Abstract
What does it mean to be an early childhood teacher in a time of pandemic? Which stories remain constant in our profession and which are lost to the hand of physical distance? This narrative inquiry explores the persistent role of story in the creation of the body of the classroom community, and the sustaining of a practice of an early childhood teacher. Through narratives, one teacher explores the stories emerging in her classroom in the fall of 2020, and how, through narrative, community both evolves and retains the pervasive stories of early childhood.
Mika (all children’s names are pseeudonyms) handed me a tiny rock today. It was nothing, just another of the infinite collection of “treasures” that have been bestowed on me over 20 years of teaching. It was a sunny morning on the playground, and I sat with Mika to support her morning transition, while also trying to unobtrusively watch a group of active playmates as they worked with large sticks and logs. When I finally stepped away, I almost dropped the rock out of my hand and onto the ground. It was just a rock. Then I remembered. I remembered the time of no rocks. I remembered the time of empty pockets, when the seemingly endless pipeline of sticks, rocks, and pipe-cleaner creations lined with shining pony beads suddenly stopped. I remembered crying on my kitchen floor as the closure of schools was announced for the rest of the year. I remembered those tiny faces in boxes on a screen, all lost to me. I remembered the empty-pocket time. And I clutched that tiny rock in my hand, not letting go.
It is not an easy thing to write in the midst of the storm. Often, I wait until the winds have stilled and the torrents have passed to survey the detritus around me. Detritus tells powerful stories, and these artifacts and the way they have fallen offer messages about pedagogies and children’s voices. But what do you do when the storm is not over? When you fear the storm might never end? This is where we find ourselves as teachers and researchers in this moment in time, with the winds howling around us as we try to locate the messages, to find our voices, to find instants of clarity. And so forgive me if this work is muddled, if it lacks a typical beginning, middle, and end. I do not know where we are right now, where we fall in the story, but I do know that the stories continue to assert themselves, to tell and to demand to be told. So, I begin here with me and Mika, a playground, a rock, a small story that is, and always has been, in the life of a preschool teacher.
I opened with this tiny story of Mika’s rock because it reveals one of the monoliths of lives shared with young children: the power of story as a force behind who we are, who we were, and who we might become (Bakhtin, 1981; Bruner, 1990; Dyson and Genishi, 1994). These stories take different shapes, ever-shifting identities in response to communities, the world, and children’s role as political beings in that world (Bentley and Souto-Manning, 2018). Yet the organizing power of story is pervasive in its many guises and roles in our lives (Bruner, 1990), and perhaps more important now as we wonder about what remains. What is left of our work and world in the face of the leveling force of the pandemic? The above story is mine, and it is ours. I would hazard that this is a story of every preschool teacher, with pockets full of treasures, collected and bestowed across the years (Bentley, 2013). The persistence of this story, this tiny moment, spun out over the years, brings me back to myself, reminds me that there are certainties, there are stories that persist, that bridge distance, time, and trauma. And as these stories ignite and unfold, so do we as teachers and classrooms, finding our way to each other despite six feet of distance and muffling masks on our faces.
As we floundered into these first weeks of school in September 2020, the intensity of not knowing took my breath away. There is a certainty that comes with 20 years in the classroom, a soothing sense of “what will be” and “what always is” that carries me through the challenges of the earliest days. This year, we found ourselves without that calming blanket of expectedness, floundering in endless hours of measuring, planning, developing systems, discarding systems, and attempting to prepare for the impossible. Thirteen four- and five-year-olds. No touching. No sharing. Six feet of distance at all times. It was unfathomable. And yet, despite the impossibility, I had a strange sense of assurance (in the midst of the 12-hour workdays). All of the panic and sleeplessness was threaded with an absolute certainty that the children would know. The children would show us the way. We could plan to our hearts’ content, but half of it would be scrapped, and the kids would know what to do. We needed to wait for them.
Living in the midst of a storm, it is strange to see the stories that fall away, and the ones that firmly assert themselves amidst the chaos. There are so many things that we think are absolutely critical which fell away under the sterile hand of the pandemic. Sometimes it felt like there were no absolutes, no ground to stand on. I found myself wondering if my profession itself was over.
And then there was my persistent, never-ending battle of “the good teacher” (Greene, 1973), and the teacher who I am, who I will always be. “The good teacher” is a woman of absolutes who knows the exact circle shape of the morning meeting, the organization of the cubbies, the morning sign-in, and the specific name song we would sing. These are her absolutes, the things we absolutely must have. Until we could not. We could not sit in a circle together. We could not sing “Afunga Alafia” (we could not sing at all). We could not share the pencils as we began our sign-in. That “good teacher,” the woman who knows, who is certain, who has all of the structures to solve the problem—she was not invited to this story. She and all of her accoutrements of unflappable structure were gone.
