May 3, 2004

By Elizabeth Kiem

It’s not every pedagogue that can connect Ukrainian minstrels, Steven Spielberg and racial identity. In fact, during a recent lecture in the course called “Story and Healing,” it took two instructors to make the case.

“Let’s talk about heroic epic and lament,” began Professor Rachel Saury once her students had formed a passable circle of chairs.

For about 45 minutes Saury lectured on oral theory and the themes and formulas of poetic imagery. Then her colleague John Alexander took over, showing a three-minute clip from “Saving Private Ryan” before opening a conversation on visual themes in traumatic narratives. Time ran out before the discussion could segue from epic lament to racism, but as of the date of the class, April 1, there were still seven more meetings left to get there.

“The idea is to have the students be exposed to a culture that is distant enough from them to be strange or to be like the ‘other,’ but that doesn’t have any emotional charge for them,” said Saury, referring to the focus on Ukrainian folklore early in the course. “Then we move them into working with issues of race and oppression in our own setting, with the idea being that race and oppression is a very charged topic.”

Saury and Alexander have been co-teaching the spring semester undergraduate course since 1998. They are both professors of the Slavic department, where the course was originally devised (by Professor Natalie Kononenko). But “Story and Healing” defies departmental categorization. Equal parts sociology, physiology, psychology, anthropology, and literature, this is a course that draws students from all fields of study.

“The kids who do come in thinking this is going to be a class about folk tales or whatever soon find out that it’s also about how to relate to rap music, or Native Americans,” said Jackie Kamara, a third-year economics major who got so much out of the class last year she has returned as a teaching assistant this year. “The response has been overwhelmingly positive.”

Kamara said that “Story and Healing,” in which about 40 students form smaller working groups to share personal journals and even meditate, was the only class in which she felt a personal bond with each of her peers: “I actually know everyone’s name and their stories. I’ve read about their families and backgrounds.”

Saury and Alexander stress the individuality of the course’s participants. Students are instructed to voice opinions in the first-person singular, and to avoid couching assertions as representative of a larger group. On the other hand, cultivating an understanding and empathy for other cultures and groups of different experience is a primary objective of the class.

“The point of the class is not personal therapy,” said Saury, a practicing Buddhist. “The truth is the better you know yourself, the better you understand the subjectivity of your experience.”

Alexander said the objective of the course has changed over the six years. He said increasing its interdisciplinary nature helped clarify the course objective as dealing with and recovering from trauma in a variety of ways.

“Though some of the students haven’t had a lot of experience with trauma per se, all of them have had times when they have been troubled. When traumatic experience happens to us, certain things happen to our brain … and an important part of recovery is through story or narrative.”

Saury said her family history, marred by mental illness, and her deep academic immersion with Russian literature, a famously dark body of work, conspired to give her perfect credentials for teaching about stories and survival.

Alexander credited a long fascination with the deeper meanings of folklore and also with African-American literature, which he has studied and taught in southern universities for three decades.

Still, they acknowledged that two white professors of European ancestry with backgrounds in Slavic studies should supplement their lectures on diversity with other voices.

This semester, a chaplain and a sociologist were guest lecturers. Past speakers include a local author who has written about her mixed ethnic background and an African drummer/sociologist from Bridgewater College.

Saury and Alexander raised funds from organizations around Grounds to bring Martin Prechtel (left), a Mayan folklorist and key writer in the syllabus, as a featured author for the recent Virginia Festival of the Book.

For his course, Alexander selected Prechtel’s book Secrets of the Talking Jaguar to help students “get outside of many of the assumptions that we share about our own reality and to get them to see things more symbolically, metaphorically”; but at the book festival, the writer chose a work perhaps even more relevant to SLFK 204’s topic: The Toe-Bone and the Tooth is subtitled “Story as Cultural Medicine.”