Word-Slam Stories as Venues for Stimulating Learning and Developing Agency with Urban High School Students

Tell your story as if you are supposed to be there As if you have all the power. Amy Cuddy Our research project focused on improving learning for 9th graders in an inner city high school where we chose to work with personal story writing as a foundation for teaching English Language Arts (Pinhasi-Vittorio & Ben-Yosef, 2014). We were assigned 2 classrooms of students with a history of failure and slim prospects of success. Although each a unique human being, these African American and Hispanic children could jointly be characterized as socially and economically disenfranchised youth. Many had arrived from junior high school with few credits while others were locked into the classroom for the duration of the school day due to behavior issues. They were expected to learn - new computers were expected any day for use during free time to catch up on credits (which are the points a student is expected to collect for work completed by the end of school) ..., but, computers never materialized and being locked in a room "like animals" (a student's comment) was, of course, counter-productive to academic learning. Why Stories? Looking for fresh ways of incorporating more nonfiction into their English classrooms, Kirby and Kirby (2010) found personal narratives (which they call contemporary memoirs) to be "ideal" for using with teens "to improve their abilities in sophisticated reading, writing, critical thinking, and inquiry strategies" because teachers can guide the writing to become sites of "honest unfolding of human struggles and triumphs from which important lessons are learned, significant family events are preserved, and generations of family members braid the cord of their lived experiences" (p. 22). This resonated with our belief that learning emanates from the learner and is closely associated with personal lives, cultures, passions, histories. We chose to use personal stories in our ELA classrooms to raise initial student engagement with reading and writing due to the intimacy of the material. These would then become a jumping board to increased interest in school learning in general. A bigger goal down the road was for students to begin seeing themselves as agents of personal and social change (Freire, 1997; Greene, 2001; Welsh, 2014). The storytelling activities were intended to humanize the learning environments we shared by inviting in students' experiences and knowledge upon which to build new knowledge (Andrews, 2010; Piaget & Inhelder, 1969); to highlight students' instrumentality in their own educational process and help them make sense of the world while affirming our universal yearning for agency (Hirth, 2002). The personal story of which the student is expert and master was to be both platform and scaffold for furthering students' academic learning. Personal stories also "... reveal truths and mysteries of lives we would never know if the author had not chosen to take us there" (Kirby & Kirby, 2010, p. 24) providing teachers with a deeper understanding of the children's abilities, knowledge base and needs, the networks of relationships enmeshing their life. Listening to both the stories and the silences showed us more holistic pictures of the children. One day, Jacob (1) reappeared in school wearing yellow and blue necklaces. When asked about them he didn't respond. Later someone explained that Jacob had joined a gang and those were its colors--an eye-opening story for realizing other ways of being and the complexity of situations as we worked to reach and teach every student. Theoretical Framework A complexity perspective on human behavior Human behavior is a complex system characterized by multiple components in interaction. In such a system, the focus is on relations and interdependencies between the elements (e.g., teacher-students-environment-time-place) and not on elements on their own ("a student", "classroom size"), since no isolated element can explain the behavior of the system as a whole. …