So, what was left? It was a different kind of story, a different absolute. It was a story about children, a story that I always hoped I believed but was not sure had fully taken residence in my sacred space of assurances. Yet, in the darkest time, there it was. The children would know. I knew that they would know. I knew that they would shape our community and show us the way to each other. This is the story that I always hoped I believed in, the teacher I hoped I was. And with the winds howling around us, bottles of antibacterial spray in our hands, it was there and it was true.
There is a magical unicorn who lives in our classroom. The magical unicorn was trapped in a gem by her evil sister (who is also a witch). The children in the pre-kindergarten classroom are the only ones who have the power to release the unicorn, to make her free again. Eliot narrated the beginnings of this story as he played at his table, working with blocks, gems, and animals at a designated six feet from his classmates. As he played, his voice rose in exclamations, and the story wound its way through the classroom. Soon, Samantha began to chime in from her space on the rug, offering twists and bends to the story. Alex looked up, yelling to be heard from across the classroom, and the quiet voice of Mika burst in during the cracks in the dialogue. Soon there was a cacophony, a crowd of voices building a story, rushing to each other, weaving into each other through the power of the narrative. The unicorn is still alive in our midst. She travels through the classroom, out onto the playground, into our socially distanced morning meetings, and onto the pages the children draw and write. When the children are dropped off at our gate, they are often met with the cry, “Do you want to play the magical unicorn?” And they step into the shared story, racing across the playground to cries from the teachers, “Remember to keep your own space!” The story persists, through the noise of the air purifier, across the carefully distanced six-feet spots, and into the body of who we are and who we are becoming as a class.
The above narrative continues to evolve in the developing identity/identities of our classroom; I frame this work as a “language act” (Lindfors, 1999), in which the individuals in the class (both children and teachers) wield the collaborative power of story to create a text, an intimate space of connection and intersection, living in close contact despite physical distance. The “language act” of shared story defies the limitations of social distance, drawing us together in shared communion of what it means to be “us,” to play “us,” to write “us” into being, a community bound by connection and the co-construction of meaning. Dyson and Genishi (1994: 5) describe this story-making process thus: “in sharing stories, we have the potential for forging new relationships, including local, classroom ‘cultures’ in which individuals are interconnected and new ‘we’s’ are formed . . . In such ways, individual lives are woven together through the stuff of stories.”
As a member of this community, the unicorns racing through our classroom are a foundation of our “we’s,” the “we’s” that we are today and that we are evolving into. As their magical tails swish across the playground and the small rescuers race to free them from entrapment, there is an enduring sense that children are still children, teachers are still teachers, and the stuff of the classroom—the “we”—is still there and continues to become. The storm of the pandemic continues to rage around us, yet “we” are still both here in this moment and becoming into the next. The persistence of story writes us into being and connection in ways that are both utterly unique and part of an eternal story of play and relationships in the classroom.
It is the end of the day, and we wait with the children in the elaborate choreography of school dismissal in a pandemic world, cell phones buzzing as pick-ups are radioed across campus and children are deposited in vehicles and buses with our best attempts at distancing and no-contact buckling of booster seats. Waiting for her carpool, Mika looks up at me thoughtfully and asks, “Do you still have your rock?” I quickly produce it from my pocket and, to Mika’s pleasure, Jill (a student teacher) pulls one from hers as well. “I have one too!” she announces. “Yes,” Mika says solemnly. “They are treasures I give to my teachers. Keep them safe.” We tuck them back into our pockets, which now rattle with the many treasures that have been bestowed today. And, there, another “we” is born—a new teacher holding her first pocket treasures and an old teacher awash with gratitude for the treasures she feared she had lost. Mika’s car pulls around the circle and I walk her out, buckling her car seat and depositing her backpack beside her. “Dana, tomorrow can you bring your rock? It has magic we can use to rescue the unicorn, I think. I need to tell Eliot.” I nod, close the door, and they drive away. And as I watch the car drive down the street, I can see our stories, ourselves weaving together, old stories of pocket treasures and new stories of imprisoned unicorns, persistently winding their way together through the distance of the pandemic. Mika’s rock sits on my computer as I write this, reminding me of who I am, who we are, and how some stories are constant even in the center of the storm. I think I will tuck it back into my pocket for safekeeping.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
