As teachers, we rarely reflect on who we are as people although it is something that is heard recurrently during professional developments or professional learning community meetings. Having the pleasure of participating in the Yale New Haven Teachers Institute for several years, I decided to approach this introductory statement differently. A simple statement of who I am is easy. However, the truth of the matter is that I am an educator of 30 years and have been shaped and influenced not only by my years of education and experiences, but by the students and families that I have had the pleasure of working with. My most recent years have included teaching Social Studies to sixth, seventh and eighth-grade students for the past five years at two neighborhood school. My current, second, neighborhood school is a K-8 community school gently nestled in one of the heavily populated neighborhoods in the New Haven Public School District located in New Haven, Connecticut. This close-knit K-8 community school has a population of approximately 250 students—many started out in our early elementary program and continue through grade 8. The students live in our surrounding urban community. My background is in instruction with the greater part of my years as a language arts teacher and work experiences in curriculum and instruction and journalism.
A unit that approaches Social Studies through the lenses of stories, fairy tales, legends and myths is a creative and authentic way to deepen the Social Studies curriculum for New Haven Public School students. While this unit will be social studies-focused, it has a strong English Language Arts emphasis as well and would be successful as an integrated or interdisciplinary unit. There are a few ways to look at a unit involving myths, stories, legends and fairy tales. Fairy tales, myths and creation stories are an effective way to introduce the study of a society or set of people. This type of unit of study connects well with my seventh-grade curriculum as we study world history. It would also be possible to develop a robust grade 8 unit based on the stories of the many Indigenous people of United States in comparison to other world cultures—looking at the Indigenous peoples living in the 13 colonies or during the westward expansion. Even more interesting to explore is allowing students to discover the influence of colonialism or politics on people or the stories developed by other people that have somehow been infused into another people’s or culture’s stories.
The study of folktales ties directly in with my seventh-grade curriculum as we study the Caribbean, Africa, Central and South America, Europe, Asia and other parts of the world. The families and past generations of New Haven students are from these places. It is not only important for them to be able locate a longitudinal or latitudinal place on a map, but to know the stories of the people they learn about as well as possibly discovering ties to their own history and familial existence. This unit will host connections from myths, legends and fairy tales to modern or contemporary books and films. It is important to find those links so that students can form a connection from the past to the present as well as find themselves represented in that learning or represented in some aspect of historical space, belonging and connection. Through the cohort students will learn how to read, analyze and interpret myths, fairy tales and legends while also examining them as cultural pieces. By the end of this unit, students will have drawn ties from their own familial stories and oral narratives in comparison with the research and study of folktales, myths and lore from around the world.
The research gained from my Teachers Institute cohort’s classes led by Marta Figlerowicz and work on this unit will allow educators and students to access familiar and undoubtedly unheard-of information during study of the Caribbean, Africa, Central and South America, Asia and other parts of the world. The basis of society and every culture or set of people that we know about has either a creation story, legends, folktales or myths that are associated with the beginning and chronological existence of its people. There are also stories that explain the rise and fall of a civilization’s or a people’s great leaders. This reflects the research and learning that can take place as a result of this unit. At times folktales have been used to explain happenings like eclipses, wolf moons, droughts earthquakes, or other natural phenomena. In addition to providing a script to understand planetary occurrences, tales have the ability to be used as a tool to carve and contour the lives of human inhabitants.
Stories may even be used to shape or control a people. A society’s creation story is key. It is important to know who created the tale, told the tale, and ensured that the story was passed down. It is often said the one must know the history or beginning of a thing to understand where it is going—and even how it has changed or grown from that course.
