Shall We Begin: Part Two

This is more of what you'd expect in an introduction. Plus a powerful exercise!

This is Part Two of the introduction. Perhaps.

This project is fun for me and organic in its approach because I have no specific outline or plan. The “chapters” will unfold like I am walking through the woods with a flashlight.  I know where I want to go—basically—but I can only see immediately in front of me.  There might be monsters.  There might be coyote poo.  I might find a quarter or a golden ring. We will see.

For this part two, I am inclined to spend some time with “Restorative Storytelling” and chew on those two words for a bit. Come to think of it, chewing is a perfect place to start because the word restorative is directly connected to food. If you look at the word, you will see several other words, including the word restaurant. Restorative/restaurant. Both have the etymological root of “to build up again”. Restaurants are restorative in that they bring their clientele back to health by feeding them healthy, or at least nontoxic, food.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Restorative justice is interested in repairing the harm caused by a crime or conflict.¹

Restorative practices seek to strengthen relationships between individuals as well as social connections within communities.²

Build-up, repair, and strengthen are all images and descriptions of healing and nourishment. 

Restorative Storytelling has a similar goal: to use descriptive language to restore the blueprint of social health and wholeness. It is to bring back into the fold members of ourselves or our social system that have strayed, been forgotten or been excluded.

It is a protocol that I subconsciously experienced many times:

1. When I lied about owning a chimp in an attempt to be included.

2. When I told a high school bully that I wasn’t afraid of him.

3. When I changed my last name.

4. When I used storytelling to discover my superpowers.

But it wasn’t until I entered a first grade classroom as their first elementary school teacher that I saw this in action. This is where the practice became scientific and measurable. I would see a challenge, create a story to address that challenge, and then notice a measurable change as a result of that story. I didn’t understand how this worked or why this worked, but I was glad it worked.

This helped us as a community navigate the sickness and death of a sixth grader in the same school. It helped us understand the divorce that one child went through. It supported the children through the dismissal of our gym teacher and gave them context for how the school was working together to fill that need. And this is in addition to teaching them their letters, math functions, and social skills through storytelling. This was very quickly the gold standard of teaching tools, and since I had some practiced facility (as a writer, actor, performer), it was my go-to pedagogical strategy for most needs in the classroom.

It wasn’t until I stopped teaching and co-founded Sparkle Stories, that I began to do the research into what was happening when children listened to stories, and why they so quickly transformed their behavior. Was this about casting magic spells? It turns out that yes it was—and that it was teachable.