"HOW DOES IT GET INTO MY IMAGINATION?":
INTERTEXTUALITY AND ALTERNATIVE STORIES
IN THE CLASSROOM
Elizabeth Yeoman
Faculty of Education
Winter 1995

Introduction

"Sometimes [stories] mean something that's incredibly true. That was true, that really happened to people. Maybe not exactly that way, but explained in different words." (Valerie)

"[Stories] could actually teach you lessons." (Sarah)

"... I'm really really wondering... I'm still thinking about that. How does it get into my imagination?" (Sarah)

"'If we never heard stories, we wouldn't have an imagination.' 'And if we never had an imagination, we wouldn't have dreams...' 'And then we wouldn't make up stories!'" (Anastasia and Emma Lina)

"Could you tell us true ghost stories in the bathroom with the lights out?" (Lucy)

"Did you ever almost die?... Could you tell us a story about it?" (Michael)
This article, drawing on a classroom based study of children's engagement with stories, looks specifically at one aspect of the engagement process, the notion of intertextuality and its relevance for using stories in the classroom. I am using the term intertextuality to refer to the reader's background knowledge and understanding of texts, and of how the stories used in the research fitted into a broader textual framework. A key finding of the study under discussion concerned the importance of intertextual knowledge in how children read and interpret texts ("text" being used in the broadest sense of "what the respondent responds to", including films, for example, as well as written texts). Response to texts can take place only in the context of previous knowledge and experience. Readers respond not only to the text itself in a "live circuit" (Rosenblatt, 1978, p. 14), or to each other in a "thought collective" (Bleich, 1986, p. 418), but to the multitudinous voices of their own culture and history. These constitute the imaginative background that enables children both to understand, and to take pleasure in stories or other texts. Intertextual knowledge is a key factor in the constitution of this imaginative background.
We use stories to make sense of the world. Perhaps it is safe, in this case, to use a universal "we" -- for can there be anyone in the world who does not use some form of story to explain, explore, understand their own lived experience? Or any society that does not use stories to explain its origins and values? The above quotations, all taken from the transcripts of the study under discussion in this article, indicate how aware the children who took part in the research were of the importance and pleasure of stories. From Sarah and Valerie's comments on the educational and moral value of stories, to Emma Lina, Anastasia and Sarah's emphasis on the workings of the imagination, to Lucy's sense of entertainment and drama, to Michael's intuitive rephrasing of Labov's well-known question, "Did you ever think you were about to die?" (Labov and Waletsky, 1970), the children's comments show a clear sense of the key roles stories played in their lives.
The study was set up to investigate the use of "disruptive" stories in classrooms -- stories that, in some way, challenge the world as it is and suggest a better world that might be. The stories used disrupted conventional and constraining European storylines about race and gender through presenting unexpected characterizations, plots or outcomes. Examples are stories where girls are adventurous protagonists, the beautiful heroine is black, or the outcome of a fairy tale is not"... and they married and lived happily ever after". It was hoped that these stories would function to surprise the readers/listeners into questioning some of their previous assumptions about how the world works.
Parents, schools and school boards receive many recommendations regarding the creation and use of non-violent, non-racist and non-sexist books and teaching materials. Assumptions are made, based partly on research, partly on "common sense", that the use of such texts will influence children in such a way as to contribute to the building of a more peaceful and egalitarian society. On the other hand, books and materials depicting certain kinds of violent acts and/or stereotyped images are often assumed to have the opposite effect. Because of such recommendations and assumptions, books are added to, or removed from, classrooms and library shelves and intense debates take place in schools and communities.
There is a considerable body of literature on the use of non-stereotyped and non-violent texts in schools. However, children's response to texts is a complex process, and little of the writing on the topic deals with actual case studies of how these kinds of texts are interpreted and integrated into what I refer to in this article as the imaginative background of the readers. Through a case study and analysis, this research project began to examine what children actually say and do when engaging with "disruptive" stories.
Although the study was done in a multicultural classroom in a large urban centre, an understanding of the central role intertextual knowledge plays in children's reading and response should be equally relevant for teachers in Newfoundland and Labrador. The knowledge and experience of children here may in some ways be very different from that of the children who participated in the study. However, because of the dominance of certain forms of media and certain kinds of storylines, their intertextual knowledge is likely to be remarkably similar.

