Teachers as Storytellers: Helping Students Make Meaning of the World

Jana Schmieding believes some of the most important storytellers in the country are working at the front of classrooms. "Everything we watch—on TikTok, on television, everywhere—is telling us something about the world," said Schmieding, comedian, Hollywood writer, and keynote speaker at College Board's 2026 Native American Student Advocacy Institute. "The real work is helping young people develop a point of view."

Schmieding spent years working as a middle-school teacher in the Bronx before achieving her dream of becoming a comedy writer and actor in Hollywood. Her big break was a role writing and performing on Rutherford Falls, a sitcom that centers on the relationship between a New England town and the Native community it borders. 

“I legit had to get therapy about my fear that I was going to get cancelled,” said Schmieding, who is Mniconjou and Sicangu Lakota but worried that her background as an urban professional—she lived in Manhattan before moving to Los Angeles to write—would make some people question her authenticity. “I was just trying to be a normie, successful lady!” she joked. “And that came with plenty of adversity.”

Her honesty about questions of identity and representation resonated with the audience at NASAI, which was held in the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona. In front of hundreds of educators and college administrators, Schmieding talked about the parallels between teaching, acting, and comedy writing, along with the pressure to represent Native characters in all their complexity. 

“Being a performer, it helps to make meaning of the world,” she said, and as both a teacher and a producer, she is always looking for the most accessible way to tell a good story.

That habit was reinforced by her years of teaching middle school, where she witnessed all kinds of traumatic incidents in the lives of her students and had to find ways of keeping them engaged in the classroom. Those were hard years, she said, when she was spending long days at school and then devoting her evenings to improv and comedy shows to hone her passion for writing and performing. 

They also cemented her belief that everyone has a story to tell, and that a big part of education’s role should be equipping students to recognize and shape the narrative of their own lives. “They have a story within them,” she said of her students. “Once they learn how to tell it, the entire world makes more sense.”

Storytelling isn’t just a way to make things interesting, Schmieding argued. It’s powerful because it opens the door to agency and ambition. “We’re creating the future, imagining different ways we could live.” For a young person in challenging circumstances, that sense of possibility can be hugely motivational. 

After the success of Rutherford Falls, Schmieding went on to write and act for the acclaimed Reservation Dogs and is now developing a show for CBS. But she still believes some of the most important storytellers in the country are working at the front of classrooms, helping students find a voice. 

“How do you make [school] fun? That’s what I feel like I brought to the classroom,” Schmieding said. “There are ways we can unlock storytelling in every subject.”