Cedar Place has been trying to come together, as a collective, to learn to tell stories together. New stories. It began with a discussion about a tree being cut down behind the centre. The children were intrigued, curious, and affected by the process of the tree coming down. It was noisy. It required ropes but little discussion or warning that this was going to happen (my understanding is that workers came and took the tree down quite quickly). Some of the children retold the story to their parents over many days.
We’ve been thinking with Donna Haraway’s concept of “storytelling for earthly survival”. Johanna and Diana have been making space for Key to take the lead in storying the life of a tree. Many trees. But one in particular that now lives in their centre. Its life story is unfolding on the wall (with markers and paint) while children sit in a circle to listen and engage. Some children shout back at Key-tree as she tells stories. Others sit silently watching. Some squirm and try to walk away (but not as many as you might think). Most seem interested to see what is happening. Some try get up very close to Key-tree to watch her paint. Some notice who goes in and out of the circle. These moments of coming together have become somewhat of an event where Key puts on her tree hat and become ‘Key-tree-story-teller’.
Fabrizio Terranova (2016) created a film called ‘Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival’, whose “contributions to feminist studies of science and technology resist and even rebel against hegemonic ways of thinking and living. But what form should such stories take? What might they sound or feel like?”
It is Donna Haraway’s ideas about “storytelling for earthly survival” that came to mind when Cedar first met with me (Narda) to discussed inquiry ideas for experimenting with ‘collectivity’. It still does. I am fascinated by everyone’s openness to keep trying to tell new stories with the children as a collective and the way that the children ‘stick with it’, you all ‘stick with it’ and how much effort everyone is doing to ‘stick with it’ even if there have been uncomfortable moments and moments of not knowing where things are going.
In the film, Donna Haraway talks about what is required to do restorative, collective work in the process of striving to create more livable worlds. Whatever we decide ‘it’ is (that is, whatever we decide is the focus/problem/issue we need to work on together)…She says:
"The only way to come to grips with 'it'. To come into the presence of 'it' is to constantly keep doing positive things. You have to keep trying to make an experiment work. You have to constantly keep writing this particular story, not some story in general, but this story...The only possible way is to - again and again and again - engage each other in doing something."
Last week’s inquiry time took a turn…
Original intentions to go to the forest were derailed by the wind and parental concerns about safety after a large branch fell in front of a parent’s car (?). The children were excited to go outside when I arrived, but instead of simply saying no or trying to redirect their attention away from the wind Key, Johanna and Diana decided to ‘stay with the trouble’ of the wind and invite the children to think about why we could not go to the forest. They met the children’s desire with respect and created the conditions for them to witness the wind and listen to the story it was telling with the trees.
With the wind pushing recycling around the parking lot (part of the story too), we watched huge Douglas fir trees sway as gusts of wind wound their way through with you all on the edge. “Not today!!” shouted one child. Another tried to run to collect recycling that was swirling in the parking lot (stopped by Xiao who picked it up with him).
Before we left a chorus of voices shouted encouragement to the trees:
“Hold on!!!!!!”
“Be strooooong!!!!”
“Hold on!!!”
We walked back to the centre. Another tree-Key story emerged.
This time the story transformed children into hungry frogs, unsuspecting educators and a pedagogist into insect-infested trees, after the tree on the wall grew and changed in the process of the new story being told. At the end of it all: frogs were fed, trees stopped itching, the tree on the wall grew a thicker trunk with a hole so the owls had a home. All the while, the wind-story became something other than simply a shutting down or diverting attention story.
Peter Moss mentions ‘the Dark Mountain Project’ in a book that addresses the importance of learning to tell new stories in early childhood education: :
“We believe that the roots of the converging crisis of our times lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves…We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.” (Dark Mountain Project, 2009a)
“The Dark Mountain Project is a network of writers, artists and thinkers ‘who have stopped believing the stories our civilization tells itself…[as the world enters] an age of ecological collapse, material contraction and social and political unravelling’. These once potent stories but now unbelievable stories, they contend:”
Tell us that humanity is separate from all other life and destined to control it; that the ecological and economic crises we face are mere technical glitches; that anything that cannot be measured cannot matter. But these stories are losing their power. We see them falling apart before out eyes. (Dark Mountain Project, 2009b)
Reference:
Middleton (2019):