(bright downbeat music) - Most people are familiar with storytelling because most people like to hear stories or tell them.

But to Dr. Nancy Small at the University of Wyoming and her students, storytelling is the subject of important academic study as well.

And she's building a new PhD program at UW on that basis.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS, this is "Wyoming Chronicle."

(bright downbeat music continues) - [Announcer] Funding for Wyoming Chronicle is made possible in part by Wyoming Humanities, enhancing the Wyoming narrative to promote engaged communities and improve our quality of life.

And by the members of Wyoming PBS.

Thank you for your support.

- Dr. Nancy Small, University of Wyoming, welcome to "Wyoming Chronicle," and thanks for having us here today.

What's the room that we're in?

- We are in Matheson Library, which is the heart and soul of Hoyt Hall, where the English department and modern and classical languages are housed.

- Great old UW building that's been here for more than a century, and storytelling is what we're gonna be talking about today.

It seems like it has sort of an obvious definition.

You are someone who studies it and has thought about it more than most people.

What is storytelling to you?

- So, I won't give you the full graduate student level lecture, but a story in its most basic form is a recounting of events.

Sometimes they are more complete than others.

Sometimes we leave things out, we often adjust them to the teller and the situation.

So, it's how we relate to one another through our firsthand experiences.

- Thinking back to your, when you were a younger person, who told stories to you?

- It's really an amazing intergenerational activity, and I wish I could go back in time to like pay more attention because really what it was more like as a kid is, you're just swimming around in the stories of your family, your brothers and sisters, aunties and uncles.

I would say that my mom and dad were both storytellers.

My dad more of a verbal one.

And of course, you know, there's, you have to, at Thanksgiving, roll your eyes when the same story gets told yet again.

But now thinking back, I wish I could go re-experience some of those retellings.

- [Steve] Sure.

- My mom recently used an online program that my sister gifted her to write, she wrote a story a week for a whole year and that became a printed book that she gave me for Christmas last year.

And it's really one of the greatest gifts I could have asked for because some of the stories I'm familiar with and some I'm not.

- I was just gonna ask, combination of things you knew and wanted to be in there and assumed would be, but new stuff too.

- Yeah, so family was a big source, but then I was, my brother and sister are older, so I spent a lot of time as a little kiddo alone.

We lived in a little town in South Texas.

And the libraries were my best friends, so I would go to the high school library and check the Nancy Drew books.

And I would also go to the town, one town over, it's called Pearsall, Texas, and I'd go to their public library and I would rent, I would check out the, this was a thing in the 70s, is, it was a record, but it had a book attached to it.

And all the Disney ones, and Peter Pan was one of my favorites.

So, I listened to the record and page through and try to get lost in that- - There was this object that was fascinating and fun for you also.

You sort of operated this story in addition to learning it.

- [Dr. Nancy] Yeah.

- Well, now you view it more seriously as an academic subject.

What's so important about it in that way?

- Storytelling can happen in lots of different forums.

People on stages.

And I don't just mean actors or people in movies, but I also mean politicians, people who represent us in our communities, of course they tell stories.

Those are important stories that are projected into our communities.

But what I'm really interested in is, everyday people's storytelling.

So, as we sit here and in the interview or before the interview, and we just chat and we learn things about one another, those, that kind of informal everyday storytelling is how we communicate values, it's how we indicate belonging.

If you're in a situation where the stories that are being told in that group around you don't feel comfortable, then it can create a sense of not belonging, which can be a terrible thing to feel.

So, I feel like stories are the things that make our worlds, and that's why it's important to look at them, not just on the big, like the big stage stories, but the little everyday stories.

- I recall a newspaper project that we did related to the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II.

And we interviewed many, many people from our, also small community about their World War II experiences.

And the thing I found was that I took away from that, I think as strong as anything was, almost everybody's got a good story to tell.

The things that these people told were as good as, in some cases, good as anything I'd read in a book or seen on a TV or movie screen.

But I don't know how many people had ever heard them before, we amplified it a little bit.

Sounds like that's a big part of what you try to do in your work or think ought to be done.

- Absolutely.

Storytelling is what we live in.

And so, to think about it at the community level and what that means for our communities, I think it's an important thing for us to inquire in, especially in contemporary times.

I mean, I don't think anyone's surprised if I say there's a lot of division.

And so, I think we can learn from one another's stories.

We might not be able to repair all those divisions, but we can understand each other as humans a little bit better.

- You've received a substantial grant from a big international foundation to help you do a storytelling project at the university.

And also, I believe I'm right in saying the basis for an entire new doctoral program that the university's going to launch with your help, your guidance, your leadership.

