Interview with David Raines, elementary school teacher and residency participant; Crystal Raines, student residency participant; and Tamara Coffey, company member

By Ann Kilkelly

Ann Kilkelly: Please identify yourself and say what your role is in this project.

Tamara Coffey: I am Tamara and I work with Roadside Theater. Roadside worked with David for about four years on a project in the school.

David Raines: I am David Raines. I am a public-school teacher in Buchannon County, Virginia. I have taught at Harmon School for about 18 years. During four of those years I worked with Roadside Theater in their Artist in Residency Program.

AK: What level of school is that?

DR: Our school is an elementary/middle school. Grades K-8. I’ve been a classroom teacher in the past, but for the past few years I’ve been a gym teacher at the school. So, I work with all the students. This year I am actually going to be working with reading.

TC: David was actually a gym teacher when he brought us in to work with him.

AK: Can you tell me what that initial contact was, how you got started?

DR: It is a long story. I’ll make it as brief as I can. I was involved in a master’s program at the time. You are going to love this. It was through Virginia Tech.

AK: Oh no? Small world. In education?

DR: In education. I got a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction. As part of one of the courses of study in that degree, I had an assignment to do. An I-search paper, instead of a typical research paper which gave us as students more freedom to choose any topic to write on.

AK: And "I-search" is a term that is used to define a different kind of research from standard?

DR: Exactly. Basically it gives the student total freedom to choose whatever they want to write a paper on. I had an interest in storytelling, and especially an interest in using storytelling in classroom situations, so that was my topic. In researching this, I had seen Roadside perform on a couple of occasions, so I tried to contact some of their storytellers that I had met.

AK: Do you remember which ones?

DR: Yes. I contacted Tommy Bledsoe, who is not with the company right now, but was for a long time. I also spoke with Ron Short. I interviewed those two storyteller/actors. In doing so, I found out about the Artist in Education residency program. I became extremely interested in doing something of that nature at our school. I spoke with the principal. This was taking place in the fall, probably in September of 1992 or 1991. Funding for a program of that nature was not available in the fall, but there was some funding for a program called a Teacher Incentive Program. We rushed that through, got it approved and got some funding from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. We started out with the residency on a small scale that first year.

AK: How long a residency was it?

DR: The first year, the funding was very limited for that program. It was just several days, probably not more than a week total. It was a taste of what it could be. We tried to expand and go from there for a full-fledged residency for the next year.

AK: For eight years you’ve been working with them?

DR: No. We worked together for four years. There were lots of reasons for termination of that work, but funding was a large part of the reason. A loss of funding.

AK: Are you a storyteller yourself?

DR: Well, yes, I am.

AK: I thought maybe you were. I heard you say that was the source of your interest in research, but what do you see as the connection between that and education?

DR: I felt like the great strengths of the work we accomplished at Harmon were in helping students learn about their family histories, their community history and history of the region. It helped students with their self-esteem. Being from the Appalachian region, I felt like that was an extremely important part of the child’s education. To help them get over some of the stigma of being from Appalachia. Self-confidence.

AK: That is a great point. I would love to hear more about how that worked. Some examples?

DR: It definitely worked. Let’s talk about some of the often less successful students, first of all. Students from poor backgrounds that often don’t have a lot available to them, have parents with very little education, and very often are not successful in school, for obvious reasons. Storytelling and theater-type work is geared to helping students from that background more than anything,. I mean they normally struggle in writing things down. They don’t write well, they don’t have good vocabularies, they don’t express themselves well.

AK: Difficulty reading?

DR: Yeah. In lots of cases the only book available at home might be the Bible, sometimes not even that. Seriously. I’ve seen, and still see homes like that. Kids have no reading material in their home. I’m sure they will have television, but nothing to read. This storytelling and oral-expression work was geared towards helping those students. We saw kids from situations like this go out and talk to their parents and learn stories. Or their grand parents. Or in some cases, just a neighbor, if they were from families that had poor family situations. Lots of times, students would actually talk to friends, or people they saw at church. Different settings, not always family.