Review of the Literature

The study draws on the diverse analytical frameworks of reader-response, critical pedagogy and developmental psychology. The complexity of the intersecting theoretical areas is echoed in the complexity of the analysis which looks at race, culture, social position and gender as factors in children's response to alternative stories. Both the children's lived experience and textual factors present in the stories are taken into account and seen as parts of a continuous dialogue in which meanings are negotiated and re-negotiated, and dominant discourses in the community are upheld or challenged.
Developmental psychologists and others in the field of language and literacy contribute a great deal to understanding literacy in the context of culture and community. Such researchers as Lev Vygotsky (1978) and Jerome Bruner (1986) in developmental psychology and Gordon Wells (1987) and Shirley Brice Heath (1983) in language and literacy all agree that teaching to read, write and answer questions "correctly" is not enough. They point to the collaborative nature of learning, in which learning takes place within a community of learners through mutually supportive interaction and dialogue, and to the importance of critique and creativity as elements of literacy.
Critical educational theory and critical pedagogy, unlike other theoretical frameworks for analyzing educational practice, do not take the existing society in which the school functions as a given. Rather, the school is seen as an important site of struggle for social change, and education as centered around the critique of existing social structures and the envisioning of new possibilities (Weiler, 1988). In this view, literacy is seen not merely as a set of life skills, or even as the "literate thinking" described by Wells (1981) et al., but rather as offering an end to passivity and powerlessness, and a means of re-thinking and re-shaping society. This process begins with the lived realities of students and teachers and their own hopes and strengths. It builds on this knowledge to critique and to re-build.
Reader-response privileges a view of the reader as active constructor of meaning (Rosenblatt, 1978). There are numerous studies of children's response to stories and articles on the use of stories in classrooms. However, most such studies, while viewing reading as an interactive process, nonetheless see it as an essentially private act, or as one taking place within a closed community of readers. The relationships between/among readers and texts are not viewed as problematic. Those studies that do acknowledge the ideological nature of reading still tend to see texts as offering examples and role models to which children will respond in a unified fashion, or at least in ways that can be analyzed quantitatively.
Researchers who both take an ideological stance and recognize the complexity of the reading process are Walkerdine (1984) and Davies and Banks (1992). Both of these studies deal with children's understanding of storylines of gender. As well, both conclude that traditional gender equity programmes relying on non-stereotyped role models are ineffective because they discount the contexts that make texts intelligible, and the role of the conscious and unconscious desires of the reader. However, their conclusions differ from one another in one important respect. Davies and Banks recommend that children be taught critical analytical reading skills as a more effective approach to gender equity. Walkerdine concludes that, because the fantasies currently popular with young girls are so enticing, there is a need for equally appealing alternative fantasies.
My study, like those of Walkerdine and Davies and Banks, sees meaning as socially constructed, and engagement with texts as central to this process. The study conclusions corroborate some of the findings of Walkerdine and Davies and Banks, for instance the power and pervasiveness of certain traditional storylines in children's interpretations of non-traditional stories. My study adds to theirs in that theirs deal specifically with gender whereas mine examines the intersection of various factors including gender, culture, race and social position. My study also makes suggestions as to what might be some of the characteristics of "potent [alternative] fantasies" (Walkerdine, 1984, p. 184), and to what a methodology for teaching critical analytical reading skills (as Davies and Banks suggest) might look like.