Tell us about that.

- Okay, so I'll start with the grant.

The grant is from the Andrew Mellon Foundation.

And it was for $850,000, which will be spent over three years.

- That's real money in academics.

- It's quite shocking.

Like, I did not wake up one day and say, hmm, I think this is what I'm gonna go for.

But some support from Dean Turpen and from associate Dean Susan Aronstein and from my department chair Kelly Kenny, really allowed me the space to do my best.

And we got lucky that my best was good enough to get this going.

It will allow us to do a number of things, including fast track some faculty hiring, we're still rebuilding faculty from times when there's been budget cuts.

It will also fund some graduate assistantships to get bright young people to participate.

It also, I have funding in the grant to do professional development, which will be open not just to anyone in the university, but to anyone in the community or who wants to travel to the community.

So it's, I'm really trying to think community centered here.

Things like, how do you do conversational interviews?

Which of course, you would be an expert at.

- Well, we'll see.

- Another one of our methods is collaboratively developing photo essays with a participant.

So, we have Shane Epping, who is a well-regarded photojournalist that just joined our communication and journalism department.

So, I'm hoping maybe to rope him in for a lesson about photo essays, so these kinds of things, professional development.

And then I have a nice pot of money to take us for three years, mostly in the late spring, early summer, because of traveling in Wyoming, all around the state to put on community storytelling events.

- Excellent.

- So, using these different methods, we will hope to gather a wide variety of multimedia stories from everyday people all over the state.

Teachers, maybe folks that work at the mines or in the energy industry, folks that serve our food, folks that run our libraries.

So, it's very grounded in the stories of the everyday people of Wyoming, kind of as a counter to the national narrative of Wyoming, which is like the Yellowstone television show.

So it's like, what's the reality of everyday folks in Wyoming right now?

So, the PhD program, it's in English, but it has a focus in public engaged humanities.

So, you might be wondering, what does that mean?

- You're about to tell us.

- I'm about to tell you, exactly right.

So traditionally, PhDs programs are designed to train another generation of academics.

You train folks that you expect to go into the professorate to end up like me.

So that's, a lot of what you would call reproduction of academics.

Well, the fact is that the academic job market right now isn't so great.

And so, it's unethical and irresponsible of us to just reproduce mini me's and send them out to jobs that may or may not be there.

So engaged public humanities, what that means is, we're gonna train and educate and have great conversations with advanced graduate students.

We already do this with our amazing master's students, we're gonna extend it to the PhD level.

To think about questions such as, how do you use things like interviews and surveys and other qualitative methods to learn about communities?

If you know what a community organization needs, how do you rhetorically or the use of words and symbols, how do you craft messages that best help those community organizations?

So, an engaged public humanities program looks outward, not inward.

And I'm really excited about that because aligned with the Mellon Grant, how much better it is to look outward than to go to all these communities in Wyoming and talk to folks and listen to their stories, not tell them how they should be thinking of themselves, but absorb from the outside and bring it back in?

I think it'll also make great community partnership opportunities, community colleges, libraries, other kinds of nonprofit foundations across the state, which then our graduate students can eventually, hopefully acquire internships in as part of their PhDs, and maybe go to work for post graduation.

So, it's like an ecology that's community focused.

- I was a community college trustee for a while, and that was during a time when, which a new sense of public education, I think in particular, at higher education, was really, really tilting sharply toward the subject we would call STEM.

Science, technology, engineering, math.

Nothing wrong with that, but STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM.

Was this a hard sell to have a new humanities-based program approved at a state university at the PhD level?

I just, you just don't hear much of that happening very often these days.

How'd you do it?

- So, in its over 135-year history, UW has never had a PhD in the humanities.

We have some in social sciences, but not in the humanities.

So, it is a amazing, interesting turn.

I think the kind of catalyst for making it possible was the Carnegie R1 classification.

President Seidel and Provost Carmen are very interested in achieving that level to try to amplify UW's presence in the higher education world- - And this could be part of that.

- It could be, except last October our, the Carnegie system changed its metrics so that now UW actually already meets the metrics for R1.

So then, the question of, why maintain the plan for an English PhD?

Which does require some resources to get started.

Well, I think one of the wonderful things about UW is, yes, we have a STEM presence and we have great capable professors and interesting things going on.

But if you look at the as a whole, we're incredibly well balanced.

We have a fantastic theater, fine arts and creative arts program.

We have solid education in the humanities.

We have a fantastic, for example, graduate program in psychology.

We have areas in Native American Studies and Native American Culture that are doing fine but are, would be fantastic to grow.

So what I see, we have this, and I should also mention the new school of computing, which has been a big change for us recently.

