"Over the Rainbow": Fantasy Lands, Dream Worlds, and Magic Kingdoms

Introduction and Rationale

Once upon a time, before digital media, I was an only child living in a little, pale green house next to a neglected cemetery. I read books, watched television, talked on a landline, had pen pals, formed one-member clubs, invented siblings, and wrote narratives. I invented backstories for the people whose tombstones I saw on my walks, and would tell my friends about them. I fantasized about life as a grown up, elsewhere. I had a sense of longing for what I knew I was missing, and for what I hoped might come in the future. My imagination was my “bestie.” Life was otherwise fairly simple, and my awkward photographs stayed within the family. There was rarely instant gratification, and the waiting gave me room to think, to dream. That’s how things worked before technology crept in and changed the world. We had alone time. Growing up was painful already, but doing so now—in a time when teens feel the pressure to share every minutiae with their social networks—is a dystopian horror story not even I could have imagined.

My students do not know the world before social media, or before phones that fit in their pockets. They are obsessed with immediacy—the “here and now” of shared experiences. They sometimes recall stories from elementary school, but they rarely, if ever, look forward or outward. They are constantly connected. They sleep with their phones under their pillows after staying up too late tapping, tapping, tapping, consuming, sharing, and tapping. With a few exceptions, my students are firmly rooted in tangible, firmly unimaginative, reality. Since they are constantly connected, there really is no free time for them to think, dream, or imagine. When they do have free time, the siren songs of their mobile devices are too strong to resist, and the potential for imaginative is life cast aside for social media (and the ubiquitous Snapchat filters), videos of people physically fighting, and any game that lets them enter an almost vegetative state.

 When discussing this phenomena based on students being rooted in the “here and now,” my seminar leader, Joe Roach, said he sees the image of “a digital clock, which only shows the self-succeeding now, [showing] neither the past nor the future”¹ as on a face of an analog clock. The face of an analog clock has the capacity to show the past and the future, and its structure enables us to situate ourselves in time by reading where the hands lie on the continuum. This image is painfully apt, as the majority of my students do not know how to read an analog clock. The students are living their stories, but they often lack foresight and hindsight, which are skills they need in order reflect upon their pasts and look toward their futures. While the structure of an analog clock might be lost on my students, I can teach them another structure: narrative. In Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Peter Brooks claims, "We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed."² Narrative is the analog clock: it is the story structure that will help students look forwards and backwards while still knowing where they are on the continuum. Narrative structure will help them tell their own stories, personal and fictional. By understanding narrative, students will begin to understand that “here and now” is the intersection of stories waiting to be told.

Once the students understand narrative structure, they still need to generate content to speak and write their stories. Technology and social media have dulled my students’ imaginations, so it is my job to help them reignite those flames of creativity. In the past, when asked to use their imaginations to write a story, my students have either stared blankly or have regurgitated narratives provided by the media they consume. To counter that vacuum of imagination, I must find engaging alternatives to the various digital environments (social media, video games, etc.) in order to help students reconnect with their imaginations so that they can start writing their own narratives. To do so, one method is to engage the students with existing narratives that have enchanted people for generations by letting them rewrite the stories using ideas from their personal cultures. In “Rewriting ‘Goldilocks’ in the Urban, Multicultural Elementary School,” Heather Lotherington and Sandra Chow observe that their students “envision their cultural worlds as plugged into pop culture; their ideas about culture are more heavily influenced by television than by the physical world around them,”³ I agree with her, and that is why I, too, have decided to have my students examine and then rewrite a familiar cultural narrative. I welcome revisionist folktales with characters borrowed from current pop culture, because most of their imaginations are tied to the media they consume. I also believe my students will still be able to write innovative stories while still participating in this cultural pastiche.

This unit focuses on many aspects of narrative structure and storytelling in order to awaken hibernating imaginations and provide time-tested frameworks that will inspire the students to write their own narratives. Students will learn pieces of narratology and structuralism through the examination of  “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” or “The Story of the Three Bears.” Once they understand how that plot functions, they will use the same lens of narratology to explore other folktales in groups and independently. For group and independent work, they will choose from stories that fall under the four story types as Joe Roach outlined in our seminar: Quest, Showdown, Decision, and Discovery. All of this will be tied together by a continued practice of oral storytelling via Story Circles, a practice that will get the students comfortable with the storytelling process. With the knowledge of narratological structures, oral story telling, folktales, and plot, each student will then develop and compose a five-paragraph narrative that showcases their awakened imaginative abilities.

While this unit was developed with seventh graders in mind, it can easily be adapted for all grade levels. “The Story of the Three Bears” works well for primary grades, as elements can be simplified or omitted per the standards. As for older students, specifically those in high school, teachers can review or gloss over “The Story of the Three Bears” and discuss its structure before having the students work on a more challenging text. Narratology and plot can be applied to any narrative at any reading level, which means its principles can be taught at every grade. Additionally, oral story telling/story circles can be used across all grade levels.