but ourselves. How can we truly understand ourselves if we fail to recognize the stories of others? By failing to do so, we further isolate ourselves from other perspectives, which in turn, reaffirms the beliefs and ideas of the circle we most often tread. The concept of isolation in this context was a powerful realization for me. I have Dr. Marck Abraham to thank for that. I not only consider Dr. Abraham a colleague on a shared mission of making this world a better place, but also a friend. We may come from very different lived experiences, but the passion we share binds us together. By actively working to break down real and self-created barriers to our isolation, we can begin to empathetically listen to each other’s stories without looking to fix others. If we can open our ears, minds, and hearts to others it means we are willing to affirm their truths thereby providing a far richer story for all of us to share as one people.
