Teacher traveler brings the world to her students

KANNAPOLIS — Rachael Steele is a real character. Or maybe that’s Rakella Travella. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

Steele teaches academically gifted students at Forest Park Elementary School. Rakella is her globe-hopping, storytelling alter ego.

On a recent day, Rakella made one of her monthly landings at Forest Park, borrowing Steele’s classroom, which is no problem, Rakella explained, because the two are actually best friends.

Class after class of students filed in, pulled up seats on the floor and made ready to meet Miss Travella.

“My name is Rakella Travella, and I am a world traveller,”Rakella energetically told the kids. “I live in the land of imagination.”

She wore a skirt with all the multi-colored continents sewn on, a red, yellow and white Hawaiian-style lei, a pink hat like a miniature sombrero with fuzzy pink balls dangling from the brim and shiny gold sneakers.

It wouldn’t be hard to take Rakella for the queen of the land of imagination, or at least the grand dutchess. And this day at least, she addressed a crowd of attentive subjects, the students who sat wide eyed and listened.

This was a get-to-know-you kind of day, Rakella priming the kids for her monthly fly-bys and drop-ins, when she’d tell them tales of visiting far-off lands and some nearby ones, too. Waving her arms, twisting her torso and stretching her face, Rakella tells the students how she got be “such a character.”

It apparently all started when she was just a youngster. She relates how she raised eyebrows for wandering outside and across the road to listen to a bird talk, how she feigned illness one too many times to get out of math class and how she started a petition drive in high school demanding that girls be allowed to wear pants.

And how she started college three days after finishing high school “because I wanted to get my diploma so Icould start traveling the world,” Rakella said.

The children respond, giggling and gasping in all the right giggle and gasp places, interjecting their own thoughts on the subjects of characters (they offer Power Rangers and Arthur) and world travel (one little boy’s observation that snacks on airplanes are usually peanuts sets off a conversation about airplane food in general).

In each instance of misadventure along Rakella’s path to world-class adventurer, someone — her mother, a teacher, the school principal — had the last words: “She is such a character.”

And so was Steele.

“All of those situations, to a certain extent, did happen to me,” she explained. “I was always getting into trouble when I was a little girl ... Ihad trouble listening to my mother, but I had good intentions.”

She really did make herself sick to avoid reading class, she really took part in a petition drive to abolish a school rule barring girls from wearing pants, and she really started college three days after graduating from high school.

But not because she was anxious to start traveling the world. It was really because she didn’t want to go to college at all but made a deal with her dad to attend one quarter and quit if she didn’t like it.

So she started at Gaston College, which had a summer quarter beginning, intending to “get it out of the way and get on with my life.”

Something unexpected happened to Steele at Gaston College, though.

“I just fell in love with it, just the whole education process, and Inever stopped.” She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in education from Queen’s College in Charlotte and a master’s at Converse College in South Carolina.

It was while working on her master’s degree that Steele first conceived of Rakella Travella. She was taking a storytelling class, realized she had a talent for it and invented the character for church suppers and other events and, eventually, a side business.

Rakella began following Steele to work about two years ago, while she taught at the Fallston School of Global Studies in Cleveland County.

An immersion school, students there connected everything to a global studies theme. And Steele was even a team leader in developing a global studies curriculum for the school that won a national award three years ago.

But she noticed while at Fallston that the students weren’t doing as well as they should on state writing tests. They had little to go by when asked to write imaginative narratives about places in the world they’d never been.

So Rakella began making regular stops there, telling them about the places she had been and the adventures she’d had at those places. And the children got to know the character, so they could then imagine Rakella when writing stories about different places.

Her tales sparked in the children an interest in more than just writing. They wanted to know about the geography, culture and food in the places she’d been, which was all fine with Steele.

“I think people realize it’s not enough for that child to read and write and do arithmetic,” the teacher said.“We’re living in a global society, and if we’re going to raise a child to live in a global society, we have to teach that.”

Steele brought that belief with her to Kannapolis City Schools, where she teaches at Forest Park and Woodrow Wilson. She decided on Kannapolis after considering jobs with several other systems, including Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Albemarle.

“I interviewed in a lot of different places, but Ikept coming back to Kannapolis,”she said. She likes the administration philosophy that allows teachers to be involved in making decisions and determined “this is just where I was meant to be.”

And her principal at Forest Park, Jill Roach, couldn’t be happier about that.

“She uses a lot of creativity in designing her lessons with (academically gifted) students, but she’s excited the students in all the classes, and that’s the way I think it should be,” Roach said. “You can’t be around her and not get excited about learning.”

The school has picked up on Steele’s global studies curriculum and integrated it into reading, art, music and even physical education classes. The songs wafting through the halls, normally soft classical music, include selections from the monthly continent, Roach said.

And of course Steele brought her best friend along as well. She initially planned for only the students in her academically-gifted classes to meet Rakella, but word spread of her travels and now she’s something of a celebrity.

“When they see Ms. Steele, they always ask about Rakella, where she’s traveling, when she’s coming back, how she’s doing,” Steele said. “I even have parents ask me; parents get excited about it, too.”

She compares the students’ willingness to separate her from her look-alike friend to an understanding that’s “sort of like Santa Clause.”

“Most will find a reason to believe it or a reason to believe that Rakella couldn’t possibly be Ms. Steele,” she said. “They like the myth. It’s almost like we always want to believe in magic.”

And that’s fine with Steele. After all, she and Rakella are best friends, at least.

“There’s a lot of Rakella in me,” she said, “or a lot of me in Rakella.”

Contact Scott Jenkins at 704-797-4248 or sjenkins@salisburypost.com .