Creating a caring community

By Felicity Markdal

‘Togetherness’ is not a term that fully covers the Danish terms of ‘samvær’ (fellowship) and ‘fællesskab’ (community), but it captures the essence of what these concepts are seeking to achieve. Within the walls of a folk high school we seek to create caring communities where individuals are seen holis­tically, and not only in terms of educational capacity. Being an educator at a folk high school involves treading beyond one’s usual teaching remit in class, and beyond curriculum standards. It is arguably this ability to teach the whole per­son, to have time and space to know the whole person, that gives the folk high school some of its greatest strengths.

An international folk high school

Firstly, to explain the premise of our school: At Interna­tional People’s College (IPC) students come from a multi­tude of different ethnic, cultural and national backgrounds. Usually anything ranging from 20-35 different nation states are represented, and the different languages spoken can be as many as 90. We are privileged to encounter and work with cultural diversity on a regular basis.

This diversity could naturally entail a fracturing of the community, especially where language barriers and previous cultural understandings of one another come into play. To take one example, students from Korea and Japan are often cultured to have a particular view of the other nation, while Western students may have a particu­lar view of people from the so-called Third World. These encultured views could evidently stand as barriers to ‘togetherness’. However, most times we are able to turn this immense diversity into a great asset of the school.

students from Korea and Japan are often cultured to have a particular view of the other nation, while Western students may have a particu­lar view of people from the so-called Third World.

Felicity Markdal

Sharing stories

One of the ways we do this is through a concept we call ‘Life Stories’ - we sit and we share our life stories with one another. We meet on three separate occasions, for three different sessions simply named Life Stories I, II and III, to tell stories from three separate eras of our lives. From almost the outset of the school term our student body is divided into smaller groups (we like to call them in col­loquial terms ‘families’, although the more official title is ‘contact groups’). These groups are designed by trying to mix the students according to nationality, age, and gender, so each group will try to be a small mirror of the student body as a whole, containing around 10-11 individuals. Each group is then anchored by a teacher. All three sessions are supported by a list of questions that the students are given prior to the event so that they can prepare by bringing pic­tures, asking their family questions and so forth.

The past generation

‘Life Stories I’, usually taking place very early in our term is focused on the generations that have come directly before, i.e. we share the stories of our grandparents and parents. It is usually incredible to sit and listen to the ancestry of a group of 10 people from around the world. Hearing where each of us has come from gives us a deeper understanding of one another. Knowing that a student’s grandmother was a prisoner in a Nazi extermination camp, or that a student descends from a tribal king, makes us understand their worldview better. We are not only enlightened as to that individual’s own experiences and history – something that cannot help but influence their current understanding and perspective. We are also given the opportunity to meet incarnations of history that we may otherwise only know of from history books and teachers. Genocides, imperialism, class struggle, all sorts of societal phenomena that might seem at great distance to us personally are humanized.

Knowing that a student’s grandmother was a prisoner in a Nazi extermination camp, or that a student descends from a tribal king, makes us understand their worldview better.

Felicity Markdal

What effect can this have on motivation? Argua­bly a great deal. The antithesis to motivation is apathy. Apathy comes from a lack of care or understanding, an overload of impersonal information. When you can hear, see and put names and faces to individuals that lived and breathed these things, apathy dissipates. We are called to action by love and compassion. Stories bring us people that we can feel for and fight for. Life stories work on these two levels, giving us a greater understanding of each per­son and of the world. It brings people close together, they feel bonded in their vulnerability and openness, a trust is built. Additionally, this session is great motivation for bridging the generational divide. We become curious and inquisitive about our own heritage and the stories of our families and their sacrifices, hard work and contributions to bring us to where we are.

Childhood

‘Life Stories II’ is concerned with the student’s own child­hood, up to the age of 16. We share the stories of where we grew up, what a typical day at school was like, what our hobbies and loves were, and what our family looked like amongst other things. This session allows us to get to really know one another, to understand the experiences that we have been through and how they have shaped us. As a teacher, it is a great teaching tool to understand the behav­ior and motivation of the students in my class. Knowing that a student really did not like traditional education allows me as a teacher to think of more unconventional ways to pass on information, or knowing that a student loves a particu­lar sport, movie or literature genre gives you other avenues to engage them in conversation, both in and outside class. In instances of misbehavior or misunderstandings the intimacy and information that comes through storytelling allows you to approach each student in a very different way. Discipline is not needed to the same extent, because you can empathise with their behavior and appeal to them not as an authority figure but as a human to a human.

Present and future

The final installment, ‘Life Stories III’, is concerned with the students’ lives from 16 years old to their current age, but also their dreams and hopes for the future. We ask them to imagine their future employment, future family configura­tion, even a geographical location. This is often the most difficult storytelling session, because it is not merely about recounting, but also reflecting and imagining. A six month stay at a Højskole qualifies you for nothing, and everything. This last session of teaching assists the teaching of individ­ual classes and the school experience as a whole by invit­ing students to reflect on how they want to use their new perspective or knowledge, and to reflect back on who they were and who they could imagine themselves to be.

Stories become part of classes

After the sharing of stories has been done in the ‘family’ groups, the teaching team meets and discusses if any­thing pedagogically relevant came up during the sessions. Respecting confidentiality we are then able to share if our student body contains expertise that can be used in the teaching of classes, meaning that the students become a part of teaching and designing the curriculum. To take an example, a student revealed that at the age of five she was sent across the Himalayas from Tibet to India in order to have better opportunities in life and has not been able to return home or see her family since then. This personal story was integrated into the class on ‘People, movement and migration’ to put a human face, voice and emotion onto a global phenomenon, but it was also used as a focal point of a morning assembly as an example of our core value of respect and openness to others.

Another student used the story of a sister’s bi-polarity to help a small group of students in a class on innovation to design an app and communication system to make life easier for people with that diagnosis. Stories can thus be used as themes for activities, material for projects, to illus­trate teaching points or as community activities to bring us closer together. In development management, we use the life experiences of students to design new social action projects, like preventing bullying in schools in Japan, or improving language learning in Brazil. In movie making we integrate their stories into scripts, and in environmental studies we use it to find out how our world is changing.

Stories can thus be used as themes for activities, material for projects, to illus­trate teaching points or as community activities to bring us closer together.

Felicity Markdal

IPC was founded on the idea that war and conflict arises through the conception of the ‘other’ as something we are taught to fear. ‘Life stories’ a tangible proof that when we meet that other, both in person and through their stories across generations, we come to realize that we are different and the same. Stories touch our hearts and connect us in a way that matters. As the American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou said: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”29

The concept of Life Stories is designed by Cynthia Nolasco (Cha) and Runa Midtvåge with inspiration from the philippine Educa­tion for Life Foundation. See “To learn from life, for life, through­out your lifetime” by Edicio dela Torre in #3 Take responsibility, FFD’s Forlag, 2019.