AK: They were doing research in their family history?

DR: In lots of cases, they were doing research of their family history, and then, in some cases, it was more of a community-based story gathering and telling.

AK: People would get together and have storytelling sessions?

DR: Well, not so much that. We did some of that at school, and we called them story swaps. What I am speaking of were basically opportunities for those students that didn’t have family members they could interview and learn stories from. They interviewed people in their communities, or people they knew from churches or other places they would go. The students brought in stories and shared them orally with Roadside’s people and the teachers that were involved in the residency program. They would eventually develop these stories into a written form. Sometimes into scripts so that they could produce little plays with the stories they gathered. We saw students that normally struggled greatly in writing and reading do well with lots of these type endeavors. I felt like it was a great thing because of that.

AK: In the amount of time that you’ve been doing that, you’ve probably seen some students go on and do other things. Have you seen any evidence of that skill that they acquired there?

DR: I don’t know if I have any large success stories, but I have definitely seen some successes. Kids have come back to Harmon School after going on to high school and shared things with us. They’ve felt like they’ve achieved some good results from the work they did as storytellers and actors at Harmon. Some of the confidences they gained helped them in their speech classes, and later on.

AK: When they went off to school?

DR: Yes. Some of our first storytellers that we had at Harmon are now in college. I guess freshman or sophomores. Actually I do have contact with quite a few of those kids. We had a reunion of sorts this spring and several of our storytellers that were high-school students and college students came back and were really pleased to be with us again.

AK: Are they still engaged in storytelling or theater?

DR: Several of them had been involved in theater during school. I think there was a connection there. Yes. I do. I just feel like the confidences that they gained and some of the experiences that they had laid a good foundation for them to go on and participate in some of these theater-type things later on. I know several of them were involved in an oral-communications project at the high school. You probably didn’t hear about Lee Smith, the author –

AK: Oh, I know Lee Smith. I’m a big fan.

DR: A teacher at the high school got involved with Lee Smith and they collaborated to create a book.

AK: Does the project itself have a name?

DR: The book itself is called "Sitting on the Courthouse Bench". It is a collection of stories from the community of Grundy, Virginia. The inspiration for that project came from a teacher at the high school, Debbie Raines. Another Raines, how about that? We are just famous in these parts.

AK: What is her relation to you?

DR: Debbie is another distant cousin. Debbie and I used to have great discussions when we were doing our residencies at Harmon. She would say, "We need to have some type of collaboration between the elementary/middle school and the high school." We did get together on a couple of occasions. She had students in her oral-communications class at that time that were creating little skits and doing performances. We had kids at Harmon doing the same thing with Roadside Theater’s help and inspiration. They were bringing stories in, creating scripts and doing little live performances of their creative scripts. So, we combined our kids on a couple of occasions. We took our students up to the high school and they brought their kids down to our school a couple of times. It was very excellent.

This other thing that I mentioned, I didn’t expound on nearly enough. There were several students that had been storytellers and actors at Harmon with our residency program that later were a part of this oral-communications group that worked on the book with Lee Smith. In that work they had to do basically the same things that they had done with Harmon’s residency program. That is the beginning of it anyway, going out and interviewing people. Getting stories from the community to be a part of this book. They carried tape recorders and went out and interviewed people. Of course they had to transpose all of that into a written form for the book, which of course was edited by Lee Smith. It is now an excellent book.

AK: What is it about the way they work that kids latch onto? Or what attracts you to that way of working? Is it that it is an arts activity in an environment where there isn’t much of that? And/or is it stuff about the particular people, or the kind of material? Could you talk about that a little?

