Craig Vezina Interview with Cleary Vaughan-Lee (abridged), May 17, 2020

Craig Vezina:  You have very much a sort of global scope and sensibility and I’m wondering assuming you grew up in the U.S. but how do you develop that global scope?

Cleary Vaughan-Lee:  Yeah.  So it’s interesting.  I didn’t leave the country until I was in college.  I studied a semester in Madrid which opened my world view dramatically, but I think once we start to open ourselves to other cultures and other people and other people who are different from us our world view becomes bigger and that’s also something that my parents taught me too.  They didn’t travel that much but think just this slight turn of being open to other people who were very different than you can open your world view.  And then doing this work and meeting and kind of digesting all of these stories from people all around the world kind of took that sensibility that I had as a child and, of course, when I got into college much deeper I wanted to learn more about global cultures and the global issues that many people face around the world and really try to understand what is at the root.  I think to be able to be open to the global cultures of our world it really just means what it means to be human and I think we have to be open to learning which is critical I think if we want to expand our world views.

Craig Vezina:  Is there a story that you can share of student work that has been very inspiring to you?

Cleary Vaughan-Lee:  Yes.  There’s one particular story that I turn to when I share our work with educators and students and it involves a short documentary film called Marie’s Dictionary which is about a Native American woman who is the last speaker of her language, Wukchumni.  And this film in particular I think is really moving to a lot of students for a variety of factors, but one elementary classroom used this film in their curriculum and what ended up coming from that is that the students were so inspired by her story because she’s talking about saving her language.  It took her seven years to write a dictionary from memory to put all the phrases down and it’s still a living dictionary so it’s still happening today.  She’s I think almost 90.  But what came from that is students wanted to, the elementary students who were ten years old wanted to write letters to Marie.

So they reached out to us and we enabled that to happen, but what was in these letters was very foundational and inspiring for me and I think for us as an organization to see kind of what came from it.  And what they wrote was appreciation.  They saw her as a hero and some of the comments said I love that you care.  I love that you didn’t leave your language behind and you’re trying to save your culture.  And then what came from that too is how can we help.  These are questions they were asking her.  And so I think when a story can reveal, can make us more human and I think that’s what this story does is it enables us as well, students and teachers, every time I share this and the thing is that it inspires everybody to think about their cultural heritage and their stories and their family heritage and then they want to share those stories.  But I think a simple story can make us and especially students kind of enable this humanness within them. And I think when we respond in an authentic  and compassionate way that is kind of the heart of learning.

Stories can really challenge our misconceptions and our stereotypes and I say that because I see that happening all the time when stories are shared and when they’re really kind of when students sit with these and contemplate them.  But they bring up a lot of questions and so how can we, I love this quote from Elie Wiesel who talks a lot about how questions can really serve us and he said questions connect us to one another while answers separate us.  Questions open us while answers close us.  And there is quest in question.  And so I think stories can reflect kind of our deepest most human selves which is all of our insecurities and our fears and vulnerabilities.  And so which brings up a lot of questions.  I think if we can embrace that and see that as a new way forward, a new way of thinking that answers aren’t really – you can see them as a dead end, but questions are really alive and one question might lead to another question.  

If we can assess students in terms of questions I think what I read one teacher had written about this before is that he assesses his students by the questions they ask, not by the answers they give.  I think that would be a new way forward, at least one of them. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and he has an essay on our website called Teaching and Learning from Hard and Troubled Times.  We’ve just been talking a lot about the life and work of Elie Wiesel who was a professor for decades. And as I’ve been very moved by his legacy and by his work as a teacher and when he was asked in an interview what makes it possible to conquer despair, he responded by saying that we don’t do it alone.  And he kind of also responded that we needed to be vulnerable and he said if we need to help students out of their cocoons which I think is a really something happening right now, very in the moment that we need to teach them to be vulnerable again.  And he said in order to do that you need to tell stories.

And I have actually a quote here from him.  He says, “You may have to tell a thousand stories before you find one that will awaken them.  But everyone has one story he or she will react to which I find really moving because his deep understanding of the power of storytelling to create meaningful connections rings true to me and the work that I do which is at the center section of storytelling and education.  But it’s also this, and I think this is something that we’re starting to see a lot now too.  This value of reciprocity.  What does it mean to give.  What does it mean to receive? What does it mean to be open and closed and that these are learning experiences.  And I think I didn’t have the opportunity to meet  Elie Wiesel but his life and work as a teacher and learning about his work in a lot of the articles and lectures and books that he has written, especially through working with Ariel Burger has been incredibly moving at this time when we are, especially when the world is kind of in deep pain. He also said that learning will save us.  He said learning saved him.  And I think at the heart of learning is like he said this kind of being open and vulnerable and just steadfast.  We need to keep at it and that’s, to me, kind of really moving.