Secondhand storytelling

Rory has never been to the arctic, but she knows the way the snow crunched underfoot. She can feel the blistering cold and hear the silence interrupted by small gusts of wind. Not because she was there, but because her teacher, Mr. Hayden was. On the first day of their climate unit, Mr. Hayden stood in front of the room and told stories and shared pictures of the research trip he took as a grad student, how his eyelashes froze together while he dug out ice core samples, how the sun hovered above the horizon all day, never setting. He passed around a small rock that he’d brought home from the ice shelf: “This was buried under 20,000 years worth of snowfall.” Rory’s eyes widened. It wasn’t a lecture, it was a story. 

In Matthew’s post, Visceral Learning, last week, he argued passionately for reclaiming firsthand experience in education. He wrote that the firsthand is fully immersive, immediate, and embodied. Through the firsthand, we can make sense of things in our direct experience. 

As we continue to grapple with the ideas of first, second, and thirdhand experience, we turn our attention to secondhand experience. These are the experiences we encounter through others via narratives, images, documentary, or other mediated means. These are the stories told to us by those who did experience something firsthand and, while they can sometimes be ignored in experiential circles, secondhand experience can be deeply transformative. 

Secondhand Power

Secondhand experiences carry with them a different kind of power. They offer a way for us to borrow someone else’s memory, not to live through but to listen through. When Rory’s teacher told that story, he wasn’t just conveying information, he was inviting his students into a world he embodied, lived with, and felt deeply. The rock he shared with them wasn’t a prop but a portal. 

There is beauty in the recreation of an experience through a story. If you’ve seen Tim Burton’s 2003 movie Big Fish, you know the work that this entails. In the movie, a father’s life is recalled through the tall tales he told to his son including when he met a giant, traveled with the circus, and fought in the Korean War. As we come to find in the end (sorry for the spoilers…) each story is a fictionalized version of the truth. And yet, the meanings of those stories for his son remained the same. Did Rory’s teacher’s eyelashes really freeze together? In the end, it could be the truth or it could be a tool of immersion, but it doesn’t change the purpose of the story - Rory was drawn in. 

Instead of demanding presence like a firsthand experience, secondhand experiences demand a presence of mind. They call on the audience to activate their imaginations to the lived experience of the storyteller. When a teacher says “When I was there…” or “Let me tell you about the time…” they are not detouring from content, they are the content. 

Why secondhand?

In my view, one of the tragedies of education is that we cannot give our students access to all the experiences that could make them whole, build their identities, and help them to find meaning. At the end of the day, many students don’t even have access to field trips around the corner let alone a trip to gather ice cores in the arctic. But we can give them all access to stories. 

Secondhand experiences also add another layer of social-emotional learning. While firsthand experiences ground us in embodiment, secondhand experience helps us to practice empathy. I think of this specifically when students are given opportunities to share their own experiences. When a student talks about their walk to school every morning, their weekend camping with their mom, or their failed attempt at making the hockey team, they are themselves inviting others into their experience. They are themselves becoming teachers for their classmates to learn from. 

Making room for secondhand

So what does this mean for teaching? It means making room for stories to be told by all members of the room. 

One way to do this is to open up our definition of professional development to include giving teachers firsthand experiences in their content area that they can share with their students. Imagine the difference between a history teacher talking about British colonialism in India from the textbooks they’ve read compared to a history teacher sharing the story of their visit to Punjab and the remnants of partition they experienced there. 

Another is to recall the classroom as a cohabitation, a place where all experiences are not only worth sharing but are valuable educational resources. You can quite easily imagine a classroom where students are given the power and agency to become the teachers by tapping into their own experiences. 

Questions, still. 

There are still questions to be grappled with here. How does fiction vs non-fiction come into play here? What about tall tales like those from Big Fish? How does the creative agency of a documentary director move things from second to thirdhand experience? 

Rory may have never walked the Arctic shelf herself, but because her teacher did, she carries a sliver of that world within her. That is the potential power of secondhand experience.