Stories help ‘to make sense of our lives’

Law students in Ralph Cagle’s legal profession class learn directly from a master storyteller. Cagle regularly cites a scene in Otto Preminger’s 1959 film “Anatomy of a Murder.”

“Ben Gazzara has killed his wife’s assailant, and now he’s on trial. James Stewart plays the defense attorney. He constructs a story through his questioning, and ultimately, the jury accepts it,” Cagle says.

Cagle shared this example during a recent panel discussion, the first in a series of events that will explore the use of stories in teaching and learning. Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities through a Mellon grant, the series is based on Robert Coles’ book, “The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination.”

Cagle says he draws from a stash of instructional tales from personal — he was a trial lawyer who later worked in the political arena — and family experiences, as well as from movies, television and literature. For him, stories link different constituencies on several levels.

“Stories make connections,” he says. “Law students come from all the undergraduate majors, so they’re a diverse group. Stories help them connect with the teacher, each other and themselves.”

He observes that stories can also bridge abstract theory and concrete practice, a point underscored by Casey Reiser, a genetic counseling faculty associate.

“Stories illustrate principles,” she says. She and her students rely heavily on family histories in their barely 20-year-old discipline to get a feel for family communication patterns, attitudes toward disabilities, feelings about conditions they themselves have and more.

“Students often ask for more panels where families tell their stories,” she notes. Her students are reading biographies of people with genetic conditions. Later there will be oral book reports, when students will talk about what the biographies say about what they are learning in class, such as coping skills.

Ruth Olson, associate director for the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, says she takes a more anthropological, field approach. Her students tape-record interviews and then transcribe them.

“They learn a lot about listening from this exercise,” she says. “It takes a lot of effort — about four hours of typing for every hour of tape. But the students invariably report they hear things on the tape while they’re transcribing it that they missed completely during the recording.” This phenomenon enhances analytical skills and sharpens listening, Olson says. Anne Lundin, associate professor of library and information studies, began the discussion with a testimonial to the power of stories she uses in the children’s literature course she teaches.

“I assign response papers about what students have read for class,” she says, noting that the practice encourages students to bring their own stories to bear on the discussion started by the books they’ve read. “The stories within us are extremely compelling,” she says. “The papers I get are absolutely amazing. In telling their own stories, the students are opening themselves more fully to what they read and hear. I also open myself as a professor and listen to my students’ stories as they respond to the literature.

“A narrative thread connects us to stories of others in the world, some like us, some very different. We need stories to make sense of our lives,” she says.

Mary Layoun, professor of comparative literature, will lead the next Call of Stories event on Friday, Dec. 6, at noon in 4207 Helen C. White Hall. For more information, go to http://labweb.education.wisc.edu/callofstories or contact Doreen Holmgren, 262-2353, or: dholmgren@education.wisc.edu.