“The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” (Thomas King)

We talked without interruption or questions, we listened without interrupting or questioning, we took our stories as we heard them. We wrote, we drew – we had time to breathe, to think, to see – maybe the world couldn’t work this way. Maybe we need the structures and systems and rules and regulations – maybe those things help us too, like highway signs and traffic lights and rules of the road.  But we also need to wander, to meander, to be surprised, to step outside the structure – to reflect on what we are doing, to think about what we know, how we can guide and support each other, how we can have the courage to be honest and brave about our discomforts, how we can examine assumptions, live with questions and how we can accept ambiguity. The experiences and ideas we talked about in the group are inexpressible in the landscape of accountability, where knowledge gained through quantitative research is privileged, where statistics, measurable targets and continuous improvement are thought to be a true reflection of experience, where our agendas are set by others and we have to feed and satisfy a system which has been created to keep it all tidy.

The great temptation for me is to think about the experience of the story group as a superior alternative to the types of learning/training that is usually available to us in the literacy field in Ontario. My impulse is to put my experience of being the story group on the top of some sort of hierarchy, so that the story group is better, purer, and more authentic than other experiences of learning.  But I have thought and thought about this and have come to see that my experience in the story group is one thing, very important to me personally, a great learning experience, an opportunity to actually and literally hear about literacy practice – to learn about what it’s like to work as a literacy practitioner and about the struggles and energy that go into it. 

But that’s not really the point – it’s not that the story group is a better way; it’s that it’s another way – a way past abstraction to the real everyday work and relationships in literacy programs. I see it as one way to break the silence about the mystery and complexity of the relationships that grow in a program. This is a way of knowing that is left out in standard or accepted accounts of what happens in literacy. It gets us closer to understanding something about what goes on. 

It’s not an either or, better or worse, authentic or not. It is a way of looking – that makes room for the experience, emotions, life history, story of the practitioner – what she is bringing, learning, needing and asking and how all these pieces are always there. All our stories coming together, sometimes contradicting or even conflicting with each other, colouring how we see and what we hear, what we do. I see it as one way to acknowledge our many selves, to honour some of the many versions of our stories, the personal, the political, and the social. I see the work of the story group as one way to look at the tacit knowledge and the working wisdom of practitioners, how in working in relationship with students and with each other, across differences of class and race and gender we learn by encountering each other and ourselves in our stories.