Today's students enter our classrooms with fewer experiences than ever in how to connect with their peers, and how to connect with adults. Many students' lives are fragmented, whether they're racing from their ballet class to the baseball field, or they're being passed from grandmother to uncle while their parent is in jail. Stories provide classes with a series of evocative shared experiences, so that over time, the group develops more and more of a community feeling, joined together by their empathetic response to the challenges faced by the characters in the stories they hear, united by their ability to recall events and characters from the stories they've already heard, and empowered by the ability to refer to the range of emotions contained in the stories when attempting to communicate their own experiences. There are lessons we can learn today from the way traditional societies around the world have used stories to problem-solve, to mediate conflict, to develop a shared vocabulary. When a group of students has been exposed to a number of thoughtfully selected stories, then that shared knowledge can contribute to better understanding among the individuals in that classroom.