Description of Study: Background and Methodology

The research for this study was done in a Grade Four/Five classroom at Charles Street Public School¹ an elementary school in Toronto. Charles Street School draws on a very diverse population, both in terms of culture and ethnic origin, and socio-economic situation. Thus the children in the class represented a wide variety of backgrounds and experience. The children, in small groups, listened to selected stories intended to generate discussion through disrupting more conventional storylines, and participated in follow-up activities and discussions. In so doing, they talked extensively about their interpretations and their own lives in relation to these texts, and also frequently made references to other texts they were familiar with.
The three stories referred to in this article were chosen, in part, to disrupt the conventional storylines that heroines are white and fair haired, and that they must marry princes to find happiness. Outlines of the stories are as follows:
To Hell With Dying by Alice Walker (1967): A picture book, illustrated by Catherine Deeter. Large, detailed and realistic colour illustrations to complement an autobiographical story of childhood in the rural American South. The child, Alice Walker, lives next door to a warm, loving, talented and eccentric old man. When the old man drinks (which he does frequently), he gets depressed and threatens to die, but the children always bring him back to life -- until the end of the story when he really does die. The story deals with racism, alcoholism, illness and death and yet is sensitively and lovingly told. As its own jacket description puts it, it is about "someone who erases the boundaries between children and adults, whose faults gentle us into tolerance and charity, whose praise makes us strong and proud -- and whose love helps us to understand what love really is."
The Talking Eggs by Robert San Souci (1989): A picture book, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. Based, apparently, on an old European fairy tale but told traditionally among African Americans in Louisiana. The characters have become Creole and the story now takes place in rural Louisiana. There is a magical solution to the trials of a poor, oppressed, but good and brave young girl. It is a version of the Cinderella story, but with important differences: The illustrations show the characters as nineteenth-century farming people of African descent. All of the main characters are women. There is no prince and the selfish sister and mother are no uglier than the good sister.
Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters: written and illustrated by John Steptoe (1987). A Zimbabwean folk tale similar in theme to The Talking Eggs and Cinderella. The younger sister is oppressed by the older but is eventually rewarded for her goodness with riches and power. Unlike the good sister in the other two stories, she takes revenge on her cruel sister.
The children most frequently referred to in this article are Marilyn, Monique and Sarah, three grade four girls, of African-Canadian, Chilean and French/German backgrounds respectively. All three were average students and all demonstrated a broad and perceptive intertextual knowledge, despite the fact that for Sarah and Monique English was a second or third language.

Intertextuality and Engagement with Stories

Toni Morrison writes that "[r]eaders and writers both struggle to interpret and perform within a common language shareable imaginative worlds" (Morrison, 1992, p. xii). Identification with textual characters is central to how children participate in this shareable imaginative world. Characters, however, like real people, do not exist in a vacuum. The stories they inhabit have geographical and historical backgrounds and are organized into significant sequences of events that can be used to give coherence and meaning to the lives of readers/listeners. In responding to texts of all kinds, most school-age children already have a wide repertoire of story "frames" to draw upon. They know certain kinds of people and certain situations and resolutions from their own lives and the retold lives of friends and family, others from films, books and so on. They make sense of one text by reference to others, or to previous readings of the same one. In other words, they have a great deal of intertextual knowledge.
A good example of this kind of knowledge (although she was baffled by it herself at the time) came up in a conversation with Sarah. We had been talking about the role of illustrations in response to stories, and I had asked her if the pictures were sometimes different from the way she had imagined the characters:
Sarah: Yeah, like when I saw the movie of "The Little Mermaid" I also read the book of it and the king was even more different than in the movie.

Elizabeth: Different from the way you imagined him, or from the story?

