Rediscovering the lost art of story-telling
Annie Auckland, lead teacher of the IB Cambodian Project, discovers an innovative approach to bringing literature alive.
One of the perennial challenges in planning for the ongoing teacher training workshops is finding appropriate starting points in Language Arts. The IB first began to develop the Cambodia project in 2002 with some teacher training workshops sponsored by Unesco and the IB Asia-Pacific regional office. In Cambodia there is a lack of accessible literature in schools and in the community. Books, especially fiction, are simply not affordable or available to the general public. There are no corner newsstands with newspapers, magazines, comic books or paperbacks. This is a population where children do not recognize Mickey Mouse or Harry Potter. Most known stories are re-tells of old folk tales from ancient Khmer culture. People who can read, read for information, not for pleasure. When students write in school, it is to record information.
The Khmer language uses an alphabet unique to Cambodia. There are no upper or lower-case letters, no punctuation as we know it, and single words are often replaced by lengthy main-idea configurations. Self-expression, originality of thought and the communication of different points of view are radically foreign concepts to the existing language curriculum.
In the months preceding our September return to Cambodia, while trying to recall familiar stories used in both international and national schools that might be appropriate, I remembered ‘Stone Soup’. The timeless tale of three hungry strangers, who trick the suspicious inhabitants of a rural village with a feast of their Stone Soup, became the central theme of our entire workshop.
There are currently at least six English versions of Stone Soup in print. I chose two and we read both books to a captivated audience. The teachers chose the original storyline to do a shared writing summary as a class text, which later became the shared reading material, allowing us to model these teaching strategies in a meaningful way. This list became the framework for the creation of new Khmer editions of Stone Soup. It also provided the chance to discuss elements of setting, character and plot in fiction.
We believe that for most of the teachers, this was their first experience in creative writing. They used peer editing, made storyboards and finally ‘published’ their books. By the end of the three weeks the workshop participants had written, illustrated and shared with an audience eight new versions of Stone Soup, all set in Cambodia, with details appropriate and true to Khmer culture and history. Each school received multiple copies of every story for use in the classrooms.
We used the book to introduce assessment strategies and to initiate brainstorming to plan connected lessons in other subject areas. Each group of grade teachers (1-6) prepared integrated teaching units directly linking the story to existing required curriculum outlines for mathematics, social studies, Khmer studies and science, the four basic texts they have in their classrooms.
We even touched on higher-order questioning, the idea of multiple intelligences, and different learning styles as we developed follow-up activities.
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Binding books for class
