Playing Their Part
Language and Learning in the Classroom
Nancy King, University of Delaware

Storymaking enables us to experience the healing power of stories, to evoke new questions, reflect on past experience, and imagine new possibilities. Sharing stories creates community by helping us connect to each other in meaningful ways.

Dancing With Wonder: Self-Discovery Through stories is a book of and about stories, designed to enable readers to explore and tell their own stories whether they are autobiographical, creative, or some mixture of the two. The stories and activities in this book are designed to encourage readers to embark on their own storymaking journeys with and without the company of others.

Click here for a press kit (.pdf)

Read a Blogcritics Magazine review
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2008/05/
05/215448.php

Listen to a radio Interview with Diego Mulligan
The Journey Home (KSFR 90.7 FM) 13.Feb.06
RealAudio • MP3

Listen to a radio Interview with Arin McKenna
Art Tour Santa Fe (KTRC 1260 AM) 12.14.05
RealAudio • MP3

For years, Nancy King has used the arts - drama, poetry, imagemaking, movement, storymaking, and music - as the core of her classroom work. She stresses the process of "making" - painting, sculpting, writing, moving, etc. - to help us connect who we are with what we think, feel, and know. She also recognizes the pleasure and self-esteem that children can derive from ownership, from being able to say "I made this."

In this book, teachers and those working with children will find ways to use the arts to teach language arts. The activities are designed to help teachers consciously and deliberately discover ways to connect what we learn to who we are. And to do it in ways that best facilitate learning.

Myths and related stories describe essential human experience which, requiring use of the imagination, reconcile and give voice to fantasy and reality. Speaking through images which embrace the paradox of possible and impossible, the likely and the desired, they stimulate our personal expressive abilities in a way quite distinct from the absorption of prescribed images which television and radio present. This book is concerned with rekindling that creative power of the human imagaination which in the West has atrophied through neglect. It is concerned with increasing an understanding of the need to exercise our imagination as one of our psychic functions, as well as the need to exercise our bodies as one of our physical functions.

This book contains myths and tales from all over the world which are grouped around seven themes, all reflective of forms of human experience. The authors suggest ways in which these myths and tales can be used to develop our imagination's original and unique voice through educational and therapeutic encounter, and how this expression can be communicated to others who are engaged in the same task.