DR: The appeal is there for students because it is something so different from what they are used to seeing or participating in school. There is singing involved, moving around, acting. It doesn’t involve them sitting in little uncomfortable desks for long periods of time listening to somebody read to them from a textbook. Tommy and Ron and Rhema and Kim, and all those guys – they are just high energy. They had great personalities that appealed to the young people.

TC: Rhema’s mom was a teacher at the school at the same time.

AK: And what was her name?

DR: Vivianne Keen, who was also in the same master’s program with me. That was another result of the I-search paper. Vivianne’s daughter became a member of Roadside as a result of this paper. Through researching for the paper I found out that Roadside was looking for another actress to be in some of their plays. Rhema loved theater and was very much interested in that when she found out about it. She applied for work and was hired by Roadside to be a member of the troupe.

TC: She had been working down at the Barter, so she had experience before she came to us.

AK: This is an example of your work in education partnered with an arts organization. It is really interesting to see how that network happens. It seems like it would be really difficult for any one of those elements to produce that kind of thing on their own. That is somehow the source of what is so good in the work. I am so amazed at how that connection happens. In my own mind I think it takes a personality, someone who really sees what needs to happen in education and has a passion or a drive to do that. If there is not an organization available or some sort of structure available it is almost impossible to carry that on in this way.

DR: Absolutely. I was very fortunate at the time to have a principal that was very much interested in the idea when I approached her. She fully supported the work from day one. Just felt like it was important. Felt like it was a wonderful opportunity for students. That wouldn’t happen in every school, by any means – not even close.

AK: That is an interesting point. If you are a little bit cynical about things that happen in schools, like I think you get after a time teaching in them, sometimes the really innovative and the truthful can be really scary and threatening. Does that happen?

DR: It does sometimes. We didn’t have very many instances of that nature. I did see some kids that thought they wanted to be a part of the residency, and after they found out what was involved they didn’t really want to anymore because of less than desirable home situations that they didn’t want to share with anyone in any form whatsoever.

AK: Did that happen? I teach women’s studies sometimes. I have men and women in my classes that will reveal something really terrible that is happening to them. Sexual abuse, violence and all kinds of issues. I teach a lot of art processes. There are a lot of stories too. Those methods don’t always, but to me they often invite disclosure. How do you deal with that? What do you think about that?

DR: Well, we didn’t have to deal with any really touchy issues in all those years. Fortunately.

AK: Did you ever get the sense that they were there?

DR: Yes. I know there were situations there. Like you said, that setting does encourage students to open up.

AK: So, you tried to focus on helping them honor their own stories?

DR: That’s right. We focused on that predominantly. We tried to make it a very positive experience. We tried to make it something that helped each individual that was involved not only become a better storyteller, or actor, or singer and dancer, but also –

AK: And you did get into all those things?

DR: Oh yeah. We got into all of it. We had a great time. We basically wanted every kid to feel better about themselves and where they were from, and learn something that they weren’t being spoon-fed from a television set or a video game. All kids, no matter if they are rural kids or city kids, are spending way too much time being spoon-fed. My own kids included.

AK: How many children do you have?

DR: Three.

AK: Are they involved in theater or storytelling?

DR: The two older ones were involved in the residency. My youngest has not been. We haven’t had anything of that nature going on for a few years for a lot of reasons. Mainly there hasn’t been any flexibility in my schedule or any other teacher’s schedule in my school that would allow us to work with them.

AK: Do you have standards and competencies?

DR: Not so much that in our case. It has been a physical thing. We’ve had a school close and have increased our student population at our school, which increased the number of classes we have to have. Planning time, or anything of that nature, is almost nonexistent now. We’ve had a change in principals. The principal that was so supportive and wanted this work retired. Our new principal didn’t discourage the idea, but didn’t really encourage it either.

AK: And you have to encourage it.

DR: Funding problems came along at the same time. All those things combined and kind of called an end to our residency program.

AK: That is a shame. All the cuts in the state budget for education devastated everybody. I was a department head at the time and had to cut a miniscule budget. I do know what you mean. Tell me a story about one of your favorite moments during that residency.

