“Teachers are designers,” say Wiggins and McTighe in Understanding By Design. Teachers start with the desired results, and educational objectives become the criteria by which materials are selected, content is outlined, and instructional procedures are developed to indicate the kinds of changes in the student to be brought about.” Backward Design, a popular concept in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, asks the teacher to think, “Given a task to be accomplished, how do we get there?”
That’s how I began my summer with Wisconsin Upward Bound (WUB) students at UWMC in Wausau. The directives from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) were to teach English to 44 first generation college-bound, low income, predominantly Hmong students by using the visual and performing arts to build language proficiency, literacy, and college readiness. This was a tall and open-ended order that, as is often the case with a curriculum emphasizing the performing arts, involved the traditional culminating activity--to “PUT ON A SHOW!!!” I now had my “expected outcome,” so backward design could begin. Plus, my recent participation in the FACETS program at UWSP would guide and inform my work on this ambitious project.
A Journey to Reach Enduring Understandings
From my years of experience with children’s theatre, creating storytelling projects and performances, I knew that the storytelling process was the perfect vehicle for backwards design. To “get there”, “there” being the production of a compendium of personal narratives shaped into skits or storytellings, the process would take the participant through stages of self-examination, absorption of new information, recursive and layered learning, shaping or organization of experience, and holistic integration of enduring understandings. Reaching the level of “enduring understandings” is what FACETS teachings identify as penultimate pedagogy.
What “enduring understandings” does the storytelling process have to transmit? I turned to Joseph Campbell’s iconic interpretation of “The Hero’s Journey” for illumination. In Campbell’s paradigm, every individual has a story and every life is a journey with that individual as the hero on that journey. The journey consists of these stages: a call to consciousness, a readiness to answer the call, a journey marked by challenges – physical, social, intellectual, and spiritual – which, as the hero meets them, initiate growth and create passages into higher states of being. Through these culturally observed passages, or rites, the individual is transformed into a truly evolved being, ready to rejoin and reshape the world that he or she left. It is obvious that conceiving of oneself in this way empowers any individual. Therefore, the initial expected outcome for my students’ enduring understanding was empowerment; as my project progressed, I soon expected nothing short of transformation! I wanted these first and second generation Southeast Asian students, many of whom walked gingerly between two worlds, to see themselves as heroes on their own journeys – journeys that could inform not just their own self-awareness but also the awareness of their peers and families. And, by undertaking this journey, they would enter into the commitment to become life-long learners aware of their own learning processes…a key component in FACETS teachings.
Principles That Guided My Experience
This reflective piece will chronicle my experience with these WUB students, freshmen to juniors, and justify my curriculum, as informed by principles I learned through FACETS.
The FACETS teachings were a good start for understanding Hmong Millennials. “Make it personal,” was the first admonition. Millennials don’t want theory unless it matters in their lives, now. The storytelling process engages the inner child state, a state that is traditionally receptive to deep learning and one that symbolizes the beginning of the hero’s journey. Childhood is perhaps the most personal and metaphoric of life phases. And, the child in all of us always responds to story, because a child’s psyche is so absorbent that all stories become personal. Plus, children learn holistically, as FACETS tells us, and storytelling touches many levels of learning – personal, emotional, social, cultural, and universal. Storytelling can be, at the same time, abstract, physical, and concrete, and can embrace many different learning preferences to create engagement among even the most reluctant learners. Lastly, it provides a structure for learning so that creativity can be channeled in useful ways that increase literacy.
I started with the oral reading, in large and small groups, of seminal children’s picture books Arrow to the Sun (a Pueblo coming-of-age initiation story), Where the Wild Things Are, (Sendak’s Freudian dream), Brer Rabbit tales, and many Native American and African-American pourquois stories, a genre that endures with children because it attempts to answer the question “How did things come to be the way they are?” The diverse origins of the stories I chose kept the students’ interest high, and they keyed into themes that transcended any one culture. Perhaps because they strongly self-identified as a minority sub-group struggling with integration issues, the Hmong Millennials embraced diversity as a given, even more so than Anglo Millennials in the group. The group work was immensely successful; Millennials liked the social interaction, as FACETS acknowledges.
The mural creation project utilized a teaching concept I had learned earlier to assist Millennials’ “need” to make learning personal (another FACETS instruction), what I call the first stage of the Praxis model – the idea that a student must first claim, and a teacher should immediately validate, the student’s own knowledge on the subject at hand.
