Cultural imaginaries and oral traditions as creative resources for connecting home storytelling to English learning

• In Event: Early grade reading and language

Proposal

When teachers and learners of English face challenging circumstances such as limited access to books and teaching supplies, local practices such as oral storytelling traditions can provide creative resources for supporting language and literacy development. We describe how a cultural imaginary of stories told by Rwandan and U.S. students supported dramatic retelling through reader’s theater in English camps for Rwandan upper elementary school students. The students embodied and dramatized their favorite stories written in English or Kinyarwanda and redesigned them into readers theater scripts. Often these stories originated from creative storytelling practices by the students in their homes, thus illustrating how storytelling traditions connected funds of knowledge from home to resources for teaching and learning.

We provide an account of a co-curricular intercultural community project that provided Rwandan schoolchildren with opportunities to create and illustrate their stories, many drawn from oral collective imagination and tradition (Gallagher, 2007). Of these stories, several were adapted as reader's theater scripts for use in summer English camps from 2012 to 2017. We reflect on emerging insights about creativity that we have gathered through engagement with reading in a rural Rwandan community. At the school, we have collaborated with educators, parents and civic leaders to accomplish several initiatives, the most important being the creative of annual anthologies of stories written by the students and their US counterparts. Other initiatives have included establishing a reading room and building a playground at the school. While asking children about the stories that they have read recently and would like to read soon, we have noticed that frequently their stories come from oral storytelling rather than from books. This is likely due to the low availability of reading materials for the students. The community has no bookstores or libraries, apart from a few school libraries, and families prioritize purchasing textbooks that are required for school rather books for pleasure reading. The stories the children tell us have formed the basis for some of the curriculum that we have developed for the English camp that are offered for two weeks every July.

To illustrate what these stories are like, we will begin with two anecdotes from our field notes and interview transcripts of the stories of “Nyansha and Baba” and “The Truth Passes through Fire without Being Burnt,” presented interactively in a storytelling style. These stories and the oral mode of communicating them, usually in Kinyarwanda, represent funds of knowledge (Moll, 2015; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) that are still not fully recognized in the primary school. They illustrate how the home is an important setting where oral tradition, cultural imaginaries and textbook stories intersect and mingle. Literacy scholars no longer view written language as the foundation for analytical thought, logic, and reason (e.g. Ong, 1980), but dismissive attitudes towards orality as a rightful aspect of children’s social and cultural context in schooling can still persist. In postcolonial settings where education systems were modeled after Westernized education, the potential of funds of knowledge represented by family and community oral storytelling are still frequently undermined and undervalued.

Funds of knowledge research has addressed the skills sets of the parents, their cultural and linguistic knowledge, and their daily living practices, all of which might not be fully reflected by the school curriculum. Other work has documented how young learners incorporate stories from popular literacies originating from the media, digital, and consumer-based storytelling into their literate play (Dyson, 1998, 2003). Oral traditions of students whose families have immigrated to the US have been deployed as texts for reading and drama (e.g. Souryasack & Lee, 2007). In research with young learners, the "collective imaginaries” of shared discourses, multimodal performances, and cultural spaces are oriented in ways that are seamless in the experiences of the learners (Wohlwend & Medina, 2013, p. 6), suggesting that the commonplace distinctions imposed on schooling—in-school or out-of-school, global, local or glocal, digital or face-to-face, or crossing political boundaries—really have little to do with the ways that young children experience learning. Although we initially adopted reader's theater for the research-based benefits of the pedagogy, our experiences with the storytelling skills of the students have shown that the practice also respects the creative storytelling traditions of their homes.

We will proceed with a description of the literacy and language learning activities that help the children to write their stories, the process of selecting stories for bilingual Kinyarwanda-English publication, the creation of the reader’s theater script based on a selected story, and pedagogy of the reader’s class where the young learners perform the story. Our presentation will include visual images and short video clips. Audience members will be able to receive a pre-print copy of our article, which is due to appear in a special issue of the TESOL Journal, as well as off-prints of reader’s theater scripts that have been adapted from stories written by US and Rwandan children.

Authors

• Beth Lewis Samuelson, Indiana University Bloomington

• G Yeon Park, The Catholic University of Korea

• Simon Pierre Munyaneza, Indiana University Bloomington