DR: Okay. There are several. The first one that comes to mind is a little story about – we had about 30 kids involved in our residency program at this time. What we usually did was to try and group them in groups of three or four. To bring in stories and share them and gradually develop one or two that they liked the best into a script. Or in this case, they developed a song from a story. This was a group of four boys that were middle-school students. I think they were probably sixth-graders at the time. One of the boys had brought in a story about a coal-mining disaster in his neighborhood that his father had told him about. Back in the ’20s, this coal mine had a big rock fall and a man had been trapped and killed in this accident in the mine. The story involved some folklore. There were rumors that the mine was haunted after this had happened.

AK: Was that here?

DR: In Buchannon County. Near Harmon School in this place called Convict Hollow. There had been a convict camp situated in that hollow. So, this was the Convict Hollow coal-mine disaster story. Rhema’s friend Kate came along for two days during that residency program. These boys had been struggling to do a script from that story. They weren’t getting very far with it. Kate, being a singer-songwriter, was along with Rhema that day. I don’t remember exactly how the idea for doing a song came up. Do you Crystal?

Crystal Raines: I think one of the boys had heard the story, but they didn’t even have anything wrote down. They just started talking about it. Like you said, she was a songwriter and she just started kind of playing with the idea.

DR: I remember the day. We had groups scattered around in the gym like we always did. Rhema, and myself, and I think Vivienne Keen was in there. Well anyway, Kate ended up going over to this group of boys that were struggling along and somehow they got started on the idea of writing a song from this story that they had learned about the coal-mining disaster.

AK: Is this with Kate Long?

DR: No. Kate Larkin. She has done some CDs actually. Kate spent this afternoon working with these boys and they eventually turned that story into a song. Then, the next day, polished it up some more. We attempted to sing it several times, with mixed results.

AK: Like how? What do you mean?

DR: Well, these boys were pretty shy. They didn’t want to sing.

AK: Do you guys remember the lyrics?

DR: I have a copy of them.

CR: I remember how it starts, "Way down yonder in Convict Hollow miners worked to earn a dollar. Then one day in ’23 there was a bad catastrophe." I can remember that!

DR: It went on to talk about the mine shaking and quaking. It talked about the miner that was trapped.

AK: Did anyone know the miner? Were any of the students relatives of the miner?

DR: I don’t believe any of the students were related. We ended up getting quite a few stories that weren’t necessarily family-based but were community-based. That was a great strand to that work, the community part of it. We had those community story swaps at school that were great events. We had big potluck dinners that were attached, so we all ate real well. Roadside’s people would come and they would entertain by playing some songs and maybe tell a story. Then our storytellers would tell a story to the group.

CR: When the community came and had a story that they wanted to share, they shared it. Not being a part of the Harmon group, or Roadside, but still – Remember that man who brought in the clocks that were made out of turtle shells? He would bring in all different things all the time.

AK: And you were telling stories, Crystal?

CR: Mm-hm. I was in for quite awhile. At first, it was something that everybody had to be public speaking. I was scared to death. Especially just being in elementary school. One thing about the storytelling, I thought, is that you worked with people that you probably never would have socialized with. We had all grades. The fourth grade through the seventh grade were all there. You had all of those grades mixed together. When we broke into individual groups, it wasn’t just the seventh graders working on something, it was all different grades and ages mixed.

We would have an assignment to go out and interview your grandparents or your community. You just go out and write that story, or tape record it and come back. They loaned out tape recorders from the school that we could take with us. When we come back, different Roadside people would help develop our stories. They start out, and we just stand up and read our stories. But as you developed it, it turned into a skit and a play. It became dialogue. It became real. I remember one, really vividly, that I did. I think it might have even been one that Roadside had and then we performed. I was playing a young boy. I was in a loft of a cabin. Someone pushes you down. I can remember that all so vividly. I can remember hitting the floor every time.

