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

Mon Aug 5 20:20:15 PDT 2019

Thank you Mike
for sending these over

A teacher collaborating with me and I have been
looking at storytelling with CHAT and with Paley
in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad

We seem to know Vivian
and will remember her

Sharada
----------------------------

On 8/6/19, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
> 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.
>