Whose Story Is It Anyway? Teaching Social Studies and Making Use of Kuwento

Abstract

In the Filipino language, kuwento means “story,” but the concept itself encapsulates more than its literal meaning. Similar to talk story events in Hawaiian communities (Au & Jordan, 1981), kuwento serves as a tool to communicate everyday experiences within groups, especially among family and community members (Eugenio, 1981). It is an abstraction of history, congealing experience into a chain of events. It is what Bakhtin (1981) would call a unique speech experience—one that is shaped and developed in continuous and constant interaction with others. Kuwento is largely influenced by other people's words and ideas that eventually become incorporated into one's own. Like story and storytelling, kuwento takes many forms and can be used in the classroom during sharing time to construct and activate newer understandings (Cazden, 1994; Michaels, 1981). In the case of paucity in classroom material, the teacher can engage students to learn through her/his own writing (Vascellaro & Genishi, 1994) and her/his own construction of oral stories in different participant structures (Phillips, 1972). As we shall see in the case of Filipino Heritage Studies, the teacher's use of reflective- and real-time stories conveys the importance of history and present-day realities both in his and his students' lives. Although kuwento is also present in other participant structures, this article focuses on the teacher's whole-class lecture during a unit on the Philippine American War.

Notes

¹“Filipina/o” is used throughout this article to recognize and be inclusive of gender differences. In some instances, the male-centered term “Filipino” remains to note the teacher's gender, reflect the speaker's transcribed speech, or acknowledge the name given to the academic course.

²All names of locations and participants are pseudonyms.

³The transcribed symbols used for the segments are: italics for pronounced emphasis, colons for elongated sound of the previous letter, period in parentheses for noticeable pause, brackets for observer's added commentary, empty parentheses for unintelligible words or phrases, ((double)) parentheses for nonverbal behavior, (single) parentheses for clarifying notes and other information, capitalized words for increased volume, and ellipsis points for omitted data. Conventional punctuation marks are used to indicate ends of utterances or sentences, usually indicated by slight pauses on the audiotape. Commas refer to pauses within words or phrases. Also, bold italicized words or phrases are used to direct the attention of the reader for textual understanding.

⁴Loosely translated, the formal name of Katipunan means “the most highly respected society of the nation's children.”

⁵Recommended texts for teachers and other educators include Cordova & Espiritu's (2001) Pinoy Teach and Tintiango-Cubales's (2007) Pin@y Educational Partnerships.