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Stories are woven so tightly into the fabric of our everyday lives that it's easy to overlook their significance in framing how we think about ourselves and the world. They fill every part of our daily lives as we talk about events and people, read books and news reports, gossip, send text messages, listen to music, watch video clips, and catch up on a favorite television show. We live storied lives.
Stories are thus much more than a book or narrative- they are the way our minds make sense of our lives and world. We work at understanding events and people by constructing stories to interpret what is occurring around us. In turn, these stories create our views of the world and the lens through which we construct meaning about ourselves and others. We also tell stories to make connections, form relationships, and create community with others.
These stories provide a way for us to move between local and global cultures and to explore the ways in which people live and think in cultures that differ from our own. Whether these stories are directly shared with us by global members of our immediate community or through literature from people living in distant geographical places, they provide access to shared and unique experiences and beliefs. We need more than facts to understand the storied lives of people in diverse global cultures.
Despite the significant ways in which stories frame our world views and identities, their role in making sense of life is often not recognized or valued. In schools, students are given access to stories primarily through literature, but the focus is not on the value of the stories themselves. Instead, literature is used to teach something else-reading skills, critical thinking, writing models, historical events, mathematical concepts. Many teacher education programs have eliminated children's literature as a separate course, choosing to integrate literature into a range of methods courses where the focus again is how to use literature to teach something else. The many different forms in which stories are commonly told and shared outside of schools are also often not recognized or valued within classrooms.
If we step back from the pressure of tests and standards and consider why story matters and the ways in...