Sarah: I imagined him just like in the movie and the little mermaid, she's not as pretty in the book as in the movie or in my imagination... and I don't know how the pictures got in my imagination 'cause I never even saw the movie yet.² 'Cause my imagination was more like the movie and just a teensy bit of the story... and there's quite a question cause I'm really really wondering. I'm still thinking about that. How does it get into my imagination? Cause no one ever told me about the little mermaid. I only heard the title about it and nothing about the story.
Although Sarah did not feel that she understood the process, her question, "How does it get into my imagination?", expresses a sense of intertextuality. She knew that her ideas about characters and stories came from somewhere, although she did not know where. Her comment that her imaginings were closer to the film version than to the book plausibly indicates a greater familiarity with the Disney animated genre of illustration and/or a preference for it over other types of storybook illustrations. Most of the children in the study made quite frequent intertextual references to Disney versions of stories.
There are many references in the study transcripts to resemblances among texts, to recognition of the "rules" of various genres and so on. Sometimes intertextual references were made to similarities that I had not been aware of myself until the children pointed them out. For example, we discussed three different versions of the Cinderella story, the Perrault one (or a Disney re-writing of it) and two others, The Talking Eggs (San Souci, 1989) and Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters (Steptoe, 1987). These two stories are both "black" versions, the former from Louisiana, and the latter from West Africa, of the familiar "oppressed youngest daughter goes from rags to riches" story. However, there are important differences among the three which led to different kinds of responses to them. One difference is the "circumstantial detail" (de Certeau, 1980) of the Cinderella figure being black in the two alternative versions, another is in the details of the outcome.
In choosing stories and organising activities, I had not really thought about the connections among these three stories. Marilyn was the one who recognized that they were all Cinderella stories and pointed this out. During one of the response activities, I had read The Talking Eggs aloud to the children and asked them to draw the characters as they imagined them, without looking at the illustrations in the book. When I had done this activity with children in the past, they almost invariably drew white characters, no matter what race they were themselves, and usually drew a blonde heroine, sometimes expressing surprise when they saw that the "real" illustrations were of black characters. As Marilyn was drawing, she talked about this and about the connections among the various versions of this story. She said that Blanche, the heroine of The Talking Eggs, reminded her both of Cinderella and of Mufaro's beautiful daughter, but that she had chosen to draw her as the Perrault/Disney Cinderella. Her illustration shows a blonde young woman dressed in rags and tatters (rags and tatters are not mentioned in the text of The Talking Eggs) and standing at an ironing board. Although she herself is African-Canadian, Marilyn said that she found it easier to imagine Blanche as the European Cinderella than in some other way. Some extracts from a group discussion highlight this issue:
[I had just finished reading "The Talking Eggs" to the children.]
Calvin: I didn't draw the girls. I just drew the farm.
Elizabeth: Could you try to draw one of the girls? I'm interested in how you imagined the characters.
Marilyn: I imagined that Blanche was wearing rags and her hair was really blonde and she was doing all this ironing...
Calvin: I'm going to draw Rose on a motorbike!
...
Marilyn: I read a story once called Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters and the sister, named Mayara, she was really mean and the father would say "I want both of you to clean up the yard" and the sister would say... "You have to clean up the yard because Dad said" and she would be the queen and her sister would be the servant...
[At this point the tape ran out. Marilyn was commenting that she wanted to know what people in stories look like, so she liked to have descriptive details given in the text or shown in the illustrations.]
Elizabeth: Marilyn, you drew Blanche all in rags before she got rich. Since the story didn't give you details of what she looked like, how did you decide what she looked like?
Marilyn: Well, I got some stories from Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters... well, she wasn't dressed exactly in rags but... she had smudge marks all over her and she was ironing and all that so I thought of Blanche as in rags and old shoes like Cinderella.
Elizabeth: But you drew her more like Cinderella than like the illustrations in Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters...?
Marilyn: Well, in Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters she was ironing and all that stuff and Cinderella she's always in rags and always ironing... [group discussion of how the three stories ended]
Marilyn: I mostly thought she would be like, you know how Cinderella is? And I mostly thought she would get married and live happily ever after.
The above illustrates an important point about the intertextuality of children's stories. Marilyn had a wide range of possible texts and images available to her and she recognized relationships and resemblances among several of them. Despite this, the Perrault/Disney version of Cinderella remained somehow dominant in her imagination, just as Disney heroines seem to have been so dominant for Sarah that, although she knew several versions of the story, she imagined "The Little Mermaid" like the Disney character before she even saw the film.
Repeated exposure to certain images and themes does seem to have a cumulative effect. This was also expressed by Monique. As she drew Blanche, she commented, "I imagine her dark but I'm drawing her blonde." I asked her why but she said she didn't know. Both Marilyn, an African-Canadian, and Monique, a dark-skinned Chilean, drew the heroine as unlike themselves, even though Marilyn saw Blanche's resemblance to an African character as well as to a European one, and Monique stated that she imagined Blanche differently from the way she was drawing her. Why should it be that, even with a wide range of physical images to choose from, including their own, and even though both girls were aware of other possibilities and of discrepancies, the ideal of a blonde heroine remained dominant? How does it happen that certain versions of stories, often ones carrying limiting and hegemonic meanings, come to take such an important place in the imaginations of children?
In linguistic terms, for many North American children, the white is the unmarked, or the "norm", while the black is the marked, or "different". This view of the world is constantly reinforced in children's literature and film. Despite improvements in the availability of alternative images in children's literature and other cultural forms, the black remains marked as less beautiful, less heroic and as "other". I cannot think of any other reason why these two girls (and others in the study) would have responded as they did. The black remains marked, in part, simply because white images of goodness and beauty are still so much more pervasive. As well, it may be because such influential institutions as the Disney studios actually work with and exaggerate hegemonic image forms that function to reproduce racism and sexism. (For example, although there are no black mermaids in "The Little Mermaid", the sea witch is black and sings a calypso song.) Through such ubiquitous cultural forms, blondeness (especially for females) and certain kinds of bodies, clothes and so on, maintain their powerful associations with goodness, comfort, beauty and romance. Darkness, on the other hand, is still equated with the exotic, the occult, and, often, with evil.
In the course of an earlier study, one girl had exclaimed, on seeing the illustrations in the book, "Oh, she's dark! I gave her yellow hair!" When I asked her why, she answered without hesitation, "Well, she was good so I wanted to make her pretty." If good equals pretty equals blonde, then how do children of all races learn to see themselves? Images are important and their cumulative effect even more so. The examples I have given here deal with the negative impact of certain dominant kinds of texts and images -- and I would argue that this impact is just as harmful and limiting to white children as it is to those constituted as "the other". There were also a few more positive examples of children responding pleasurably to the less stereotyped heroes and heroines in the "disruptive" stories used in the study. My own daughter, Ilse, had expressed intense pleasure on seeing the cover illustration of the child Alice Walker in To Hell With Dying, another book I used in the study, exclaiming "She looks like me!" Donald Bogle discusses the impact of changing images in his analysis of why so many black women responded so positively to Stephen Spielberg's film version of Alice Walker's The Color Purple:
...you have never seen Black women like this put on the screen before. I'm not talking about what happens to them in the film, I'm talking about the visual statement itself. When you see Whoopi Goldberg in close-up, a loving close-up, you look at this woman, you know that in American films in the past... she would have played a maid. She would have been a comic maid. Suddenly the camera is focusing on her and we say, 'I've seen this woman someplace, I know her' (Bogle, quoted in Bobo, in Pribram, Ed., 1988, p. 92).
Obviously, the children who participated in the study were able to make connections between texts and to recognize similarities in characters without being shown or guided in this process. The transcripts reproduced here are typical of other discussions in which intertextual references, sometimes quite sophisticated ones, were made without any expectations or prompting from me. Probably the most important finding here is the dominance of certain kinds of texts and particularly of certain images, despite the children's exposure to and knowledge of a much wider range of possibilities.
Implications for Teaching Practice