AK: Were you scared?

CR: Oh, yeah. I was scared, especially at the community story swaps. At school, it became routine. You got to know that group of people. But when you had to stand up in front of the community and perform it was a really nervous thing. It helped so much when I got to high school.

AK: How?

CR: Like in speech class. Again, we were seniors and freshmen in that class. We were all mixed together. I was just so nervous on my first reading. The first thing we did was poetry. We had to interpret a poem. I was just so nervous. But as I did it, the storytelling came back. We did short stories where we had to interpret with hand movements and stuff like that. It helps so much. I had done it. I already had experience.

AK: Was it fun?

CR: I loved it. It was great fun. When we went to Whitesburg, it was a Christmas play. That was probably our biggest play, as far as butterflies in the stomach.

DR: On stage, in front of God and everybody.

AK: Oh, yeah!

CR: It was a great experience.

AK: Would you ever do anything like that again?

CR: I would. I am hoping that once I get in college with drama classes, and clubs and stuff like that maybe that will come into play then also. I think there is a class of Appalachian history. I think it will play a big part in that also.

AK: Do you remember any particular moments? We’ve heard about Convict Hollow, but are there any other moments that you really remember?

CR: That was one of the most vivid things that I remember about it. I guess it was with the song. That is why it stuck so much. I believe that was about the only song we did that year, wasn’t it?

DR: That may be the only story that got developed into a song. I think one reason I remember it so much is that those boys that were involved were not successful students.

CR: Academically, they didn’t make good grades. They probably had never been involved in anything like that before. Where they had to work.

DR: I guess there were four of them. If you were going through the school at that time those four may have been four of the least likely individuals that you would expect to do something like that.

AK: I want to ask you both if you about how personally it changed you.

CR: It gave me more confidence, but it also gave me a better sense of who I am. The stories in my family that I probably wouldn’t have known about, people that I probably wouldn’t have known about if I hadn’t been out and researching. I just learned so much about my family. It helped me as a person to develop.

AK: What would you say to that?

DR: Well, that is great. That is what we were hoping for. She just really has gone over some of the goals that I personally had for that work. To help students in those areas, to help them learn more about who they are, to help them gain self confidence, and at the same time get to be better speakers and writers and things of that nature too. It helped me personally, too. I have been a very amateur guitar player years before this, but I had kind of put it aside and hadn’t done much with that in a long time. Roadside’s people inspired me to pick up my guitar and start playing that again. In the process of that I’ve gone on to play the banjo, and the mandolin and learn a whole lot of old mountain tunes. I learned several from Tommy and Ron during this work. I came to realize how much fun old-time mountain music really is.

Like my students, I think we are all guilty of this media blitz. You are just overwhelmed with all the current stuff on television, in the movies, in print. You absorb all of that and you start to think that is where the fun in life is, that is where the excitement is. You get away from what is really your home base. What is really important to everyone is where they are and how they experience their life where they are. So many of us are missing out on some of the most enjoyable, exciting, interesting facets of life by looking too far away for our entertainment and our education. We need to start looking closer to home.

AK: You sure are an inspired teacher, an inspiring teacher.

TC: One of the most interesting things that you did was the Appalachian Fair. That was incredible.

AK: What was that?

DR: We started out in the beginning with just this core group of storytellers doing the residency for several years. Then in the last year that we had Roadside as a part of our school, we expanded the thing to include the whole school as much as possible. As much as teachers would allow it to take part in their respective classrooms. There was a lot of that. Like I said, the principal encouraged that a lot. We saw classrooms get involved in art projects, little children in kindergarten did a quilt. The quilt was wonderful. Each block came from a different kid. Their parents had helped them create it

CR: I remember that quilt. Each child brought in a piece of something that was special to them; a piece from their baby blanket, their favorite t-shirt, things like that. I can remember doing the boxed lunches. We brought in shoeboxes and decorated them like baskets. They brought them to the cafeteria and auctioned them off for a picnic outside. That was a whole-school thing. We did the Christmas tree one year in the cafeteria with the cranberries and popcorn.

