Lucy McCormick Calkins

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Lucy McCormick Calkins
Teachers College, Columbia University
with
Shelley Harwayne
Teachers College Writing Project
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Shared Stories
Turn Classrooms into
Communities
v / u r students need what readers and
writers the world over need. They need places to go and things to do. They
need supplies: paper, pens, pencils of all sorts and sizes, typewriters, and word
processors, if possible; stamps, envelopes, phone books, catalogues, and files
of addresses; paper clips, staplers, scissors, carbon paper, tape, and white-out;
file folders, file drawers, and ways to index their work; dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, and thesauruses. They need lots and lots of time to write and
doodle and dream and play. They need ways to get advice, to gain distance, to
settle down and write, to take a break. But more than all this, they need to feel
at home. They need to feel safe and respected and free to be themselves.
Launching the Writing Workshop
"Let's push all the desks against the walls," Shelley Harwayne said as she and
fourth-grade teacher Anne Gianatiempo began "preparing the soil" for writing in Room 417 of P.S. 148. Readers of this book will become familiar with
Arjne, with Laurie Pessah, the staff developer who nurtures and guides teachers in this building, and with Public School 148. There are eighteen different
dialects spoken here. The front foyer is always filled with clusters of new
immigrant children waiting for their class assignments, and every turn of the
hallway reveals another circle of beautiful, wide-eyed children drawn closely
around a ten-year-old "teacher." These youngsters, like their mentors inside
the classroom, teach with easels, newsprint stories, tape recorders, clipboards,
and literature. This is a school for literacy. Reading and writing hang from
the ceiling and fill the halls. Inside the door to the library there is a white
wicker baby basket filled with new books, labeled "New Arrivals." Each year
thefifthgraders of the school hold a "Bed and Books" sJeepover at the school.
Bulletin boards are full of announcements of network meetings, study sessions,
27
28
Shared Stories Turn Classrooms into Communities
reading and writing groups for teachers. Even in a school such as P.S. 148,
children need to be called together into a community, and they need to rediscover over and over again that yes, indeed, they have observations to make,
stories to tell, lessons to teach.
"Instead of squeezing into our traditional meeting area, let's form a big
circle, one that includes all the observing teachers and principals," Shelley
said. As the children began to gather, she added, "You needn't bring pencils
or paper." After the circle was formed, Shelley said, "We're going to be in this
circle for a long while, so let's get very comfortable." When the rustling and
shifting stopped and the room filled with an expectant stillness, Shelley began,
first sweeping the circle of faces with her eyes as if to gather people together,
and then quietly said, "Today, and often, we're going to share stories, memories, moments. In every family there are stories we tell over and over. These
are stories that hold us together as a family; stories of coming to America, of
how one child got his name, of the day we found a turtle on the highway, or
named our dog, or got stuck in a rainstorm."
With no further explanation, and no mention about topic choice or the
writing workshop, Shelley launched into a story. "Last night my mother told
me the familiar story about how, when she was a child in a small village in
Poland, she made her own toys. She spoke of drying the small bones of a
chicken's neck to use as jacks, and gathering hairs from cows to mold into a
ball, and carving checkers out of bits of broken brick. It's a story I've heard
many times before," Shelley added, "but somehow I never get tired of hearing it."
One story leads to another. Jonas told about how, on his sister's wedding
day, she opened the door to leave for the church and a puppy with muddy
paws ran in, scampering right up the long train of her white bride's dress.
Norman told of asking his grandmother, "Where do people get babies?" and
his grandmother answering that babies come on a boat from a land full of
babies. Ariel told about how her mom had been rescued by an American
helicopter pilot in Vietnam a few weeks before she gave birth, and that she
was born in America. Alex told about his father bringing his mother home to
meet his parents, who served rabbit stew for the occasion. Alex's mother
detested this stew, and so she slipped it under the table to her fiance\ little by
little, lest she insult her in-laws-to-be.
Every family has stories that are called forth again and again, stories that
start with the chorus, "Remember the time when
" Bill Martin and John
Archambault's picture book Knots on a Counting Rope begins with a young
Indian boy saying to his grandfather.
Tell me the story again. Grandfather.
Tell me who I am.
I have told you many times. Boy.
You know die story by heart.
But it sounds better
when you tell it. Grandfather . . .
29
Launching the Writing Workshop
Once there was a boy-child . . .
No, Grandfather.
Start at the beginning.
Start where the storm
was crying my name . ..
Start, "It was a dark n i g h t . . . "
In the same way, the children who sat around the circle that day told
stories they'd heard again and again. As one person after another shared a
story, something cumulative happened in the room. There was a welling up,
a growing sense of "What lives we lead!"
After a bit Shelley intervened to say, "Sometimes the seeds for our stories
are not contained in family tales, but in private treasures. I'm thinking of the
drawer or the shoebox full of stuff that your mother calls junk. In a way she's
right, but somehow you can't bring yourself to throw it away, and you're not
sure why." Bringing out an old wrinkled black-and-white photo of a man
reading to a child, Shelley said, "This photograph was in the attic of our house
when we moved in. Even though I don't know the people, for some reason I
keep looking at their picture."