While it is true that certain limiting storylines remain dominant, and are constantly reinforced through cultural forms such as Disney films, it is also true that the availability of alternative stories of various kinds has had an impact. In the course of the study I found that, despite the dominance of Disney, the Charles Street School children, unlike the children in the Davies and Banks (1992) study, were well able to understand, take pleasure in and create alternative stories. I attribute this difference in large part to the efforts of the Toronto Board of Education and, more particularly, to those of their own teacher. The Toronto Board has invested a great deal of time and money in multicultural, anti-racist and anti-sexist work, no doubt making an important contribution to Toronto's being named "multicultural city of the year" by the United Nations last year. Marie, the children's teacher, believed profoundly in the importance of stories and in the anti-racist and anti-sexist stance of the board. Over the course of the two years the children were in her class, she had exposed them to a rich variety of alternative texts and response activities. The teacher, then, through providing alternatives, may play a key role in developing children's ability to critique limiting stories and to understand and create new ones.
Based on the findings and analysis of the study, and on previous work by other researchers (Walkerdine, 1984; Davies and Banks, 1992), suggestions can be made for the development of a methodology for an effective pedagogy of justice and equity at the elementary school level. This methodology would be based on the provision of appealing and challenging alternative texts for children, and the use of these texts to foster the ability to critique more traditional texts, to "read against the grain", and to broaden children's "discursive imaginations" (Bogdan, in Straw and Bogdan, 1993, p. 3). It is, thus, a two-tiered approach, taking into account both the importance of desire in response to texts, and the necessity for the development of critical analytical skills in young readers/listeners/viewers. An understanding of what kinds of stories are most likely to make a strong impact is helpful in recommending alternative reading for children. Virtually all of the Charles Street School children emphasized a preference for intensely dramatic themes and a need to identify with a believable and realistic character. Textual characters form an important part of the imaginative background of narrative and visual resources on which children draw so as to give meaning to themselves and to the world. Circumstantial details surrounding the characters are probably one of the most effective ways of presenting new possibilities for change in the imaginative landscape that is central to children's view of the real world and their own lived experience. Probably the most important circumstantial details in written texts and illustrations are those regarding race and gender. For a white child, to identify with a black character means to recognize commonalties of human experience while at the same time acknowledging difference. It means to broaden the range of possibilities of who can do what in this world and to develop empathy. For a child who is not white, identifying more frequently with strong and beautiful characters of their own race or ethnic group might mean a changed perception of who they themselves can be in a historically white dominated world. As to gender, girls need heroines who are beautiful, who lead dramatic lives, but who are also strong, brave and adventurous and of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds. Boys need heroes who have these same qualities and who are kind and gentle.
As to activities, it is important, first of all, to build a community of critical readers. One way to begin doing this, even with older children, is to read aloud. An oral story offers possibilities for a more immediate response and interaction. Follow up activities like re-writing endings or details of stories, dramatising, illustrating, debating outcomes, comparing written, oral and filmic versions of stories and so on can foster critical reading and the development of critical analytical skills if they are oriented in this way.