The students were charmed by the Hero’s Journey motif; they had never thought of their short 15 or so years in terms of a journey, staged passages (or discrete life transitions), or serial initiations into phases of maturity. They had never regarded their own childhoods as histories, let alone individualized transpired events worthy of being held up for scrutiny or interpretation. We often say Millennials don’t think historically, but I found that when shown a mythic pattern, the WUB students happily used it to shape their own personalized contemporary stories. In small groups, the students collaborated and generated mural narratives, replete with shapely storylines and illustrations, about their journeys, many of which dealt with initiations from Asian to American culture. Many of the group stories shared common themes of departure from the homeland, confusion and disorientation of dislocation, apprehension of the unknown journey’s end, challenges from the new cultural ways and mores, and, finally, integration. These themes were interwoven with other concerns more specific to adolescents, such as the search for and challenges inherent in finding friends, status, and potential love-interests. The mural creation project utilized a teaching concept I had learned earlier to assist Millennials’ “need” to make learning personal (another FACETS instruction) what I call the first stage of the Praxis model – the idea that a student must first claim, and a teacher should immediately validate, the student’s own knowledge on the subject at hand. This creates empowerment, and builds receptivity for the new understandings. Certainly, all adolescents have their own stuff to share on topics such as friendship, status, and the opposite gender! And, of course these particular students had lots of first-hand knowledge of the challenges that face minority youths in the dominant culture.
Millennials prefer learning that is physical and interactive. That’s what our FACETS seminars told us. The kind of audience participatory storytelling I had traditionally done with pre-schoolers and elementary students, complete with props, puppets, and costumes, transferred easily and effectively to the high school students. Millennials seem ready to access their inner child at any given moment! Even as they participated in my beginning models, the in-class performances drawn from classic children’s literature, they were absorbing ideas for their skits and the personal storytellings that would comprise the final performance. Their preparatory work, done in small group (a pedagogical strategy that works well for Millennials’ social needs) was high energy, interactive, and creative
Another identifier of Millennials, according to FACETS teachings, is that they want to know boundaries. As wild and high-energy as my students could get, at times, they were quick to focus on the task at hand in service of the common goal – THE FINAL PRODUCTION!!! The DPI imposed outcome-based expectation turned out to be a positive force for reasons beyond backward design. On any given day, I might handle discipline issues by reminding them of the timeline that involved a prospective audience (family members, on the last day of the session). At the same time, I might field requests for special favors (extension of due-dates) by simply responding, “Is that fair to the others who have abided by the ground rules?” That response still allowed me to be lenient for extenuating circumstances while reminding the student of the social contract with the whole group. Very few asked for preferential treatment when responded to in these ways.
One final note on Millennials: although they crave “fun-factor” activities, they also know when deep learning does or does not occur.
One final note on Millennials: although they crave “fun-factor” activities, they also know when deep learning does or does not occur. A Spanish class held next door to mine was so raucous that I had to close my door and windows. I asked the students who had just arrived in my English session, breathless from the high-energy Spanish class, “What are you doing that is so noisy?” “Playing games and singing songs!” was their reply. “That sounds like fun,” I said, while thinking that works fine for elementary foreign language learning, but how optimal is that for a college prep curriculum, when in one short year, some of these WUB students will be expected to decline verbs and struggle with excruciating 2-hour finals on Spanish grammar and literature. Cautiously, I asked a rather loaded and admittedly unfair question, “Do you think you are learning useful things that will help prepare you for university-level language class expectations?” “NO!” was the cheerful response, “but it’s still fun!”
The Experiential Learning Cycle
These WUB students set off on a path to self-understanding through personal storytelling. When they shared their stories with their community, they grew in value as members of that community.
