Thomas and Stornaiuolo's focus is on young adults, and reading their article made me think of some of the ways that restorying might be applied to early reading experiences. I've often heard people explain that they don't teach critical literacy to young children because they aren't ready for the types of conversations critical literacy brings up. Conversations about gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, ability, and more can be complicated with young children. The adult has to navigate sharing an age-appropriate amount of information while continuing to make sense and simultaneously avoid promoting one world-view over another, especially if the adult is, oh say, a teacher working with someone else's children. Talk about some tricky dance moves.
That said, my son (who is six) made up a game THREE years ago called, "Fair/Not Fair." First, he shares a hypothetical situation, then we have to decide if it's fair or not. It's his favorite game. And he likes it when it gets really tricky. And he introduces it to all his friends. And they love it. Because young children love to think about how the world works and why the world works the way it does. And that, to me, is what critical literacy does.
So, I decided that for this blog post, I would play with restorying, a tool of critical literacy, by applying it in ways that are developmentally appropriate to early readers.
In the article, Thomas and Stornaiuolo identify six types of restorying: alterverse, transmedia storytelling, counterstorytelling, collective storytelling, alternate history, and bending. I used an incredibly scientific method of collecting books to try out with each type of restorying: I picked a bunch of my son's books off his bookshelf. Then, I played with how a kindergartener might explore each of the six types of restorying, either at the request of a teacher or independently. Results below.
Alterverse
This involves placing one character in the world of another. In order to make that happen, I needed two books. The first two books in the pile were Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day and The Magic School Bus: Lost in the Solar System. Perfect! I put Alexander in Miss Frizzle's class and imagined what would happen. Alexander wouldn’t have to cross any cultural barriers, but he would be very surprised when the bus turned into a spaceship.Transmedia Storytelling
Restorying via transmedia means changing the mode in which a story is told. Young readers already do this all the time when they act out stories that they’ve read. But what's a way that I could do it that would encourage restorying that engages with perspectives other than the ones already present in Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day? What if, for example, young readers studying the blues turned Alexander's story into a blues song? That would involve considering the cultural significance and historical implications of the blues and what it would mean to put Alexander’s story into that context.
Counterstorytelling
Counterstorytelling
Collective Storytelling
Collective storytelling is when readers tell a story as a group using participatory means of communication, often social media tools. By telling the story as a group, they can challenge dominant stories of how things are. And the next book is There is a Bird on Your Head.This one's kind of hard because early readers generally aren't on Twitter (get it - it's about a BIRD?!).
In the book, elephant has a problem (spoiler: it’s a bird on his head), and he only solves the problem when he speaks to the bird directly. What if each student in a class decided on something that affected him/her each day and then picked an object to represent it, and took a photo with the object on their head? Each student could narrate 1-2 sentences to an adult about what the object represented, and the pictures and text could be posted in the classroom. Follow-up might involve discussions about ways to help each other solve problems and about empathy for the things that weigh other people down.
Alternate History
Huh. This one’s particularly hard to restory with an alternate history because the story already takes place outside of present reality. Plus, every alternate history I can think of ruins the story in some horrible way.
For example, why does the young sledder live alone in a one-room house on the top of a mountain where animals have developed the ability to sled? Clearly, nuclear winter. My imagination is making the story sad.
As much as alternate histories can be totally appropriate for restorying, I think that maybe not every story can be restoried in every way.
Bending
So, what did I learn from my (ridiculously long) post? First, when I applied restorying to younger literacy, the play and imagination involved felt very appropriate to an audience of young readers. Second, different ways of restorying fit different books better. I'm still frustrated by my inability to apply alternate history to Red Sled. Third, when I grabbed six books off the shelf at random in my house, four of them featured all or predominantly White characters, and five of them featured all or predominantly male characters. So, I have some work to do with my bookshelves.
Thomas, E.E. & Stornaiuolo, A. (2016). Restorying the self: Bending toward textual justice. Harvard Educational Review, 86(3), 313-338.
Still with me? Thanks for sticking around for such a long post!
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