The best education integrates all of these things.

Even computing AI is human in its application and design.

So, the humanities underpin everything we do.

So, I think that while the R1 classification was a great momentary catalyst to make it possible to envision the actual presence of a growing humanities program on the campus just enriches the university as a whole.

- There are a lot of good stories to be told about STEM topics, aren't there?

Some of them are just fantastic.

Who figured this out?

Who invented this?

Who solved this problem using science or technology?

My experience has been that, oftentimes people in this STEM fields are grateful if someone who, for someone who could help them tell their stories, organize it, express it, make it other people understand how interesting it is.

Do you see that as a possibility for your programming?

- Absolutely.

We already have graduate students who are really interested in environmental and energy sector questions.

Here in English, the graduate students are in English.

And so, I think that's a one example of a fantastic interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary, so moving among humanities and STEM disciplines kind of partnership, because the scientific end of the spectrum might do the research to come up with the new idea or to solve a problem.

And then the humanities cannot just say, how well is it written?

I mean, that's like a really limited view of what we do in English.

But it can also say, how are different publics going to receive this?

How's this gonna be received by local governments, national governments?

How would this news travel across other spaces internationally?

So, it's the science is an important piece.

But then also, I tell my students in writing for science and technology, you can be Einstein, but if you're in a box because you can't stick your head up and communicate with someone, then you are a useless Einstein, I'm sorry to tell you.

So, it's really, we need kind of both parts of that spectrum, the communication, humanities questions as well as the science and the discovery and the problem solving to make things happen in the world.

- And earlier interview we did was with a Wyoming man who was instrumental in the launching and the deploying of the new James Webb Space Telescope.

Have to be a guy that I knew when we were in high school together.

And you know, he just knows everything about this.

But we got into this topic just a little bit and he said the most important classroom class that I ever had was my high school speech class with Mrs. Sackman who taught me how to communicate, express myself.

And now, he's the one who gets invited on to speak to everywhere he goes because he's the one who can do it.

And boy, is it interesting to hear him talk about it.

We've done three shows since the new science initiative building open for there, and maybe we'll do another one sometime with you or one of your students, or to find out how these two things are interacting.

I tell everybody, as you just said, there's room for all of it, there's a need for all of it.

It's not as disconnected, as separate as people think.

And that's what you're gonna be spending some good money now learning about and helping people with.

- And even going out into the community might trigger ideas for new projects, not necessarily in English but across the university, which would be really fun.

There was, when I first got here, I was admiring UW as an outsider trying to get used to this community.

And one of the things I read about was a collaborative project between a professor in entomology and a professor in dance.

The professor in entomology, and this was both here at UW, wanted to understand more about the movement of bumblebees because of course bees are so important to us agriculturally like to the whole human race, bees are important, and they can, they become threatened sometimes by illnesses and other factors.

So, the entomologist couldn't figure out how to describe the ways that bumblebees moved.

So, what did he do?

He went and consulted with a professor of dance who was able to map and choreograph different bumblebee movements, which then had helped him analyze hive activity.

I mean, that's the coolest thing because both the dance professor and the entomology professor have a substantive thing to add to that project.

It's not an add-on, "Hey would you come take care of this thing for me?"

They were both invested, and that I think is a gold standard of what we have the potential to do here at UW.

- Thanks for telling us that story about those- - Yeah, that's right, it's a story.

Science is a story.

- Those two professors.

You've brought three students with you as well.

And we want to talk to them about their role in the program, their interest in the subject, their thoughts about the future of it.

And we'll take a break now and do that.

Dr. Nancy Small, thanks for being with us on Wyoming Chronicle.

- Thank you so much for having me, Steve.

- I'm pleased to be joined now on Wyoming Chronicle by three graduate students in the University of Wyoming Program that Dr. Small helps lead.

Anthony Sandoval of Saratoga.

Makayla Kocher of Monument Colorado.

And Cheyenne Hume of Cody.

Welcome to all three of you.

We were talking about a class project that you've just completed.

We're here nearing the end of the spring semester, we're here in April.

And that tries out some story gathering methods that Dr. Small and I were talking about that she's teaching you about, that you're learning about.

Anthony, why don't you begin by just telling us what your experience was with that, what you contributed to it.

- I did a walking interview, which is basically just you take our participant on a walk around a place that is important to them, and you kind of have just a conversation and they, the expectation is that they gift you with their stories, and we do use that language purposefully.

- Meaning the term, gifted?

- Gifted, yes.

And yeah, we just walked around and talked, and then I recorded it as a video.

And then, you know, you have a conversation with them about what form that story's gonna take, and then you produce it into something that can be publicly seen or heard.

