[Xmca-l] Fwd: P.S. Re: R.I.P. VIVIAN PALEY -- What a rich life(-story) . . . that so enriched ours 

[mike cole]

I forgot about this set of Paley papers
Mike

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Frank Kessel <frankskessel@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 2, 2019 at 7:36 PM
Subject: P.S. Re: R.I.P. VIVIAN PALEY -- What a rich life(-story) . . .
that so enriched ours 🙏
To: Frank Kessel <kesfam@me.com>


Of course there are almost endless things we can say, and stories to share,
about Vivian.  Still, one or three of you (a) may remember this, or (b)
find it worthwhile now . . .  where “it” would be at least her own
discussion (and others’) on pp. 77 ff.



On Aug 2, 2019, at 11:24 AM, Frank Kessel <kesfam@me.com> wrote:

THE NEW YORK TIMESVivian Paley, Educator Who Promoted Storytelling, Dies at
90
Image[image: Vivian Gussin Paley in 1988. She believed in the power of
storytelling in developing the minds and social qualities of small
children. She wrote 13 books and won a MacArthur award for her work.]
Vivian Gussin Paley in 1988. She believed in the power of storytelling in
developing the minds and social qualities of small children. She wrote 13
books and won a MacArthur award for her work.CreditCreditSpecial
Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
By Katharine Q. Seelye <https://www.nytimes.com/by/katharine-q-seelye>

   - Aug. 1, 2019
   -
      -
      <https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=9869919170&link=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2019%2F08%2F01%2Feducation%2Fvivian-paley-dead.html&smid=fb-share&name=Vivian%20Paley%2C%20Educator%20Who%20Promoted%20Storytelling%2C%20Dies%20at%2090&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F>
      -
      <https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnyti.ms%2F2YyODRT&text=Vivian%20Paley%2C%20Educator%20Who%20Promoted%20Storytelling%2C%20Dies%20at%2090>
      -
      <?subject=NYTimes.com%3A%20Vivian%20Paley%2C%20Educator%20Who%20Promoted%20Storytelling%2C%20Dies%20at%2090&body=From%20The%20New%20York%20Times%3A%0A%0AVivian%20Paley%2C%20Educator%20Who%20Promoted%20Storytelling%2C%20Dies%20at%2090%0A%0AHer%20methods%20helped%20children%20%E2%80%9Cjoin%20a%20complex%20and%20diverse%20social%20world%2C%E2%80%9D%20a%20colleague%20said%2C%20but%20they%20met%20resistance%20from%20advocates%20of%20standardized%20testing.%0A%0Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2019%2F08%2F01%2Feducation%2Fvivian-paley-dead.html>
      -
      -

Vivian Gussin Paley, a pioneering teacher and widely acclaimed author who
emphasized the importance of storytelling in early childhood development,
died on July 26 in Crozet, Va. She was 90.
Her son, David Paley, said she had been in failing health for some months
and died in an assisted living facility.
Ms. Paley was a keen observer — and listener — of young children. She wrote
13 books about their social and intellectual development, including how
they learn from telling stories, and received a MacArthur “genius” grant in
recognition of her work.
Her best known works include “You Can’t Say You Can’t Play” (1993), the
title referring to a rule she laid down in her classroom to teach children
about rejection. The book is “arresting in its title, magical in its
appeal, and inspiring in its message,” the Harvard law professor and
author Derrick
Bell wrote
<https://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/06/books/a-kindergarten-cliquebuster.html?module=inline>in
The New York Times Book Review. He said it illustrated “how the teacher’s
art can attack the evil of exclusion at its childhood root.”

In “White Teacher” (1979), she described her reluctance to talk about race
as a white teacher in an integrated school. Sixteen years later she wrote
“Kwanzaa and Me,” in which she confronted racism head on.
Her book “The Girl With the Brown Crayon” (1997), which followed a girl’s
discoveries during a year of reading works by the children’s author Leo
Lionni <https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/authors/leo-lionni/>, won
Harvard University Press’s annual prize for outstanding publication about
education and society.
Ms. Paley’s teaching approach involved asking children to describe an
event, sometimes with only a few words, and then to dramatize it with their
classmates. This taught them language skills but also compassion, fairness
and how to negotiate relationships.
“She was as much an artist as a teacher, creative and playful to the end of
her life,” John Hornstein, a child development specialist at Tufts
University, said in an interview. “She is known in the field for her use of
storytelling, but the method she developed is far more than that. It is a
way in which young children join a complex and diverse social world.”
Ms. Paley developed her methods over 37 years of teaching, most of them
spent at the innovative, academically rigorous University of Chicago
Laboratory Schools <https://www.ucls.uchicago.edu/>. While there, she won
her MacArthur award in 1989 at age 60. She is believed to be the only
person to win the grant while working as a kindergarten teacher.

