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When children tell and act out their stories...

A Conversation with
VIVIAN GUSSIN PALEY

Vivian Gussin Paley has written over ten books, drawing on her experience as a kindergarten teacher at the University of Chicago lab school. She has received many awards for her contribution to education, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Erickson Institute Award for Service to Children, the John Dewey Society's Outstanding Achievement Award. She is recognized particularly for the way she engages children in telling and acting out their stories. This activity is the focus of our conversation with Vivian.

This article makes reference to the video, Vivian Gussin Paley and The Boy Who Could Tell Stories. Produced by Ball State University and distributed by Treehaus, this dramatic video shows Vivian engaging children in telling and acting out their stories. Through this otherwise ordinary activity, Vivian reveals the way children deal with profound moral issues such as: How can we create a community in which no one is left out? How can we respect diversity and encourage the expression of one's individuality? How can we create structures in which children can express their innate sense of empathy and desire for intimacy, as well as their intuitive sense of what is fair?

Although Vivian's career has been in the secular school setting and she does not claim an expertise in the spiritual life of children, she is keenly sensitive to the child's innate moral sensitivities and spiritual nature; so her approach to and perception of children has significant value for religious educators. The relationships described in this article between Vivian's replies to our questions and the spiritual life of children are those of the editor of CHILDSPIRIT, Gerard A. Pottebaum.

CHILDSPIRIT: How did you recognize the importance of children telling their own stories?

VIVIAN: In the same way children themselves know the importance of their stories. When children tell their ideas acted out in play—pretend this and pretend that—they are telling each other who they are and what images they hold dear. When I enabled these children storytellers to act out their stories on a makeshift stage, I, too, came to understand, as the children intuitively do, that they must invite others into a story, as characters inside the story, if they are to know each other as friends.

CHILDSPIRIT: In your book, The Boy Who Would be a Helicopter, you tell the story of Jason, a child who had difficulties getting along with the other children. But when storytime came, Jason and the children related to each other with greater ease through the use of a metaphor, the helicopter. How do these stories help the child and how do they help the teacher?

VIVIAN: In the telling and acting out of his or her own story, the child sees and hears what issues are on his or her mind, what he or she is struggling to express. The teacher is in a position to speak to a child through the story. The story furthers the relationship of trust since it is the child who has initiated the dialogue.

CHILDSPIRIT: A primary issue that religious educators face has to do with building relationships of trust in which the child is secure enough to express himself or herself without fear of rejection. The "faith" that religious educators attempt to convey to children depends upon the child's experience of trust in one's family and community. What have you found to be the significant issues to children?

VIVIAN: All the great issues: love and loneliness, separation and friendship, fear and pleasure, fairness and unfairness, good and evil, life and death. The children play them all out, without instruction.

CHILDSPIRIT: Why must children "do" their stories, act them out?

VIVIAN: Children cannot know their thoughts passively. Talk is not enough for them. They must step inside the plot, characters, and themes. They must take an active role in order to see and hear how a conflict plays itself out, day after day.

CHILDSPIRIT: From a religious education viewpoint, play acting has to do with ritual making. In both instances the activity involves creating a new reality, and doing it over and over again, providing for our need to feel some security in a very uncertain world. In your experience, what basic needs does the storytelling reveal?

VIVIAN: The need to be loved and wanted; to be listened to and identified with; to walk in someone else's footsteps and feel what another person feels; to reach out to others and be touched in the same ways.

CHILDSPIRIT: While exploring the social issues that the children's stories embrace, you are tapping into our human need to give order and meaning to our lives, to deal with the chaos and ambiguities of the human experience. Your observation that children do this naturally through storytelling and play acting relates, in religious education terms, to what communities do at liturgical rites. Such liturgical gatherings engage us in telling and acting out the unfolding story of God's relationship with us, a story that helps us give meaning and order to our lives, and to celebrate God's self-disclosure through our contemporary experience. What does storytelling reveal about childhood?

VIVIAN: The storytelling and play reveals the "now." Each scene imagined by a child is immediate and in the present. Children, in play, tell each other about themselves on a certain day, not in some unknown future.

CHILDSPIRIT: The "now" you observe in children's play relates to the notion that in our liturgical "play", we celebrate the "nowness" of God's action in our lives. In your writing, you have avoided such connections between the "secular" and the "sacred"—until your book The Kindness of Children, in which you relate more to the spiritual life of children.

VIVIAN: While acknowledging the legitimacy of such feelings, my intention as a secular teacher is to present moral issues within the context of the fairness and unfairness of life with people. What goes on in school has to do with the sympathy we learn to express for others and the position we learn to expect for ourselves. We deal with a person to person morality, spelling itself out in our actions toward individuals and the group, in everything we say and do.