I like to think that storytelling is an optimal pedagogical strategy for curricula in the literary, visual, and performing arts. It uses structured fun to access enduring understandings. Structured fun is another expression for the Experiential Learning Cycle, a key concept of the FACETS instruction to “make it hands-on.” Stage One of the cycle, the external stimulus, as applied to my project, consisted of exposure to classic children’s literature in a visual format (the picture book) transposed to a performance piece (my in-class skits drawn from the books). This melding of modes for the external stimulus engaged many different learning styles: read/write learners, kinesthetic students, visual learners, and aural learners. In Stage Two of the cycle, Sensory Register, students heard, saw, narrated, and interacted; in short, they engaged their sensory perceptions. Stage Three, Processing, occurred as a post-stimulus discussion, analysis, question and answer, and small group feedback session. Students discussed the stories I modeled that included their participation. Deep processing, Stage Four, occurred when students created their own stories, using various models I demonstrated. Some of the more creative students developed their own innovative models. All the students personalized their products by adding research elements to their stories, shaping them into audience-ready formats, rehearsing and directing the pieces, and presenting them for an audience. The final stage of the experiential learning cycle, Final Application is hard to ascertain at this writing. Although I could not follow the WUB students back to their schools, family environments, or communities, it was apparent to me from the resounding success of the final production for their family members that these youths had grown in self-possession, self-acceptance, and self-examination. In Bloom’s taxonomy, in “doing” the subject creates knowledge; this leads to comprehension and application. “Uncoverage,” a FACETS concept of discovering the deeper understanding, occurs when the learner synthesizes the deeper principles of any text or story with one’s own life, and finds ways to relate new information to his or her own life. Here again is Campbell’s “hero’s journey”: each individual sets heroically off on a path to self-awareness and returns as a more valuable member of community. These WUB students set off on a path to self-understanding through personal storytelling. When they shared their stories with their community, they grew in value as members of that community. The applause at the Final Production was deafening, though the audience numbered under 100. The DPI representatives said they were “moved and overwhelmed” by the obvious investment the students had in their projects, and the visible success of the whole production. (Incidentally, I got hired back to do it all again next summer, and since WUB is a three-year program for the students and then, I will be able to discern more of the Final Application effect.) But the most telling evidence of growth and learning was an unquantifiable, almost ineffable impression I – and, I believe, any astute observer -- had: the students, still in various vestiges of costuming, when rejoining the audience, seemed to be regarded by their family members as some sort of special, shining beings. The sense was that they had undergone (through their efforts on stage) some passage that, for that moment, made them complete, supernatural, and yes, heroic.
Observations on Hmong Millennials’ Learning
Here are my observations, informed by some FACETS findings, of these particular Millennials’ learning processes:
My Upward Bounders seemed to have a strong “achieving structure”; they really liked the project demand of conceiving of themselves as heroes on a hero’s journey.
- I did not micro-manage their learning. FACETS tells us to be more of a guide than an “instructor.” I came to them not as an expert, but an experienced comrade intent on keeping a stable, orderly, goal-oriented classroom. I created a model that balanced fun and the discipline they needed to inspire their own creative processes and remained hands-off unless they came to me as a resource. They did most of the prep work for their stories, papers, and projects in small groups, and they functioned quite well by helping each other.
- In an age of too-much information, it was obvious that the students were quite naïve about issues surrounding the credibility and quality of resources. We had four research days in the computer lab (the stories they were writing required them to incorporate some research) during which they meandered around the Internet and the UWMC database. I gave them a short “sage-on-a-stage” type tutorial on reliability of research, but I can’t say they grasped the difference between the web and the database or felt it was significant. Most of them reverted to internet surfing and Google sources, because those were familiar, and trying to master the more discerning search demands of a database proved too daunting for them to tackle.
- The research days in the computer lab did corroborate what FACETS tells us about Millennials: they are very tech-savvy. These students, despite the fact that many had only recently left Thai refugee camps, felt comfortable with technology and came loaded for their dorm stay with the current electronic toys– memory sticks, i-Pods, laptops, instant messaging cell phones, etc. They zipped around the net, putting me to shame. They were more than proficient; they were “tech comfy”. I confess, I was a bit disturbed to see how quickly their exuberant energy and intermittent distractibility turned to focused determination when they sat down to their computers.
- At this age, they were not too interested in increasing levels of critical inquiry - one pass, and they were done. I had planned to spend time on the drafting and revision process, but they were quickly bored with what they saw as repetition. However, being Hmong Millennials, the lingering language difficulties, mostly verb tense and prepositional problems, did force them to pay attention to editing, and they did find my compare/contrast session on Hmong and English grammar principles more interesting than I had hoped. I tend to think this was a function of the training in the ESL (English as a Second Language) programs they had received, which drilled grammar but never got to the conceptual approach to language that we use in higher education.
- They did not find it easy to unite details into a larger, overarching principle. This is, of course, a problem germane to young people in general, and Millennials in particular, and perhaps especially Hmong Millennials. Synthesizing information from several sources was very problematic, especially when focusing on the goal of creating universal truths and “enduring understandings.” This particular skill, especially when applied to cross-cultural texts, demands a long-standing, deep, and cumulative knowledge of self and other, many others, in fact. This is a tall order for first generation minority Millennials. Like all Millennials, they seemed to have a sort of detail-oriented tunnel vision and little valuation for broader concepts. I had to create this appreciation, and I believe the storytelling curriculum really helped this occur.
