Abstract:

Writing and Reading are taught together. The Story Workshop method of teaching writing and reading and imaginative problem-solving, originated and developed by John Schultz, works from grad school to grade school, from American affluent to poverty areas, from the South Side of Chicago to Fudan/Shanghai, engaging the participation and advancement of skills for the many voices and cultural and linguistic origins, as well as encouraging people to use their different ways of apprehending things—face to face, face to self, face to group, face to teacher, face to computer screen, from Grad School to Grade School. It enhances problem solving abilities at the computer and online. Grade school assessment scores for students in Story Workshop classes, meeting for 2 hours once a week, rise significantly. This includes scores for math and science where reading comprehension and narrative/visualized problem solving can be crucial. It can be adapted easily into primary and secondary curricula and into daily and weekly scheduling. It fulfills broad language arts goals. In the Story Workshop Practice Teaching program in the Fiction Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago, we work with 400-500 grade school children each year . In a city with a population and children as diverse as the world itself, we meet the challenges in reading and writing education that most educators at this conference encounter daily throughout the world. That means diversity of voices and backgrounds of students in the classroom and the ever-present challenge of how to engage them. We also see that students who are articulate and animated outside the classroom do not join their own voices and thinking with the activities of the classroom.

The very flexible Story Workshop method seats students in a semi-circle facing a director and uses inclass oral activities and class formats that integrate reading, writiing, speaking, listening, and thinking/imaginative problem solving. Acceptance of voice and background are basic principles. In word games, oral tellings, and inclass writing, we coach students "See it!" in their minds and "Give your voice, tell it, so others can see it!" Students learn from listening to other students and to other students' work, as well as listening to their own work and hearing it with the teacher. The teacher makes any comments he or she feels are needed. Visualization and mental imagery are other terms, more static in their suggestiveness. Seeing-in-the-mind is more fluid, dynamic, more accurate, combining movement, sense of audience, and choice and is helpful to students to find the power that they have. Seeing-in-the-mind connects with the student's own voice, personal and cultural, Voice can stimulate seeing, and seeing can empower voice, in the word games and oral telling activities and in interplay with oral and silent reading of own, other, and more mature literary voices.

In the Story Workshop Practice Teaching program, we draw students from our BA, BFA, and MFA programs. Their practicum is conducted in Chicago and metro area public schools. They teach a two-hour workshop with grade school or high school students once a week, and they meet once a week in a workshop in which we discuss and practice.

We have also conducted teaching workshops with public and private school teachers. They, then, use the activities in their regular classes and generally get good results.

Keywords:

Story Workshop Method, John Schultz, Voice, Seeing-in-the-mind, Imaginative and Expository Writing/Reading, Classroom Activities.