Vera Ahiyya on Teaching and Writing

From Teaching to Writing

My Journey with Storytelling

by Vera Ahiyya

I actually never enjoyed teaching writing. 

The writing curriculum we used for kindergarten was always so focused on teaching students to write about themselves or their experiences in a way that felt detached from the ways young students engage in story.

So, when I sat down to begin the process of writing my first picture book, I had the hardest time. My arrival into storytelling was not typical. I didn’t go to college for writing, nor did I have any interest in ever actually becoming an author. One thing I did have was a passion for story.

I’ve been an avid reader ever since I was very young. As a daughter of a high school English teacher, I really didn’t have much choice. But I always looked at books and reading as an opportunity and never a chore or task (unless it was my mom demanding I memorize Marc Anthony’s burial speech by Shakespeare). 

I’ve always loved stories and the art of storytelling. When I became a teacher—or, truthfully, when I became a better teacher—I grew to understand the impact of storytelling and purposeful writing. With a focus on representation and inclusion, I started to develop a classroom library that was full of diverse stories. These stories helped inspire our writing. We could pull moments from these stories and begin to ask questions and make connections.

Teaching is always this wheel of constant thinking and rethinking; evaluating and reevaluating; considering and reconsidering; writing and rewriting. We do this in the hope that our students see this process and feel inspired to integrate it into their own work whether it be in the realm of writing or reading or science or mathematics. Now when I talk to students about creating a story, I remind them that it is a process. For me, writing and developing as an author means learning and listening. This is a new journey for me and part of this new journey means educating myself in best practices so that I can continue to do my best work—and this work will hopefully inspire students to tell their own stories.