Recovering Tales Teachers Grandmothers

The Mestres Àvies Recuperadores de Contes (MARC) project (Recovering Tales Teachers Grandmothers) is a proposal of a group of retired women teachers who still want to help teaching by means of traditional storytelling. The Rosa Sensat Teachers Association of Barcelona supported this project, which is now part of their catalog of activities. The protagonists of my pictures are teachers, supporters of the practice of storytelling, who take advantage from their free time to go and tell stories in the schools which invite them. They wish to keep alive the pleasure of orality while retrieving tales and classical myths. In our time «. . . the audiovisual narration has contaminate everything, even the written literature, and now we all are urged to know how a story ends. Narration time is faster and this is definetely damaging orality», says one of them. Orality is the best way to introduce children to reading and writing, because listening to stories helps them to improve their vocabulary and to structure their thoughts. Teachers want to go on using storytelling as a link between children or young people and the elderly. «Maybe you have to be old to get to know what the tales can give to you». It’s through the closeness that an emotional link between the child and the adult can be built. The same closeness is experienced between the photographer and the teachers, who volunteered for this project with a genuine attitude, without worrying about their appearance of old people. Actually, I want to pay homage to their wrinkles and expressions, without any photo retouching intervention. Children, who often are the focus of many photographic works, this time are left in the background, as the focal point are the teachers themselves. The fact that they have decided to go on doing what they do best seems to me really great and generous. “This story I’ve told is for the bold, I’ve told this tale for the weak and the hale.” M. Àngels Ollé