For more than ten years Erik Ellis has been teaching a legendary community-engaged class at Stanford: Once Upon A Cause: Producing Picture Books for Local Children.I first heard about his class from students right when I arrived at Stanford. “It’s the PWR class that everybody tries to get into,” students tell me every quarter. “We all want to take it, but it’s so hard to get into. There’s always a long waitlist!”
Now artifacts from his class–the picture books his students have made–are on full display at the Entrance Case of Green Library as part of an exhibit: Undergraduate Showcase: Stanford Storytellers. The exhibit was designed in anticipation of Stanford’s new Capstone requirement, and is the first in a series showcasing “significant undergraduate works of research and creativity.” Picture books from Erik’s classes are featured in the exhibit, which also includes works from the Stanford Graphic Novel Project.
Erik began teaching his famous class in 2012 shortly after starting in PWR. “Fate and good luck brought me here,” he says. Erik was just a few years out from finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Arizona in 2008 while teaching in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at CU-Boulder: “The other PWR—a program inspired by Andrea Lunsford.”
His daughter was still young when he was coming up with ideas for a theme for his first PWR 2 course. “We were immersed in picture books,” he says. “I thought it was a brilliant genre overflowing with rhetoric.” Erik wanted to have his students collaborate to develop their own picture books, but he wanted to make sure he could connect them with local elementary school classes so the children in those classes could help with the development of the books and receive a copy of them once they were done.
Erik already had experience teaching service learning writing courses. In one class at CU-Boulder, for example, he had students write and produce a YouTube video to promote Rocky Mountain Riding Therapy. After an inspiring conversation with former PWR instructor Carolyn Ross, whose students worked with the local community, he reached out to teachers Kathleen Bianchini and Kim Powell at nearby Lucille M. Nixon Elementary. Both Bianchini and Powell were eager to collaborate.
According to Erik, all the picture books in PWR 2 feature at least one “life skill.” Nixon Elementary emphasizes the importance of life skills like caring, courage, creativity, flexibility, and friendship. “Of course, you can’t be preachy,” Erik says. “One of the big challenges is to create picture books that kids want to read and that still have something meaningful to say—some kind of lesson or moral.”
Erik scaffolds the collaborative process of building a picture book with and for elementary school children with a guided individual research project that connects to the group’s picture book. From this research, students create their RBAs and their oral presentations. For example, students have researched the literature on best approaches for teaching empathy in picture books; the ways in which parents are represented; and gender stereotypes.
“Students have made so many great books over the years,” he says. One book for third graders, The Pawn Who Wanted to Be King, begins, “Once a pawn a time, […]” It’s about Atticus LePawnsky, “who would have traded anything to have been born a king piece.” According to Erik, when the family dog kidnaps the king, the queen organizes a search party consisting of two knights, two bishops, and two rooks. The pieces who bring back the king will be named honorary members of the royal family. But the pawns don’t want to be left out! “‘Not so fast!’ shouted a little voice from the back of the crowd. ‘What about two pawns?!’” This little voice belongs to Evelina van der Pawnson, who shares the spotlight with Atticus throughout the book. The queen replies, “Pawns are slow, small, and apparently they have no manners.” So Atticus and Evelina set out on their own to unofficially retrieve the king.
“I love how students brought the pawns’ adventures to life,” Erik says. “You absolutely root for them as the underdogs. One of my favorite lines of dialogue is from Evelina. As the human family’s vacuum is ‘about to suck Atticus up into a world of dust and dirt,’ she pulls the plug and says, ‘Pawns may move slow, but they think fast.’ They use their resourcefulness and persistence to reach the king before the other pieces. It turns out the king wasn’t kidnapped but just needed to escape the stress of his job. Upon returning to the kingdom, the queen apologies, and Atticus has newfound pride as a pawn. It’s a brilliant book. It’s not just a great story but really captures some of the power dynamics and hierarchies at play in society and helps kids recognize the value of standing up for yourself and your rights.”
