TPCS 13: The flag, the coat of arms and me: The interactional architecture of Caribbean children’s classroom stories

By Jenny-Louise Van der Aa

Introduction

Storytelling in the classroom is a phenomenon that has has been the focus of numerous studies within a variety of disciplines, both stressing the cognitive aspects (such as educational psychology, see e.g. Applebee’s phenomenal study of children’s understanding of coherence (1978); and psychotherapy, see e.g. Brandell 1984 for some of its applications) and the social aspects (such as discourse analysis, see e.g. Gee 1991 ; conversation analysis, see e.g. Seedhouse & Yazigi 2005 ; or ethnographic analysis, see e.g. Erickson & Christman 1996). Within the scope of this article, I am specifically interested in the interactional aspects of storytelling in the classroom, a topic that has only been cursorily addressed in the existing literature. Most interactional/conversational work on storytelling (started by Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008) has focused on so-called ‘small narratives’, the type of stories that naturally occur during conversation. And while very interesting, their work has not addressed the type of narratives that are elicited by the teacher and that are also known as ‘performance’ (see Hymes 1975 and Bauman & Briggs 1990 for a detailed description of elicited stories as performance)

A particular case of storytelling is known as ‘sharing time’, the moment where one child comes up front, or stands up in a circle, and gives an account of a personal event, shares its emotions concerning a peculiar topic or simply responds to a teacher’s questions regarding its personal life. This classroom moment, similar with other cases of storytelling, has also been given multidisciplinary attention. It is also often referred to as “news”, “news time, and “morning news” in the work of educational sociologists such as Baker & Perrott (1988) and educational linguists such as Christie (1987, 1990) whose work on the moment of ‘morning news’ as genre calls for an analysis of ‘sharing time’ as a particular classroom activity that has its own characteristics, often quite different from other classroom tasks and activities. Most previous studies on ‘sharing time’ (where the name for the activity is ‘show and tell’) have dealt with stories of personal, mundane experience: cases in point are Sarah Michael’s treatise of Leona, an African-American child telling a personal story whose structure is not recognized by a European American teacher (1983); and David Poveda’s ethnopoetic analysis of a story told by Quico, a gypsy child in a Spanish classroom (2002).

The latter study underscores that sharing time, in spite of Michaels’ findings, can also be a locus for gaining attention and appreciation, otherwise gone unnoticed. Poveda’s teacher notices the different patterns and appreciates the child’s shown verbal artistry. This study elaborates on ‘sharing time’ as an elicited classroom activity, but deals with data that do not (or only partly at best) reflect children’s personal experience. These particular data bring to the fore instances of sharing time which consist of narratives in which children are required to realize a specific narrative genre (as opposed to the freer expressions in earlier studies, whether or not they were appreciated on their own terms). Rather than focusing on the intertextual gap that exists between particular stories and the canonical narrative that is expected (see Van der Aa 2011 for an analysis), I would like to focus here on the mechanisms of participation and collaboration as these stories are interactively managed by the teacher, the children and the ethnographer within the classroom as an institutional setting.

In this article I look at a special case of heritage storytelling during Independence Month in Barbados, the easternmost island in the Caribbean. The personal story content of ‘sharing time’ as studied in previous work (see above) is absent during this month: the focus is on stories related to the event of Independence Day, the day Barbados became independent of the British in the 1960s. Part of the format of regular Barbadian sharing time is continued: stories have titles, they are elicited and take place in front of the class with the teacher sitting at his desk. Other elements are not typical of sharing time in Barbados: a rigorous inscription of the child’s body through remarks on posturing, an orientation to particular expected story elements, and a stronger focus on standard English usage (as opposed to Barbadian Creole English). Fenigsen reminds us that “Barbadian ways of speaking draw their stylistic richness from intertwined and differentially valued resources of Creole (Bajan) and Barbadian English” (Fenigsen 2003:457). In this article I take a look at the specific realization of these resources which result in hybrid ways of meaning-making, differently valued in each case. This is only part of the truth; other linguistic resources such as Jamaican Creole are also seen as not appropriate for this classroom activity.

I consider the Independence Day stories analyzed here as interactionally organized because they are a response to the teacher’s elicitation; they are steered towards satisfying several interactional and structural goals; and they are closed by the teacher’s intervention. I show the stories to be an interactionally organized, emergent mobilization of narrative resources in a specific institutional setting by making use of a particular entrée into physical space, Goffman’s idea of pre-situational space (1981); and by reconsidering Goodwin’s work on story structure and the organization of participation (1984). At the same time, the asymmetrical distribution of power allows the teacher to dictate body posture and language usage. These issues will have to be taken on board in the analysis.

Keywords: storytelling, heritage, sociolinguistics, education, Barbados, Independence Month

How to quote: Van Der Aa, J. (2011). The flag, the coat of arms and me: The interactional architecture of Caribbean children’s classroom stories. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 13).

Read the full working paper here: TPCS 13: The flag, the coat of arms and me: The interactional architecture of Caribbean children’s classroom stories.