Storytelling: Fictional Narratives, Imaginary People, and the Reader's Real Life

    I and the public know
    What all school children learn
    Those to whom evil is done
    Do evil in return.
    W.H. Auden
    There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.
    Zora Neale Hurston
  

Introduction

In the last few months, several of my former high school students have made the news: one was fatally shot in a local gang altercation; another was arrested for two armed robberies; the third made national news for his shootout on the courthouse steps. I have spent most of the last decade of my teaching career in alternative schools which specialize in working with students who are considered at-risk because they have not been academically or socially successful, or both, in their home schools. The behaviors and circumstances that prevent their success range from chronic absences, poverty, and parenthood to substance abuse and criminal behaviors. This coming year, though, will be my first year teaching students who are almost exclusively at school to meet a parole requirement. Criminality is their commonality.

What journey does a seventeen-year-old take to get to this place? Almost always, the journey involves trauma, whether a single debilitating event or a chronic history of it. It may have been a natural disaster—I've taught several refugees from Hurricane Katrina—or abuse, whether verbal, physical, or sexual. It turns out that the courthouse shooter's brother had been fatally shot by police in an altercation that developed when they were questioning him about someone else. This had happened a few months before he showed up in my classroom, and the effects of his grief in his behavior were already apparent. Two of my students, having met several years before at a camp for children of parents in prison, became reacquainted in my classroom, dated for a year, and together parented a child who died within a few months after suffocating while sleeping in their bed. Trauma on top of trauma.

I set out to find out how this trauma manifested itself in my classroom, and, as an English teacher, what I could do about it. I found clear connections among recidivism, past traumatic experience, and literacy deficits. The next step was to find out how I might address the effects of these connections. I discovered that a course of writing therapy coupled with literary instruction could be an antidote. I propose that, in classrooms with any significant number of at-risk students, therapeutic writing be a prescribed practice, especially paired with sound reading instruction. It will be in mine. In fact, Jeffrey Berman says, "It may be far riskier not to allow our students to write about their fears and conflicts." ¹

By Marian MacCurdy's definition, trauma is an event or situation so overwhelming that we cannot process it because it does not fit into our existing cognitive grid of experience and emotion. ² Clearly, trauma exists in the lives of many young people from infants to college students. As teachers, this matters to us because the existence of trauma inhibits the ability to process, maintain, and use academic learning. Intuitively, as teachers we know this, but research also consistently indicates that stresses after disasters (and other traumatic events) in the lives of adolescents "can be manifested in poor decisions, risky behaviors, distrust of adults, violent outbursts and/or withdrawal." ³ All of these symptoms have been present in my classroom. For example, these "poor decisions" have come in the form of substance abuse and avoidance of birth control, both of which can lead to a chain of difficult decisions and far-reaching consequences, like addiction, unplanned parenthood, or abortion. Post-Katrina, teachers in New Orleans reported "an intellectual passivity, difficulty with maintaining in-depth study, a numbness to learning, difficulty with acquiring information, prone to argument and more physical violence, and a need for more personal affirmation and hope." ⁴ These symptoms persist in my classroom and others like mine, even when morale among students is generally good and the setting is welcoming.

These destructive behaviors are commonly accompanied by another trait: lagging academic achievement. So while traumatic experiences influence academic performance, conversely, Katsiyannis and his team explain that there is a direct correlation between low academic performance and incarceration and recidivism rates. ⁵ In fact, according to Rogers-Adkinson's team, the lack of functional literacy is perhaps the strongest common denominator among individuals in corrections." ⁶ 85% of adjudicated youth in the cited study performed at lower rates academically than their non-offending peers. This unit will encourage healing writing practices while teaching specific English Language Arts objectives intended to increase literacy and writing skills.

It should be noted that many contemporary high schools, especially in high-poverty or inner city situations, encounter similar students; they just do not have criminal records or have not found their way into concentrated groups or alternative education environments. All or parts of this unit would be appropriate for any students facing these realities.