Renowned educator and author Vivian Gussin Paley died recently. Her former editor at Harvard University Press, Elizabeth Knoll, looks back on her life and work, which emphasized storytelling as an important tool in children's learning.
Vivian Gussin Paley was a small, gray-haired schoolteacher with a sweet smile and a powerful personality. She could sit on a floor telling stories with five-year-olds or dominate a lecture hall packed with adults. White Teacher, The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter, and the unforgettably titled You Can’t Say You Can’t Play, along with ten other books published between 1979 and 2014 (eight from Harvard University Press, five from the University of Chicago Press), are classics in education and enduring provocations for developmental psychology. Each shows Paley’s innovation as a teacher: encouraging children to tell stories, listening and talking to them about their stories, and—most significant for our knowledge of cognitive development—making those stories a way to encourage children to learn. Their close observation, insight, humor, and vivid characterizations make them unforgettable. Their sales numbers make her one of Harvard University Press’s bestselling authors of all time.
Given this impact inside and outside of the academy, perhaps the most surprising part of Paley’s story is how much trouble she had getting published at all. By a perfect coincidence, the person who finally opened the door for her was a student: an eager first-year graduate student in Education and Psychology at the University of Chicago, Gillian Dowley McNamee.
McNamee was fresh from New York, where she had been researching children’s learning in Head Start preschools in Harlem, with Michael Cole, then of Rockefeller University. At that time, Cole and other developmental psychologists were becoming impatient with the rigid, rationalist, hyper-individualist, and supposedly culturally universal Piagetian hierarchies that then dominated academic theories of cognitive development. Far more suggestive and fruitful were the radically different views of Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky, whose essays Cole and his colleagues translated and edited and eventually published as Mind in Society.
For Vygotsky and the psychologists he inspired, minds are always embedded in culture. It’s simplistic to think of learning as something that goes on in your own head and that you do entirely on your own. For Vygotskians, little children aren’t individualist and independent “scientists in cribs,” each one figuring out how the world works from scratch. (Even adult scientists work entirely in groups!) They are more like new homeowners, figuring out the personalities and habits of their new neighborhood from what the longtime residents say and do.
What that means for education is that to learn anything really new, you need other people, or at least one other person—someone just enough ahead of you to help you build a bridge from what you already know how to do, or how to understand, to something much harder. If you want to envision what students are capable of learning, don’t just look at what they can do alone. What counts is what they can do in a social setting.
When McNamee started at the University of Chicago, Cole was still unpacking Vygotsky’s ideas and corresponding with McNamee about them. McNamee walked to the other end of the Education building, into the Lab School, and saw it all happening in front of her in Vivian Paley’s kindergarten.
Or rather, she heard it. “I had never heard such a din in a classroom! Every principal then and now thinks that a quiet room in which the children are sitting down, each doing something individually, shows they are learning. But I never heard children talk the way I heard them talk in 1974—because Vivian was listening to them. I knew I had found Vygotsky in action as Vygotsky himself could probably hardly imagine.”
Paley had been teaching for years and thinking about the effectiveness of play as a teaching tool, not just as didactic instruction. She was a passionately committed teacher. In moving from her home in an overwhelmingly white, middle-class town to Chicago and the Lab School, a multiracial school in the largely black South Side, during a turbulent period of enormous racial wariness and fear, she had to listen and understand the emotions and beliefs of all the children in her classroom. She did it by asking them to tell her stories, and by listening to their stories, and by encouraging them to listen to each other’s stories.
In the process, she had to think about her own stories, and what she had to learn about her own blind spots. She had to realize that she wasn’t just “a teacher”: she was a white teacher.
And she had to write it all down to make sense of this demanding, humbling, mind-expanding experience.
She tried some commercial publishers, with no luck. That’s where she got help from McNamee, by then her student teacher. She was “jumping up and down about Vygotsky,” she says, but “Vivian didn’t know what I was talking about and she didn’t care. She just couldn’t keep her eyes and ears off the children.” McNamee sent Paley’s much-rejected manuscript to Mike Cole, an editorial consultant to Harvard University Press, and he and Eric Wanner, himself a psychology PhD and one of HUP’s most visionary acquisitions editors, were transfixed by this vivid account of real children’s complicated, elaborate classroom stories that helped them absorb complicated, new ideas and relationships
According to HUP lore, the faculty board was considerably chillier. One eminence is said to have demanded, “Why are we publishing a book by a kindergarten teacher?” Another skeptic went out to observe Vivian’s classroom and came back a convert: she had never seen a teacher make possible such discussion among such young children.
So Harvard University Press published White Teacher in 1979. Then, and now, it has given teachers the teaching they needed about a hard subject: how to handle conversations among children when talk about racial differences emerges. Now Director of Teacher Education at the Erikson Institute of Chicago, McNamee sees its very personal story, from forty years ago, as only growing in importance now. “It was written when you couldn’t talk about race, and paradoxically teachers still feel they can’t—even though we’re talking about race all the time—and teachers still are without the vocabulary and strategies to manage it.”
In 1993, Vivian and HUP took on the even bigger and harder subject of inclusions and exclusions in You Can’t Say You Can’t Play. What happens when you make a new rule in kindergarten—no excluding someone who wants to join in. This time, Vivian brought in some advisors experienced in social interaction: fifth graders. They were, at best, wary. As one said,“It will be fairer, but how are we going to have any fun? What happens when you tell each other stories? When you suggest new rules? When you watch and see what happens when you try something new? How does it feel to be the person who’s shut out? How does it feel to have let someone in?”
I was Vivian’s last editor at Harvard University Press, working with her after she’d retired from the Lab School on books about classrooms other than her own. Those last books took Paley and her readers on journeys to classrooms outside the U.S., as in Kindness of Children, and to an impoverished neighborhood in an American city, In Mrs. Tully’s Room, where she saw to her awe how the pseudonymous Mrs. Tully used simple stories about animals with children younger than three to help calm and comfort them in times of loneliness, confusion, and fear and to give them a vision of kindness and community.
Though different in approach and character, these later books, like all of Vivian’s books, focus on children’s desire for connection and their empathy with one another, as well as their apparent instinct for narrative.
A few summers ago, as she was sitting on her porch with McNamee, Paley told McNamee that she had realized that in all of her books she had left out the four most important words. “That reminds me of….” That’s the way you open a conversation with children, Paley said: you make a connection between their stories and their play, or their conversation yesterday, or other stories they’ve heard and told. You remind them of how something new connects to things they’ve already thought about.
That’s what Paley herself was doing with her books. Her writing was a way of thinking for her, a way for her to understand how five-year-olds themselves were thinking, and what it was like to be them in their little classroom community.
“She could start today and write all of them again and they would still be brand-new,” McNamee says. “They would still give us a blueprint for what education should be—to teach people to ask questions and listen to others as they answer.”
