prologue

FAMILY STORIES

When I was young my father told me bedtime stories. My father’s name is John. He believed it was his responsibility, rather his moral imperative, to tell captivating stories for us as his grandfather and grandmother did for him. Chimbo was the nickname that my father gave to his grandfather, his grandmother’s name was Anya. Chimbo and Anya were able to entertain John through countless nights with story-telling. Chimbo would sleep next to the barn, engulfing John in stories of his Georgian adventures or the Russian motherland from which they had emigrated. Anya would sleep in the community house, engulfing John in stories of the Tatar raids or the community life in the Caucasus. Both Chimbo and Anya were teenagers in 1899 when they arrived in Halifax with 7300 of their brethren. It was rumoured that they could communicate in several languages upon arrival.

They arrived from an area of ancient crossroads where diverse civilizational customs and cultures converged. They saw things from a unique vantage. A perspective that had experienced life across a variety of nations and one encompassing the transitional spaces between the feudal and industrial ages. Theirs was a world where the story of humanity co-existed simultaneously with aspects of the old world, middle world and new world. The country of their origin, the country of their exile and the country of their landing all contributed to their stories. They brought a buffet of experiences from the Don River Basin and the Caucasus, places where the cultural emphasis on the oral traditions of life and the education it embodied held paramount importance towards one’s identity.

John appreciated these stories from his grandparents for the gifts that they were.  He learned from them. He believed it was his responsibility to share bedtime stories with my sister and myself and pass the gift on. John always began our bedtime stories with,

‘Life in the village was very hard. There was wood to chop, hay to bail, snow to shovel, trees to prune, weeds to pull, potatoes to peel, apples to pick, dogs to feed, eggs to collect, cows to milk, horses to tend…’ 

This list of chores went on and on. There were always a standard twelve chores to the chorus, albeit any given night might have more embellishments added to the list, depending on the tenacity of the pending story.

The emphasis within John’s stories was always placed on the work. It somehow needed to be never-ending. There were always chores to be done. This was the message. Life was defined by toil to be engaged honestly, if begrudgingly, perhaps even spiritually. I was never sure if this emphasis came from John’s own recollections of the many chores that filled his youth, or if it was a stern warning for my generation not to get soft and lazy as we seemed to have a lot more prosperity than his generation. The message stuck. It has carried forward into my orientation of how I approach life, indeed, how I approach education. There is always work to be done. There always seems to be a list of chores which predicate the entertainment and wisdom that the story might bequeath. 

The purpose of this paper is to investigate my own relationship to the power of the story. It is both an exploration and a celebration of how I identify with the stories that have been held within my family. It further acts to explore how these stories are alive within me. By doing so, the objective is to define my inherited perceptions by putting them down in the written form. By writing down these perceptions, I aim to further articulate or even discover the underlying truths that shape my being. By allowing myself the freedom to use perceptive embellishments, or fiction, I hope to further liberate the tools of imagination that help to shape my present experience. Furthermore, understanding the creation of these stories via an epigenetic awareness of my own phenomenological voice just might allow me to develop a gift that investigates a question that I have always sought to answer – what is the purpose of my life?

Due to the fact that many of the vignettes that have been written down in this project are inspired by oral stories and that the written record of some of these events at times can be sparse, or exclusive to family memoirs and keepsakes, or fragments of various other cultural documents saved or archived in either the Russian or English languages, I opted to provide a list of reference materials that the reader can use to further investigate the context of the vignettes found herein.

The narrative processes and other genres of inquiry used in the paper form the basis of a deeper and creative unfolding that is implicit in the tradition of telling and writing. In this sense the project endeavours to engage in a phenomenology of self in history though creative chronicling.  The inquiry also invites an epigenetic lens by which to understand actors and their actions across an array of experiences and landscapes of joy and trauma. (See Appendix B).

This project has been created in such a way as to keep it approachable and entertaining for my extended family. This decision has been taken so that this project might serve a greater utility among my family members.

EDUCATIONAL STORIES

As a professional teacher, there are several key questions that guide my pedagogy. These questions being;

            1. What is meant by the Russian concept of, ‘Our Living History’?

            2. How do we learn?

            3. What makes an effective classroom teacher?

            4. What is the purpose of life?

While teaching, I use storytelling to invoke my connection with specific values and perhaps even towards philosophical approaches to life’s challenges. I use stories to explore empathy and express care. I use stories to inquire and to do the deep digging into the issues that define me and also into the issues of interest to my students.

Beyond the realm of education, the teacher can take on a role within the extended community and sometimes even within the family unit. Those who might present themselves as our mentors and teachers may not necessarily be certified professional teachers. As students navigate various educational spaces they do have those adults who act as mentors and teachers from within their families, communities and general experiences regardless of any certification as professional teacher as such.

I seek to understand my own orientation to my profession and to explore why I connect with certain principles, practices and values –– all of which speak to common themes around authenticity in my pedagogical approach. I have sought to explore my lineage using a phenomenological approach and an epigenetic awareness through the stories of my forefathers. 

This paper will be mindful of the pedagogical approach of three professional BCTF teachers. My uncle Steve, my father John and myself. It weaves vignettes of individual narratives shared among us three teachers to explore how our common living history defines a unified expression in our values as professional teachers. What is it that lives amongst us, that we might share it or give it to our families and communities? What is the meaning of all the educational work we sought to engage in –– what becomes of the stories that were used to teach us about ourselves? What is the educational value embodied within these oral traditions and how can I access these truths now?

Teachers can have impact beyond their interactions with students. Care should be given to be responsible towards the messages embodied within the stories that we deliver. How can I improve my practice by using stories? As a teacher I am often in a position of storyteller, my history has a story, I must know this story to know myself. These are the facets of our living history that I am exploring. How do I embody the learnings of my forefathers? How do I gift forward the history that has opened up the story of my own creation?

There is an element of continuous unfolding to this line of inquiry. The process becomes the emphasis as I work to understand what the message I might embody is. How do I use my story to perhaps provide inspiration, guidance or context to those that might come after me? Is there any purpose which I might attach to my work to make it meaningful and relevant beyond its utility for myself as the primary learner in my own life?

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, human life in metaphorically compared to the existence of the mayfly. We are but fleeting expressions (a day to live) lodged within a much greater collective drive (the existence of humanity). This process in itself creates a historical record of our species having existed, if, our consciousness is of any actual consequence.

We humans are but mayflies propagating our collective living history by simply being our individual selves. There is profound truth in this simplicity. This core concept defines the nucleus of the truths I wish to explore as I pursue the making of meaning. By engaging in the process of co-creating stories from our collective experience I endeavour to share and explore within our common community.

We must know of ourselves. We must understand who we are and what we deem valuable before we begin to approach our profession as authentic teachers willing to engage a diverse range of students with a robust and unrelenting spectrum of needs.

Returning to the exploration of cultural identity and values, I will examine the heart of my pedagogical approach, which is that, we all must find our own answers to the questions we deem important in life. We must author our own stories. This is the primary task upon which we should embrace with wild abandon and this is the exact pursuit that we might be wise to model for our students. By exploring the stories that defined those who made me I acknowledge, at a cellular level, the expressions and embodiments of my creation. I accept the responsibility of knowing how to engage my history so that I may create my own story.

The reason we work to understand our history, to accept the responsibility of our own story is precisely so that we can live our own truth. We all must make our own decisions and be aware of the power that education and articulation can bestow upon the learner in life. That learner is nobody outside of yourself. It is with this paper that I embark upon the work to explore and define my own truth by understanding the experiences and personalities that shaped my being.

By writing fiction I dive into my spiritual core to create my reality.