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.