- These students needed rules, which we recognize as a characteristic of Western Millennials, and a need that FACETS addresses, but this mostly Hmong group brought what I suspected was a cultural bias towards norming as a group (subrogating the needs of self to the needs of the larger whole, a perhaps archaic trait in the Anglo culture of rampant individualism). This group was self-disciplined, and did not challenge authority. In fact, the only discipline problems I had were from three of the five non-Hmong students! (Two were sent home from the program, and one washed out on her own.)
- My Upward Bounders seemed to have a strong “achieving structure”; they really liked the project demand of conceiving of themselves as heroes on a hero’s journey. They were quite eager to get the best grades, and positive peer feedback was very important to them. This characteristic was reflected in many of the formal essays they submitted, another assignment in the course. At the same time, many of the writers revealed the stress they endured because of their parents’ expectations. They wanted to live up to these demands, and were well on their way to so doing, yet in part, they resisted, which I took as normal adolescent rebellion coupled with the lure of the Anglo teen slacker culture. Yet in the end, the quality of their work made it apparent they had indeed integrated the high goals set for them by immigrant parents looking for brighter futures for the next generation.
- Like many Millennials raised in an environment of interactive telecommunications, they responded best to participatory learning and visual models. FACETS suggests that we teachers need to keep pace with our students (usually superior) technical know-how. That was a tall order for me, one degree shy of a total Luddite! But I used the technology to segue into the more physical and real pedagogical strategies I find comfortable. I showed videos of professional storytellers, which they found very engaging. Then, I did real storytelling in real time, setting the personal/physical model. I made my in-class storytelling models participatory, calling volunteers up to be part of the stories from the very first day, and they had no stage fright or concerns about looking silly in front of their peers. Interactive storytelling proved to be an excellent way to build their communications skills.
- They were very open-minded and non-judgmental, and demonstrated a true ethos of appreciation for diversity. African tales, Chinese legends, Nordic myths, American slave narratives – they seemed most delighted by texts that reflected cultural differences.
- Because the students were overwhelmingly Hmong, I include one last item specific, I believe, to Hmong Millennials: most of them expressed frustration with their “traditional” parents and the expectations of the old cultural ways, including boys being valued more than girls, family demands trumping educational demands, and Western culture eroding Hmong unity. Again, part of this is due, no doubt, to the normal adolescent process of “carving out one’s own identity,” but this process is made especially difficult when walking in two worlds, between two cultures. I believe that the story models I shared, hero’s journey coming-of-age stories that featured diverse adolescents confronting the same challenges, helped, in some small way, to give my students a universal precedent, and an understanding that they could triumph at this important task.
Afterthoughts—Looking Backward
I found my course content and teaching strategies, supported by my newfound FACETS knowledge, were effective with Hmong Millennials, and I plan to rewrite my 2006/07 Freshman Composition syllabus to incorporate many of strategies I used and the discoveries I made about the Millennial generation. This will be a challenge: for example, it is not easy to make Freshman Composition courses “physical,” and second semester composition, focused on source-based argumentative writing, is even farther still from the intense personal experience of “The Hero’s Journey” than first semester composition, which does allow for some narrative writing. But some of the pedagogical strategies, which I implemented with the Hmong Millennials, will play out well with college freshmen. For example, small group work is an energizing activity that builds community within the classroom. This kind of work can be utilized in many tasks that confront the freshman writer – developing outlines for writing projects, peer editing papers, etc. This satisfies young people’s desire for communal connection and joint problem-solving. And, even “physical participation” is possible if the definition is expanded, and the instructor thinks back to what she might call “kindergarten, hands-on activities” such as going to the board with colored chalk, doing presentations in front of peers, etc.
Most significantly, what I learned about the Hmong Millennial generation is applicable to the Millennial generation as a whole. This includes the Millennial generation’s desire for interconnectivity, its tech savvy approach to learning, its underexposure to the skill of synthesizing information, and its innocence regarding credibility in an era of information overload. Incidentally, I look forward tos the opportunity to teach summer Upward Bounders in 2006, and I am sure the new strategies and insights I glean from this summer’s group will enrich my teaching of college freshmen that much more! Thanks to FACETS for all ongoing “growth” experiences!
Brief Bio: Jean is both lecturer in English, and the Lecture and Fine Arts Coordinator at UWMC. She has been a freelance creative dramatist, storyteller, and artist-in-the-school for over 25 years, and has been involved in numerous community and children's theatre projects. She works with the Upward Bound Program for first generation college bound Southeast Asian students on the Marathon campus. Contact Jean at: jgreenwo@uwc.edu