In addition to teaching children, she mentored a generation of teachers,
held workshops and lectured about her experiences in the classroom. Her
methods of storytelling and acting have been adopted elsewhere, notably in
Boston, where the public school system has incorporated
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3qKorUGb2mHaGZkNm10cTd4WVE/view> them
into its curriculum.
But they met with some resistance from the education establishment,
especially as the No Child Left Behind
<https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/opinion/why-the-new-education-law-is-good-for-children-left-behind.html?module=inline>
Act,
which required standardized testing, became law in 2002.
“She wasn’t mainstream, and she wasn’t a curriculum person,” Mr. Hornstein
said. “To her, teaching was not about meeting a bunch of core requirements
that you can quantify; it was about being a human being.”

[image: The methods of Ms. Paley, shown here in 1989, were influential, and
were adopted by the Boston school system. But they were at odds with the
increasing emphasis nationwide on testing.]
The methods of Ms. Paley, shown here in 1989, were influential, and were
adopted by the Boston school system. But they were at odds with the
increasing emphasis nationwide on testing.CreditSpecial Collections
Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
In her book “The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter: The Uses of Storytelling in
the Classroom” (1990), Ms. Paley wrote about a loner who becomes less
isolated by acting in other children’s activities and stories, both true
and fantasized, and inviting others into his imaginary helicopter to be his
co-pilot.
By using storytelling to make children feel included, Ms. Paley built trust
in her classroom and extended that to problem solving, said Sarah Sivright,
who taught with her at the Chicago Laboratory Schools.
For example, she said, a student named Billy liked to play with blocks but
never put them away. Ms. Paley and Ms. Sivright suggested that he not be
allowed to play with them anymore. But his classmates said that that wasn’t
fair because it was his favorite activity. They suggested instead that he
simply be reminded to clean up after each session.
“Billy actually did get better at cleaning up,” Ms. Sivright said. “He felt
supported by his community.”
Vivian Roslyn Gussin was born on Jan. 25, 1929, in Chicago to Harry and
Yetta (Meisel) Gussin. He was a medical doctor and she a homemaker.
Vivian received her bachelor of philosophy degree from the University of
Chicago in 1947 and another bachelor’s degree, in psychology, from Newcomb
College, the women’s college at Tulane University in New Orleans, in 1950.
She married Irving Paley in 1948. He survives her, as do their son, David,
three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Another son, Robert,
died in 2017.
Ms. Paley began her teaching career in New Orleans. There, she recalled,
she felt burdened by an overemphasis on strict learning boundaries and
memorization, and came to believe that such an approach stifled learning —
and teaching. She described herself during this period as an “uninspired
and uninspiring teacher.”
She moved to New York and earned her master’s of science degree in
education from Hofstra University on Long Island in 1965 and taught at the
Great Neck public schools, also on Long Island, until 1971.
She then moved back to Chicago, where she spent the rest of her teaching
career at the Lab Schools. There she felt free to experiment. When the
school day was extended from a half day to a full day, she decided to fill
it with storytelling and acting.

“She helped children use the tools they have, which are imagination,
sympathy and make-believe, to understand themselves and each other,” said
Dr. Joshua D. Sparrow, executive director of the Brazelton Touchpoints
Center <https://www.brazeltontouchpoints.org/about/> in Boston, which
studies child development.
Gillian D. McNamee, a protégé of Ms. Paley’s at Lab and now director of
teacher education at the Erikson Institute <https://www.erikson.edu/> in
Chicago, said that after Ms. Paley would ask children what story they
wanted to tell, she would connect it to other stories or to a book or
something that happened in class.
“Vivian gave us a blueprint for teaching children how to think,” Ms.
McNamee said.
Ms. Paley retired from Lab in 1995 but continued to lecture and hold
workshops around the world until a few years ago.
Storytelling, she wrote in a 2001 essay, “is still the only activity I know
of, besides play itself, that is immediately understood and desired by
every child over the age of two.”


-- 
 fiction is but a form of symbolic action, a mere game of “as if”, therein
lies its true   function and its potential for effecting change - R. Ellison
---------------------------------------------------
For archival resources relevant to the research of myself and other members
of LCHC, visit
lchc.ucsd.edu.  For a narrative history of the research of LCHC, visit
lchcautobio.ucsd.edu.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20190805/4f7b5fe5/attachment-0001.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Paley LCHC.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 3200729 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20190805/4f7b5fe5/attachment-0001.pdf