Conclusion

One of the Charles Street School children, Valerie, said that she loved "books about the creation of new beings and new worlds". In the end, the point of this research was to examine what kinds of books these might be, and how children might understand them. Stories are central to children's practical understanding of the world. They can both contribute to the reproduction of hegemonic meanings and challenge them in an ultimately liberatory language of possibility and hope.
Children need to make difficult moral decisions and to realize that all points of view do not necessarily have equal value. As well, they need analytical tools for understanding their own situations, and aesthetic models for broadening their narrative resources. While the roots of a better world are in critique, the art of the teacher as storyteller lies in fostering hope by enabling students to imagine and tell their own stories in new ways. In so doing, they will learn to challenge the way reality is shaped and their own lives constrained.

Author's Note

The research for this article was done before I came to this province. I welcome any comments pertaining to its relevance for Newfoundland and Labrador classrooms and communities, or suggestions for future work in the area of stories in the classroom.

References

Bleich, David (1986). The Double Perspective: Language, Literacy and Social Relations. New York: Oxford.
Bruner, Jerome (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Davies, Bronwyn and Banks, Chas. (1992). The Gender Trap: A Feminist Poststructuralist Analysis of Primary School Children's Talk About Gender. Curriculum Studies, 24(1), 1-23.
Heath, Shirley Brice (1983). Ways With Words. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Labov, William and Waletsky, Joshua (1970). Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience. In Helm, J. (Ed.), Essays on Visual and Aural Narrations. Washington: University of Washington Press.
Morrison, Toni (1992). Playing in the Dark. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rosenblatt, Louise (1978). The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Written Work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Straw, Stanley and Bogdan, Deanne (1993). Constructive Reading: Teaching Beyond Communication. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton-Cook/Heinemann.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Walkerdine, Valerie (1984). Some Day My Prince Will Come: Young Girls and the Preparation For Adult Sexuality. In McRobbie, A. and Nava, M. (Eds.), Gender and Generation. London: MacMillan Publishers.
Weiler, Kathleen (1988). Critical Educational Theory. In Women Teaching for Change. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey.
Wells, Gordon (1987). Apprenticeship in Literacy. Interchange, 18(1/2), 109-123.

Endnotes

1. The names of the school, teachers and students have been changed to protect the anonymity of the subjects. Most of the children chose their own pseudonyms for the study.
2. Presumably she means she had imagined the characters before seeing the movie since she had seen it at the time of this conversation.