A feature on ISC’s 2024 Kids Institute
When Antonio Rocha was a 10-year-old boy, his eldest sister, an ecologist, went off to Europe on scholarship. The exotic postcards she sent her little brother opened his mind to possibilities about a world he hadn’t seen much of yet. “I’d get a postcard and think, oh, I want to grow up to be just like my sister” he recalls. “I want to see the world like that.”
Decades later, Rocha is igniting the same fire in another generation of 10-year-olds. Now a storyteller based in Maine, Rocha has visited more than 40 countries in his professional travels.
Artifacts and souvenirs that Rocha has collected over the years were the inspiration for a recent program he created for Kids Institute at the International Storytelling Center. While other tourists may be content to collect t-shirts and keychains, Rocha tends to reach for more curious and unusual items of cultural significance. He has a bracelet made of elephant hair from Africa, for instance, as well as reindeer-skin shoes from Sweden and a large, rather sinister, folk puppet from the Czech Republic. (He says that people always want to know more about that one.)
For Kids Institute, Rocha conceived of these treasures as a hook for kids to learn more about world geography and culture. As the fifth-grade audiences arrived at the International Storytelling Center for his show, they could see a selection of his weird and wonderful objects on stage. During the program, he selected some of the items to propel stories about his adventures across 16 countries and six continents — experiences that included climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, watching snake charmers in India, and sharing an al fresco hotel room with an exceptionally large tarantula in the treetops of Brazil.
Kids Institute, a relatively new program at the International Storytelling Center, was designed as a special cultural experience that ties into the school curricula of regional fifth graders. Its two-step goal is to give kids the opportunity to learn something new in a fun way while helping them cultivate an appreciation for the arts and a major cultural institution in their own backyard. There’s a new focus for the weeklong program every year, with past storytellers highlighting units on scientific discoveries, World War II, and the Civil Rights movement. Kids and educators always attend the show for free and have access to customized support materials to promote more learning when they get back to the classroom.
Rocha’s November 2024 program hit many of the fifth graders’ social studies standards, bringing their classroom geography lessons to life. It also helped contextualize far-away places in terms of the kids’ knowledge about their home state of Tennessee. A story about the Amazon River became a clever point of comparison to the Nolichucky River, for example. Foods, traditions, landforms, and wildlife were all subjects that were ripe for comparison.
“I wanted to reflect how the beautiful world we live in shapes our lives,” says Rocha, who is originally from Brazil. “If you live by the sea, you eat fish. If you’re in the forest, you eat four-legged animals and birds. The geographical location of a group dictates how they thrive. The diverse nature of our environments means that we can’t live in Maine in the same way that people live in the tropics. People in the Sahara Desert can’t live like people in Scandinavia.” Rocha’s great enthusiasm about seeing new things and meeting new people are palpable and contagious.
While his stories are brimming with charming and useful information, he also weaves in personal memories, details, and connections that really bring the scenes to life. Rocha loves to tell people about the Portuguese island where his great-grandparents lived and his Brazilian father’s love of old vinyl records. He describes how the enticing smells of a peanut vendor in India reminded him of forgotten treats from his childhood. And he fondly refers to that tarantula in Brazil as his “roommate.”
To capture his young audience’s attention and help the kids stay engaged, Rocha donned an Indiana Jones-style costume complete with a surprisingly authentic whip crafted by a friend of the family. (At the end of the show, everyone went outside to watch Rocha crack the whip. “The kids went berserk,” he says with a laugh.) His fedora had been the centerpiece of Rocha’s Halloween costume the year before — a surprise for his teenage daughter, who loves the Harrison Ford films.
It was an incredibly fun and meaningful program not just for the kids who participated, but also for the storyteller himself, who credits the International Storytelling Center with launching his career and, by extension, his opportunity to see the world.
“This show feels like I’ve come full circle, because my ability to explore the world came directly from being featured at the National Storytelling Festival 25 years ago,” he says. “I traveled the world because of storytelling and came back to Jonesborough to share the stories of my experiences. It was really touching. I was pinching myself the whole time.”