A few years back, a friend asked me to name the single thing that I found most satisfying about teaching. The answer came quickly: “What I learn from the experience.” He laughed in recognition, as he’s a teacher too, and his answer was the same.

When I think back to the influential teachers in my life, the one quality they all shared was their commitment to learning as a process larger and more expansive than any classroom. They each had intellectual curiosity and moral purpose that pushed them to find meaningful connections between ideas, social history, and the complexities of human experience. Easy answers were always suspect; no matter what their personal and political ideologies were, these teachers pushed against the limits of the conventional, the expected, the safe, the comfortable, but never forgot their students’ humanity or lost their own humility. They were rabble-rousers, heretics, tricksters, transformers—they strove against the false comfort of easy answers to the world’s complexities. They understood that they didn’t know everything, and that they, too, were learners in the classroom and in the world at large.

These are qualities that I try to bring to my own classes. As much as possible, I communicate my commitment to education as lived experience, not just abstract theory. And one of the most promising ways I’ve found of bringing experience to the centre is through the concept of story, and the relationships made possible or denied through the stories we embody. We are storied creatures. Our stories give shape and substance to Creation as we know it; they reveal the best and worst of us, our hopes and fears, our dreams and insecurities about where we belong in the world…and who belong in that world with us. At their best, stories help us imagine different alternatives to the understandings we’ve inherited; at their worst, they shrink our possibilities and diminish our empathy and understanding. Like all things, stories are powerful, and that power can be used for good or ill. Frozen dogmas are deadening things, what Anishinaabe literary theorist Gerald Vizenor calls “terminal creeds,” and their static inflexibility paralyzes the human spirit, making it a fertile home for ignorance, hatred, and stagnation.

I ask my students to think about the many different stories that define their world, and to do so with a critical consciousness. What are those stories, and who tells them? What stories do we choose to tell, which voices are silenced in the telling, and why? Who gets to decide? This principle of critical engagement isn’t meant to push students toward abandoning the stories that they find meaningful; instead, it asks students to be more mindful of the necessarily social foundation of human consciousness, and the fact that they have a more powerful role in defining their world than they generally imagine. Whether we embrace the existing stories of our lives or seek new ones, we have choices, but to make informed and ethical choices, we first need to imagine otherwise, to dream and envision stories that challenge us—and our world—in better, more humane, more inclusive ways.

To practice this pedagogy requires an understanding that there will often be stories that clash with, undermine, or threaten the stories that we seek to share. Such an approach requires mindful participation by all members of the classroom community, and the willingness to be challenged as well to challenge. The focus on participatory storytelling enables all members of this localized community to take part in the conversations…if they choose to do so. Ultimately, my goal is to help my students to take responsibility for their part in the creation and maintenance of the world we share—to understand themselves as active storytellers and co-creators, not simply passive recipients of other peoples’ stories.

Whether we abandon the stories around us, fully embrace them, merely suffer their effects, or actively imagine other stories in their place, we must recognize their existence and power. When we do so, we have the opportunity to choose our response, rather than to surrender our intellectual and ethical sovereignty to circumstance. I’m honest with my students about my own socio-political position, but I’m also clear about my expectation that the classroom is a location for all to engage in robust, generous, and generative intellectual work. I’ve also learned helpful pedagogical methods from a diverse range of fellow Indigenous educators over the years, all of whom have helped me to incorporate principles of reciprocal respect that weave difference and unity together—a process of embraidment, where individual commitments are essential for collective strength.

To expand my own understanding of the stories that give meaning to this wounded world, and to help students develop the rhetorical, perceptual, and ethical skills to do the same, are perhaps the best ways I know to teach. If our stories are the scaffolding of our sense of being and belonging in the world, then there can be nothing more important than to tell these stories truthfully, and with an intellectual and moral courage born of respect, compassion, and hope.