Alma Flor Ada—the Power of a Writer

by Sari Luoma, Ph.D.

You know how some keynote speeches just kind of absorb your time and by the time you walk out the door, you may remember who it was by but not really what it was about? That's kind of what I was expecting on Friday, October 16th as I walked into the morning general session at the Houston TABE (Texas Association for Bilingual Education). But BOY was I wrong! Dr. Alma Flor Ada blew the audience away with her powerful storyteller ways. She had the audience alternately laughing and in tears, paying rapt attention to her talk from beginning to end. Some of the bilingual teachers in the audience must have known what was coming, as they gave her a standing ovation before she even started. And at the end, EVERYONE was standing and clapping.

So now, a couple of days after the plenary, can I say what it was about? Why, yes I can! Dr. Alma Flor Ada talked about the power of stories to move and educate people and help them grow. She talked about the centrality of language and the power of using your own voice in one, two, or more languages. She talked about having something to say and finding a way of saying it. Her talk was framed in a narrative about her life and about her journey into first becoming and then continuing to develop as a teacher. She did not directly make any of the points I just mentioned. Rather, her talk was composed of snippets from her own life and some of her encounters with other people. In more ways than one, her talk was a story and a compelling one at that.

Nobody can fit all of life into an hour of talk, but part of what made Dr. Ada's presentation so powerful was that she presented a rich and complex picture of life. Take the activity of writing. To write a story, a presenter has to have something meaningful to say and an underlying structure for relating the story. But a story does not have to be truthful to the last syllable. If you find there are things that need to be said but you do not want to say them yourself, you can create a character who can say them. If your story is too complex to tell from a single narrator's perspective, you can have multiple key characters in the story and divide the themes between them. And everyone has a story, an interest, something that makes them tick. If you are a teacher, your job is to help your students find their stories and help them, as needed, to express them.

At one point in her presentation, Dr. Ada mentioned the burden of tests and the drainage of joy from their classes, and for a minute I feared the worst. Please, not another affirmation of teacher prejudices against testing! I needn't have feared. In a few swift moves, Dr. Ada developed the topic into a powerful metaphor for teachers to use when they think about the requirements that standards and tests impose on their work. Appropriately for the pre-Thanksgiving season, she likened standards to a grocery list with categories of ingredients for a main dish, various kinds of sides, and desserts. When you're done writing your list and doing the shopping, what do you do when you get home? Surely you do not put the meat on the table raw, you don't pile the potatoes unpeeled on a plate, or leave the dessert ingredients in packages and expect your guests to enjoy their meal. Instead, you follow recipes or your instincts and you peel, chop, mix, toss, cook, fry, and bake. As the food preparations fill your house with delicious aromas, you take out the good china and shining silverware, set an inviting table, and begin to serve. So, as a teacher, if you see the standards as a shopping list and yourself as the cook and the host for the party, wouldn't you expect your offerings to be more enticing for your guests as well as yourself if you allow yourself some space for your expertise?

On my way out from the plenary, I heard many compliments from other audience members. Charged up and eager to get to work, we all went our various ways to enjoy the offerings of the concurrent sessions.