6 The inquiry central to this book began as a study of individual participants and their experiences of hearing stories of active care. That study grew into an action-research project as the result of the continued interests, actions, and motivations of some of the original participants. The school-based aspect of the action-research project is called the Courage and Moral Choice Project (CMCP). It grew out of the enthusiasm of Mary, an alumna of a public university in Maine, who, at an event sponsored by her alma mater, was moved by stories of active care under catastrophic conditions. She believed that the time was right to bring these stories to her public school community, where she worked as a clinical mental health counselor. The story of her efforts and our collaboration to bring narratives of active care to her school is detailed below. The CMCP grew organically to include collaboration with English and art teachers, as well as school administrators, all of whom became increasingly convinced of the value of these stories. They became curious about how the stories might fit into current curricula and how they might bolster efforts to build a more inclusive school climate. The first phase developed into a multi-year project, growing each year, and culminating in students, administrators, and teachers participating in and presenting at The Life Stories Conference, a regional conference that focused on stories of active care.

7 The second phase of the project involved several of the original teacher participants and was a more structured initiative. For this phase, I worked with teachers from the Forest School, which is located in the same school district that helped bring the CMCP into existence. The teacher participants, various local artists, and I engaged students at the alternative school to develop poetry, music, and art in response to their experiences with stories of active care. As the CMCP evolved, we came to refer to the stories of active care as stories of courageous moral choice. Kim, one of the teacher participants, aptly summarized the making of these choices as “doing the right thing in the face of your fears or adverse consequences.”

8 This second phase of the project was developed over a year’s time and was presented through a series of learning workshops during the first half of the following school year. At the culmination of this phase, participating teachers, students, and administrators presented their art work, writing, and experiences to the local school board. Below, we present our analysis of the interviews of the participants, as well as participant observers. We have tried to describe each phase of the CMCP as clearly as possible so that our analysis is adequately contextualized.

9 For the qualitative inquiry that is the CMCP, we used a grounded theory approach, allowing concepts and their organizational categories to evolve from the experience itself. For our analysis, we were guided by the principles of hermeneutics to understand our data: we did not simply look for the appearance and reappearance of certain words and terms to determine their significance; instead, we used the dialectical process of hermeneutical questioning, and it was in the back and forth of open dialogue that we determined the meaning and significance of words and concepts (Gadamer, 1989; Kvale, 1995, 1997, 2007).

10 Research questions have a special role in grounded theory, as the theory asserts that core concepts arise out of the data itself. Strauss (1996) points out that the original research questions that guide a qualitative study may arise out of both data and experience (p.14), but in order for the research questions to be effective, the use of previous experience must involve a continuous back and forth between old theory and developing theory. He says that although we may develop questions out of previous experience, these questions must be “checked out by further observation and interviews” (p. 15).

11 Even the most orthodox grounded theorists acknowledge that observation occurs in an experiential context and, because of our driving interests, we train our focus on specific areas and specific conditions. In Gadamer’s (1989) terms, this focused attention is shaped by the researcher’s presuppositions, but a dialogical engagement around meaning allows us to enlarge the horizon of our presuppositions to get “closer” to the truth of the observed setting (see also Kvale, 1995). While we began interviews with a brief formatted series of questions, we also engaged in dialogue to test the assumptions that we began to develop around meaning.1

12 After hearing Leo Goldberger, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at New York University, talk about his family’s escape and rescue from Copenhagen to Sweden during the Nazi Occupation of Denmark, Mary came to my office and stated simply, “We need these stories in our school.” The school where Mary, an alumna of the counseling program, worked as a mental health counselor is located in a largely blue collar, predominantly white manufacturing community in Maine that had experienced significant job loss over the previous two decades and had also recently become home to a large number of East African refugees. While many in the community were welcoming of immigrants, some were not, and Mary’s school and others in the area were experiencing the effects of rapid change. Teachers and administrators had been working to find ways to promote inclusion and cooperation, and Mary was one of the first to see the possibilities offered by our research project about stories of helping. The CMCP emerged as a four-year, multidisciplinary program to bring stories of active care to high school students and pair them with curriculum designed to facilitate the students’ engagement with these stories using a variety of media.2

13 The CMCP’s initial phase centered on raising student awareness of helping behavior via stories of compassion in action. A public high school—the Edmunton School—and an alternative high school—the Forest School—were involved,3 and both in-class experiences and out-ofclass community events were developed. Art and English teachers at both schools developed curricular initiatives that exposed students to stories of helping, encouraged them to consider their own experiences of helping or being helped, encouraged them to reflect on the personal impact of hearing stories about helping behavior, and directly engaged students in community service projects.

14 The first year of the CMCP focused on presenting stories associated with the rescue of Danish Jews during the Holocaust. Leo Goldberger, who participated in the rescue (and who assisted in the making of a documentary film and a book on the events associated with the rescue), told his story and engaged students in discussion. The corresponding CMCP curriculum included student essay responses to Leo’s presentation and the film about the rescue.

15 During the next year, several additional curricular initiatives were developed around stories of helping. Students completed art projects that honored someone who had helped them or others in a significant way. After watching a film about a group of senior citizens who devoted themselves to welcoming returning servicemen and women, students in an English class were encouraged to develop service projects of their own. Other students conducted interviews of friends and relatives who had helped others and initiated ongoing service projects within the larger community.