CHILDSPIRIT: Authentic spirituality has to do with the way we treat one another. The scriptures admonish us not to offer sacrifices at the altar until after we have reconciled our differences with each other. What are the moral issues in the video, The Boy Who Could Tell Stories, in which you have to deal with the unconventional behavior of an autistic child?

VIVIAN: Every decision we make is a model of the priorities of our moral vision for the classroom. When a child is separated from the group because his behavior seems too different from the norm, the classroom is less safe for all. Conventional behavior exists only on the surface; all of us feel as different in some way as Aaron, the autistic child in the film. He acts out a universal sense of confusion and separateness. If he is safe from ridicule then we all are. Respect for the diversity of behavior is the true morality. We see ourselves in the most exceptional behaviors of others and learn to accept them as we ourselves wish to be accepted.

CHILDSPIRIT: In the video, you observe that the behavior teachers might consider "disruptive" is accepted by children as natural. In "Sunday school" settings, religious educators may feel a particular need to enforce certain rules of behavior. While we speak of each person as unique and "special" in the eyes of God, we are often reluctant to encourage children to express their individuality. Would you say more about the way children might view the "norm" in, for instance, the way Aaron tells his story?

VIVIAN: The children's view that of course Aaron has a story to tell is confirmed. The time spent in helping Aaron tell his story is well justified. We adults may have been surprised, but not a single child was surprised by the existence of Aaron's story or by the need to say the words for him. To the child, it is unimportant who says the words. Children are not as superficial as we are; they know the different ways our story is told.

CHILDSPIRIT: Rather than excluding Aaron, you accommodated him and, thereby, he enjoyed an experience of belonging and acceptance. In the video and in your books, you presume the moral sensitivity of children. How would you describe the child's sense of morality?

VIVIAN: Morality has to do with fairness and empathy and the desire to put things right where unfairness and pain exists. The child's innate desire to help, protect, and love others is there, in full view, along with the ability to be hurtful and unkind. Far more often children will rise to help someone who is struggling if given a chance to do so. It feels good to help others. Children feel relieved and grateful when they are able to help, not hurt. What do we adults do, we must ask ourselves, to alter the balance, so that children, as they grow older, so often choose to ignore the truths they knew as younger schoolchildren?

CHILDSPIRIT: In our competitive society, we seem to have no time for someone who is struggling and can't keep up. Like public school teachers, religious educators are hard pressed to cover the curriculum—to "teach the truths of our faith". In the video, you took the time to include Aaron, the autistic child. What "truth" do the children discover in the teacher's kindness to Aaron?

VIVIAN: That being "nice" to Aaron is a source of relief; it means that the rest of us are free to be ourselves. Furthermore, we are all able to find out, thereby, what an interesting person Aaron really is and how interesting our own differences really are.

CHILDSPIRIT: In your book, You Can't Say You Can't Play, you dealt directly with the moral issue of how to create a democratic society that includes all peoples, or, in religious language, how to create a community that goes out of its way to find "the lost one", to embrace anyone who feels left out or rejected. The same theme runs through your book about Jason, The Boy Who Would Be A Helicopter, when the children included Jason by providing a landing pad in their stories. Years later, you observed that when Jason was a teenager, he did not remember having been a helicopter. Why do you suppose he did not remember?

VIVIAN: Perhaps we use our fantasies when we need them and then let them go, or substitute others. They are vehicles we invent to travel dangerous roads on which we find ourselves at a particular time. School, for many children, is a bumpy and fearful place. We need our fantasies, in play and storytelling, to ward off the dangers of being a stranger in a strange land.

CHILDSPIRIT: Do you remember your own childhood fantasy play?

VIVIAN: I think it was similar to what I hear today. I longed to be protected and loved by strong friends. This need to find in fantasy play these protective structures and safe harbors is universal. When we try to recall our own childhood play, we are more encouraging of the fantasies of those we care for.

CHILDSPIRIT: How might your work facilitate teachers' self-understanding?

VIVIAN: When we see the imaginative powers our children bring with them we are better able to distinguish between what we think we are teaching and what the child already knows. We see that we do not "teach" kindness and empathy; we provide the structures within which what children already understand can be supported and enriched. We see that children become "real" to each other through their stories. Teachers become real to their students when telling their own stories. "When I was little. . ." is worth a dozen lectures.

CHILDSPIRIT: Thank you, Vivian, for telling us some of your story.

VIVIAN: You're welcome.

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