Although Shelley did not mention it that day, she could have told the
circle of children that James Howe, author of Bunnicula, keeps a treasure box
under his bed containing cowboy boots from a boyhood trip to a dude ranch
and the official membership certificate from when he joined the Mickey
Mouse Club. Shelley could have told the circle of children that, in One Writer's
Beginnings, Eudora Welty talks about finding treasures in her mother's bottom
drawer: a braid of chestnut-colored hair, a tiny cardboard box containing
buffalo nickels, which Welty later learned had lain on the eyelids of a baby
brother she had never known. Shelley could have read from Dayal Kaur
Kharsa's picture book. Tales of a Gambling Grandma, in which a little girl
looked forward to the days when her grandma would slowly slide open her
special drawer. The girl recalls the drawer, saying:
I liked that drawer.
First there was the smell of sweet perfume and musty old pennies.
Then there was a tiny dark blue bottle of Evening in Paris cologne,
shaped like a seashell; a square snapshot of my grandma holding me
as a baby; big, thick, wriggly legged black hairpins; and stuck in
corners so I had to use the hairpins to get them out, dull brown dusty
pennies.
But most fascinating of all were my grandma's false teeth. (1986, 10)
Shelley could have brought these stories into the fireside sharing in Anne
Gianatiempo's classroom, but that morning the children needed very little
priming before sharing their own shoeboxes full of unexpected treasures.
*,
30
Shared Stories Turn Classrooms into Communities
"I have this thing," one boy said, backing up to add, "Don't laugh," then,
"I have this thing, this little grey bunny. It's all worn out and raggedy, but I
think he's like my protector, and I won't let my mom throw him out."
Marcella's story tumbled out quickly. "When I went to leave Colombia, I
couldn't bring this patchwork doll with me and so I made a bed for it way back
in the closet underneath Grandpa's fishing stuff, and when I went back last
summer, she was still there, and my Grandma had found her and made new
clothes for her."
As the others talked, a tall, thin boy with a punk hairstyle, who had initially been leaning back away from the circle, drew in and began to talk too.
"Your stories are reminding me of something. There's this picture of my
grandpa, framed. He died the day I was bom. Whenever I'm waitihg for
my grandma to get dressed, I just stare at the picture. I never met the man, but
I can't keep from staring at his picture."
No one spoke between stories; instead, the community of children seemed
to understand instinctively the Quaker-meeting-like uses of silence. When
Shelley joined in, she tended to do so in ways that called forth yet another
kind of story. She said, for example, "I'm wondering if any of us have scenes
or images that we can't shake out of our minds."
Judy Davis, who was one of several teachers visiting P.S. 148 that day,
spoke first. She told how, as a thirteen-year-old girl, she was charged with the
responsibility of giving her grandmother her insulin shot. "Grandpa had
always given her the shots, but he was rushed to the hospital suddenly, and
even though I was a child myself, everyone looked to me to do it," Judy said.
"I'll never forget what it was like to lift up my grandma's skirt and see her
bone-thin leg, all bruised and dark from my grandpa's shaking grip on the
syringe, and to know it was my turn to puncture that thin, fragile skin."
Billy broke the silence to say, "Where I live there's a big pothole, and after
it rains, this old man comes out and sits there all day with his fishing pole."
Marcella talked of how, on the top floor of a gutted, abandoned building, she
had seen flowerpots with bright red geraniums.
There were other images. Of an old woman who spends hours in the park,
crouched down among pigeons, and then leaves with a burlap bag that wobbles and coos. Of staring blankly at a hospital only to see a window, high up
in the building, flung open, a face appear, and a telephone go flying through
the air. Of an old man in a wheelchair, wheeling to school in the morning with
a golden-haired little girl on his lap.
Stories and images cascaded over each other that morning. There was, in
that room, a tumbling richness of stories, one resonating against another,
some dichotomous, some overlapping, but always gathering abundantly, and
there was laughter too, and people listening to each other with tears brimming. There were exclamations of "That happened to me, too," and "You
must have some family." There was among us a growing sense of "Here we
stand, in the presence of life itself," of "What a privilege it is to be part of this
community," of "What voices, what stories, what lives."
31
Moving Beyond Our Resistance to Notebooks and New Ideas
Writers need this sense of fullness, of readiness to write, of responsiveness. It can come from storytelling, it can come from shared responses to
literature, it can come from bringing boxes and files of writing we've done in
our lives and reading excerpts aloud appreciatively with each other. It can
come from camping together and sharing thoughts and stories around the
campfire. Howevei it comes, it's terribly important. In Anne's classroom, it
was the most natural thing in the world for Anne to build on the energy of that
moment by suggesting that each person begin honoring his or her memories,
images, moments, and ideas by recording them in a writer's notebook.