16 Michele and Ulrick Jean-Pierre, a couple who had been helped and who had helped others in both the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and that of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, shared their firsthand stories of help during catastrophic devastation to students at the Forest School. Michele Jean-Pierre (now Brierre), an educator herself, had recently become the Director of New Orleans’ Ellis Marsalis Performing Arts Center in the Musicians’ Village, a collaborative effort of the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity, the citizens of New Orleans, and artists such as Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr. The Musicians’ Village provides adequate and affordable housing for musicians, their families, and others who were displaced after Hurricane Katrina. The Center also provides young people with a rich musical education, offering a performance center that attracts and invites artists back to New Orleans to share their music. Ulrick is an internationally acclaimed painter whose creative work has often depicted stories of the heroes and heroines of Haitian history. Both Michele and Ulrick had done much to foster and rebuild the arts community in and around New Orleans, and they had also received a great deal of help in rebuilding their home after the hurricane.

17 Michele and Ulrick shared their stories at the area high school as well as at a community library event. Soon after those presentations, the students, teachers, staff, and community partners involved with the CMCP joined Michele and Ulrick in a series of presentations at the university conference on stories of active care. During these presentations, the students shared their experiences of hearing the stories, and they also shared artwork they had created in response to the stories, much of which described the individuals whose stories of active helping had inspired them.

18 A particularly powerful presentation at the conference featured the story of musician Elliott Cherry (2009), who created a performance piece about supporting his husband through the devastation of cancer. Titled A Finished Heart, this piece incorporates storytelling, music, and poetry. The students and staff from the CMCP were so moved by the performance that they immediately began talking about bringing it to their local community.

19 The concluding event of the first phase of the CMCP was another performance of A Finished Heart at the city library, co-sponsored by the CMCP and the Hospice of Southern Maine, and attended by students, faculty, and community members. After the performance, Elliott held an open discussion about his story of helping; he also shared his process of crafting the story into a performance. Numerous inspired audience members also shared their stories of loss and helping. This effect—the creation of an atmosphere conducive to sharing loss and grief—was described as an effect of hearing stories repeatedly during interviews for the Courage and Moral Choice Project.

20 We interviewed participants at several points during the four-year project. Those interviews of students, teachers, and others involved in the project, and the CMCP-related school assignments generated by students, were assessed and analyzed for common themes and serve as the basis for the remainder of this chapter.

41 Inspired in part by social tensions in a public school in Maine that developed in reaction to a rapid influx of African refugees, the CMCP was an effort to bring the potential beneficial effects to individuals and communities of encounters with stories of helping outside of one’s identity groups. Through the CMCP, students and teachers engaged stories of helping in the face of danger and despair, contemplating, reflecting, and learning via stories, performances, reflective assignments, and direct service to others.

42 Our analysis of interviews and writings by students and teachers both during and after the CMCP reveals patterns of response to hearing stories of active helping, as well as themes of personal change and strengthened community. Stories and experiences of the CMCP caused many of those involved to explore their identities as compassionate humans and helpers. Students and teachers involved in this phase of the CMCP were inspired to provocative self-reflection, asking questions such as, “Would I do the same thing?” (i.e., Would I summon the courage to help in the face of danger and despair?), and “What can I do to help?” Results from the first phase of the CMCP suggest that stories of helping can be effective for inspiring people to “continue the chain” of helping others, especially if students are convinced of the significance of these helping actions. An emergent question is whether stories of helping, coupled with supported opportunities to help, provide enough of a community to support an emerging altruistic identity even when the school environment is less than optimal. That is, could narratives of helping, coupled with opportunities to serve, possibly overcome some of the alienation in a more “typical” public high school? Might those narratives also promote a sense of connection with those who have helped elsewhere (as well as with the beneficiaries of efforts made by high school students to provide help to others)?

43 Our interviews suggest that if there is a lack of connection inside and outside of a school, it is unlikely that hearing stories of helping will have an impact. However, it also appears that a large high school may offer a sometimes cold and bureaucratic environment, even as it contains individuals who can express ongoing care and nurturance. Can these individuals, who sustain and nurture connection with others, provide enough safety to promote an openness to stories of helping to the rest of the community? Our interviews suggest that this may be the case, although our analysis is unable to provide specificity regarding the type and amount of nurturance needed in order to foster receptivity to and engagement with stories of helping.

44 Two of the student participants noted an increase in caring behaviors toward other students in the context of this project and a more nurturing school environment. Teacher Kim observed that large public high school where she teaches has worked on a number of initiatives to build awareness and tolerance of differences. The CMCP was one in a series of efforts to bring change to the school culture. She said:

We may sensibly conclude that along with several other school-wide initiatives to increase tolerance and care, the CMCP has been an important component of an effective effort to build a more actively caring school culture.

45 It does appear that narratives about helping in catastrophic conditions tend to inspire listeners to show interpersonal courage by sharing their own stories. (Again, we have only seen this in the context of a highly supportive teaching environment with teachers who are actively engaged in student learning and service to the community.) We observed students sharing their personal experiences with grief and loss after encountering stories of helping in both the alternative school environment and in small groups in a large public high school. These stories, therefore, might play a role in building a more authentic and coherent community as they appear to encourage interpersonal sharing and vulnerability. It is telling that teacher participants found themselves inspired to use stories of helping more with students after having participated with the CMCP, and that they expressed determination to be more deliberate about their choice of stories. Through their involvement with the CMCP, they found new ways to evoke meaningful personal stories of courage and a variety of ways to translate the students’ stories of courage into narrative and artistic expression.