Erik creates the space in his classes for students to take all different kinds of creative approaches to their picture books. One group took photos of campus for their settings, then added characters by using “stickers” from SnapChat. Another group used a dramatic gatefold—pages that flip out to extend the width of the illustration beyond the normal width of the book—to drive home the dangers of littering. “The entire, wordless double-page spread consists of empty Monkey Milk containers filling the classroom from floor to ceiling, with chairs sticking up and the animal characters frowning at what their nonchalance has wrought,” says Erik.
Erik takes his classes to visit Nixon Elementary school four times throughout the quarter. Each visit supports student connections with the children, while also helping students practice other skills related to writing and rhetoric. For example, during the first visit students interview the children to get their thoughts on the topics and themes that most interest them. The second visit focuses on getting clarity and creative ideas from the children about the three stories they voted for after watching PWR 2 students’ 1-minute story pitches. For the third visit, students bring black-and-white “dummies” of their three books, which they create in teams of five, to get constructive criticism. Finally, during the last visit, students read their finished books to the children, and everyone celebrates the collaboration. If the printed books are ready, the children get copies on the spot. Erik's PWR 2 is a Cardinal Course—a course that integrates rigorous coursework with community-engaged learning—and he's grateful to the Haas Center for course grants to pay for art supplies and printing. Erik's students also regularly receive iPads to illustrate through Stanford's iPads for Teaching and Learning program.
“Being able to write my own story unlocked something for me," says Chase Klavon, a student and co-author of Art From the Heart, one of the books highlighted in the exhibit. Klavon continues, "Now I’m considering a career in early childhood education and children's media...The mental health epidemic is currently worse than ever before because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Children’s books can teach emotional literacy and help children learn how to deal with emotional distress in their lives. I especially enjoyed working with the kids at the elementary school. It was neat to hear their thoughts and ideas, and to try and incorporate them into our work. After one session, a little girl came up to me and gave me a big hug–it felt like confirmation that what I was doing was truly important.”
Erik’s own favorite picture books have long informed his teaching. “With professional picture books, I love everything by Ezra Jack Keats,” he says. “He’s best known for The Snowy Day, which won the Caldecott Award in 1963, but he created a number of great picture books featuring a diverse cast of characters at a time when picture books were pretty much universally white.” Erik also loves David Macaulay’s postmodern picture book Black and White, which tells four stories simultaneously in quadrants. “Even deciding how to read this book makes you ponder,” Erik says. “Do you read one story at a time or all of them together? It turns out that the four narratives overlap and intermesh in all kinds of fascinating ways. And there’s no one right answer for how to make sense of it all. But it definitely makes you think.” Erik also recommends Anthony Browne’s Voices in the Park because it recounts the same event—a trip to the park—from the perspective of four characters, each with their own emotions, drawing style, color palette, and even font. “It’s wonderfully ambitious, and it has clever allusions and homages to artists like Magritte,” Erik says. “I love books like this because they respect kids’ intelligence. Not that most kids know Magritte, but that whole invitation to step into others’ shoes, and to compare perspectives, just seems so valuable.” Another book Erik loves for the same reason is Jacqueline Woodson’s Each Kindness, which is told from the perspective of a girl bully. “Rather than end with an unrealistic epiphany and instant friendship between bully and victim, Woodson has the victim leave the school, so that we linger on the main character’s regret, ‘as the sun set through the maples and the chance of a kindness with Maya became more and more forever gone.’ Powerful stuff.”
“Powerful stuff” is an apt phrase for the experience Erik has created for his students in his classes for more than a decade, an experience that changes many of their lives and which they recount with pride and affection long after their time at Stanford.
The Stanford Storytellers showcase will be on view in Green Library through March 22, 2024. Both during and after the exhibit, you can find the dozens of PWR 2 picture books in Cubberly Education Library’s curriculum collection—currently housed downstairs across from the Media & Microtext Center in Green—by searching “Once upon a cause” on the Stanford Libraries homepage.