- What was the place, if it's okay to say?

- Oh yeah, it was with my sister at our childhood home in Saratoga.

- [Steve] I see.

- Yeah.

- Makay, was your experience similar to that?

What did you do?

- It was, and it was different.

My method was a material object.

So, my participant brought an object that was meaningful to them, and we sat down and essentially had a conversation about it.

- [Steve] What was it?

- The object was a handcrafted belt buckle that my participant had made with her grandfather.

And through the process, it was a lot of talking about what is this object and what does it mean to her, and what are the stories and memories that it harbors, and why is it significant?

Why do we have this significant value in these objects?

And it was very similar to Anthony, we had a conversation, she gifted me these stories and then went away and collaboratively worked with my participant to develop a memory story.

So, mine is a final production where there are photos of the object since during the conversation we looked at different details of it, talked about it, and then it has a story that goes along with it, so... - So, both of you then, so the person, they were talking about the place or the object.

- Mm-hmm.

- Alright, Cheyenne, top that.

What was your project?

- So, mine was a photo essay, and after hearing you guys, we'll talk about yours, and I feel like it does combine both together, but also the foundation is through photos.

And so, with my story gifter, we went to their family farm and I just kind of took photos of them around the farm, and then afterwards we spoke together and collaborated on what photos to include and what those photos meant to them, and kind of craft that story together.

Similar to the belt buckle, you guys look at that belt buckle and talked about how it made, you know, your participant feel, and then it was very place-based because I personally felt a lot of emotions looking at their family farm, where they're from.

- And your graduate students now has completed undergraduate degree.

What were your undergrad degrees in?

Cheyenne?

- Mine was in secondary English.

- Mm-hmm.

Makayla?

- My major was in English, and then I had minors in honors anthropology and museum studies.

- Wow.

- [Makayla] So, a little all over the place, but... - How about you, Anthony?

- I had English and creative writing.

- So, you're English majors?

Just my kind of people.

(all chuckling) There's room in academics still for this kind of study, and?

- I found a true passion and joy for it, I love it.

And it is making me think differently, not only about like my everyday life, I'm now trying to pay more attention to the stories that surround me because they surround us every single day in every setting.

But also trying to think how can, like me as a English grad student who's studying these topics, how can I use and adapt that approach of like storytelling into anything that I study, and how can I use that to then make what I'm studying more accessible to people in the, like process of producing stories.

- We do a lot of public facing projects, and this is one of those.

And we said it kind of brings English down and makes it more accessible, and shows that this is fun.

We're not just nerds who read, we like to talk and converse.

And so, I see it everywhere, and I think it can be applied in more places than we realize.

- English is such an interdisciplinary discipline.

You know, it's about writing and communication.

It's, and stories make up culture.

So, I feel like sometimes there's some confusion about what does literature have to do with cultural studies and everything?

I think.

- Only everything.

- Yeah, only everything.

Literature and the stories we tell are what?

Make culture, they're what defines us.

- A question that I often was asked, and I'm not gonna say it bothers me, but I don't love the question, which is, what are you gonna do with that?

(all chuckling) Suggesting that the only reason to become educated in something is to make money from it.

Making money is an important thing.

Are you worried about that, I guess is how would I put it, that your field somehow might not provide a living for you?

Or is that why you're even in the field in the first place?

- Personally, I'm not worried about it.

And the more that I'm in this program, I realize English is everywhere.

We are professional writers, professional editors, professional, honestly critical thinkers that I think can be used in areas that aren't expected.

And once I can show that I am needed, they'll be like, wow, I'm really glad that you're here in whatever I find myself in a future career.

- I feel like English majors get kind of put into two camps.

It's either people are thinking composition, so like teaching you people to write, how do you compose particular works.

And then on the other hand, like literature and cultural studies and it's, you know, high theory and all of that.

But then there's like all of this stuff in the middle that gets left behind, that kind of falls under the purview, a little bit of rhetoric.

And I kind of think of English majors as like communication engineers.

Like, we think about how do we build arguments, and how do we build thoughts into things that we write?

And writing is just communication.

- A lot of people don't understand that English is everywhere, because in English you learn to critically think, you learn to communicate.

And those are skills that you need in any discipline, any field.

And I think that's something that just in general, an English degree is training us well to do.

And then we can take that and apply it to any field.

We could go into marketing, we could work for an engineering firm, doing professional writing.

We can, you know, work at publishing.

Like, we can do a lot of things.

And I think for a lot of us, the money isn't necessarily the thing we're looking at, it's more that we have a passion for this and we are curious about the world, and that's why we're here.

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