DR: An old-time Christmas tree.

TC: And dried apples. It was a beautiful tree.

DR: There were lots of classrooms involved. One class got interested in studying old tools. The teacher had kids take photographs of any old tools they had at home, that their grandfather had, or their father had. He had a collection of photographs and little writings about how the tools were used, the history of it, who owned it and all that. On the day of the fair they brought in the actual tools. He had parents and grandparents bring them in and set up displays.

TC: They had all these tables all around the room. Some people had done cooking. There were native plants. And you could talk to any of those kids and they could tell you everything. It was amazing. Didn’t you have such a large turnout that it involved another day?

DR: There was such a large turnout that we involved two school days. That was well spent.

AK: That is fantastic. But that work isn’t happening anymore?

DR: That isn’t happening anymore.

AK: Then the hard part about that is that those works end. What do you think about the possibility of having work like that happen in other ways? Do you anticipate doing that again? With Roadside in particular?

DR: I would love to see a new involvement with Roadside. But you know, when you think about a school the size of the one we are about to be going into – we are under consolidation right now. Harmon School is closing. Two other elementary schools are closing. We are all going into a building that was supposed to be ready right now. It is not ready yet, so it is going to be a few months. Probably mid-year we are going to go into what is called River View. It is an elementary/middle school that is going to house over 1,200 students. Accomplishing this kind of community-based work is going to be very difficult. I would like to think that we could.

TC: How big was Harmon?

DR: At the most we had about 300 students.

AK: Do you think it is not possible to do that kind of community work with a large group?

DR: Well, I’m not going to say that it is impossible.

AK: Yeah. That is a real question for me. I’m not sure I know either.

DR: I can hardly see that it would be possible to involve the whole school in something of that nature. When you are talking about something of that nature, it would just be mind-boggling to think about it.

CR: At Harmon everybody was just so close. Everyone knew each other. We could get together in small groups and work. It would be hard to imagine. That is more people than we have in the high school. Just timewise, it would be hard to work with that many students at one time. It would be a great thing if it could happen.

AK: It is a big challenge, but I think those same methods that would work. I mean, size is really a big issue.

DR: It could work. I mean, we have a curriculum guide. A group of us teachers got together and spent several days together during the summer while this work was going on. We created a curriculum guide for the use of Appalachian Studies in the curriculum. It is pretty darn good in a lot of ways. It has got a lot of good suggestions in there for every grade level K-8.

AK: And a lot of people still use it?

DR: I really can’t say how many people use that guide. I hope that several do. I know several teachers that did certain projects related to storytelling or music. I know one classroom got involved in old-time music at that time. Some of these things have continued on smaller scales as a part of the ongoing curriculum. One of the things that we are struggling with right now is the great push in the state of Virginia, the S.O.L.s [Standards of Learning tests]. We are seeing more and more classrooms that are basing everything they do from day one until day 180 – gearing everything towards passing the S.O.L. test. I think that is so wrong.

AK: I think the effect of S.O.L.s on the arts is just to simply say that those things don’t matter. Some things that you might think are the most important things to be teaching, like self-confidence, self-image and all kinds of empowerment. The things you describe as the outcomes of the program, are essential. They are not extra in any way at all. I hope there is some relief in the future. It is horrendous.

Ann Kilkelly is a professor of theater arts and women's studies at Virginia Tech. She is recognized nationally as a scholar and performer of jazz-tap dancing and history, performance studies and interactive performance techniques. She has received Smithsonian Senior Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant, and performs and gives master classes in jazz tap around the country. At Virginia Tech she served as the director of Women's Studies for six years, she teaches and directs multimedia performance concerts, and she recently created the Diversity Training Laboratory to help students and faculty use performance techniques to examine diversity issues.

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