To Perrin Stifel on several dates in mid and late January 2024:
Perrin, I enjoyed listening in on the MO-TELL meeting. It helped me reflect on the evolution of the unique organization. I remember being invited to lead one of the very early workshop weekends at a state park. I gave a few performances under big oak trees...this was so long ago...but it was part of the bedrock of my developing my storytelling career.
I designed and directed Project Tell in Kirkwood School District, St. Louis County. Sue Hinkel became my assistant in its third year of the Title IV federal grant to explore, demonstrate and document how storytelling can be used as an integral educational tool across the curriculum. I believe that year launched Sue as a storyteller-artist-educator as well. Project Tell was circa 1979-1983. I also am thinking of first meeting Marilyn Kinsella, who brought a class of students (maybe 8 th graders) to Robinson Elementary School.
My work as Director of Project Tell led to helping Ron Turner create the St. Louis Storytelling Festival. All of this led to working with Emily Thach Wurtz at CEMREL, which offered workshops to numerous educators across disciplines (like you) in the entire St. Louis metropolitan area, bringing together Ruthilde Kronberg and Annette Harrison as fellow teachers and mentors. All of you became lifelong friends and colleagues. The history is so Rich...Deep... and Broad!
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You really got me thinking about the evolution of my own storytelling career, including the Summer Storytelling class at UMSL (University of Missouri at St. Louis). I taught the class every day for 8 days from 9 am to 3 pm all by myself. I designed a syllabus that included all-day field trips to the log cabin at the Arboretum, the Missouri Botanical Garden, Holocaust Museum, Gateway Arch and the Old Courthouse. The students had to learn daily stories on topics relating to the themes of the sites. I never missed a year teaching this summer institute! After about 20 years by myself, I redesigned the course to be a five day summer seminar that included Annette Harrison, Sue Hinkel and you (Perrin).
The five-day intensive course was an undergraduate three-credit hour UMSL Communications course and was taught as part of the annual St. Louis Storytelling Festival offerings. I also taught “Storytelling Across the Curriculum” for Webster University in Webster Groves in the MAT program that ran 36 years. Ken Wolfe (the MO-TELL Register guru} was in the course. He wanted to continue his work as both student and “fellow storytelling traveler.” However, there were no other courses on storytelling at Webster. With the permission of the Dean of the School of Education, Webster University, I created a master’s level independent study course for him and maybe a few others.
Ken was a totally excited student of storytelling as both an art form and teaching tool. I was fascinated by the way he taught his middle school students, using a very creative “style”of storytelling in which he used improvisational drawings as he taught or rather told his lesson. We discovered each other: I as MAT teacher, and Ken, as “student-scholar,” who seemed more a colleague with whom we shared our varied interest in storytelling. Ken relished the way some new approaches could reach his middle school students, or, as he called them, his “scholars.”
On and on it joyfully goes.
Lynn
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