It all comes back to the story

While I don’t agree with everything Pink says, one of his six senses, story, has been “following me everywhere” this past week. I figured I’m especially attune to this because I’m also taking Storytelling right now. But since the last two posts by Emily and Mary also convey storytelling as it relates to gaming and capturing people’s thoughts and news events, I figured I’m not the only one thinking about it. I appreciated the Jonathan Harris video. He explains that he is a storyteller in that he conveys other people’s stories. Stories can show we have a lot in common with people around the world, even with many kinds of cultural and other “gaps” as Harris puts it. We have a need to express ourselves. Pink also writes about how integral story is to the human experience. Our lives are filled with sharing stories. Stories include telling about events that have happened to us. They can convey not only the events, but also our feelings about the event, about ourselves, and the world. I think most importantly, storytelling is not just explaining, but recreating the experience for the listeners. I often use personal stories to connect with others. I typically tell stories to my elementary students as teaching tools as well as to simply share myself with them. I also listen to their stories to learn about them. With friends and family, we use stories to make connections, to entertain, and to evoke emotion, including sympathy.

With my students, the more personal the story is, the more they are enthralled, especially if it has some humor. Yes, teaching theory says a teacher needs to connect her teaching to the students’ lives, not her own. In my teacher education program I was also advised not to tell my students too much about my personal life in order to maintain a professional, authoritative image. Yet, teaching is all about celebrating the stories of our lives and the lives of others, past, present, and future. What better way to teach than to share personal stories with my students?

A recent example occurred when I was reading from our social studies textbook with my third graders. We have been learning about communities, and the pages we were reading described the words “custom” and “culture.” The concept of “culture” is something even I can struggle with, so this was no easy concept to explain. It was also hard for them to recognize that some activities they take for granted and assume that everyone does are actually a part of our culture, and other people may do it differently. I gave the example of greeting each other. I asked them what action adults might do to greet each other, to which they responded, “shake hands.” I explained that not every culture does this, and launched into a story about myself. When I lived in the Dominican Republic, I quickly discovered that women always greet each other by offering a kiss on the cheek. It was explained to me that this wasn’t actually a kiss where your lips touch the other person, but more of an air kiss. What wasn’t explained to me was that it only is done on the right cheek, never the left. One morning I was greeting a parent and leaned in for the air kiss, but I was heading toward her left. She, of course, was heading towards my right and turning her left side away from me, so my nose crashed into her face! This little story grabbed all the students’ attention, and helped them grasp a little better the concept of customs and the importance of learning about others’ customs!

I could tell that some of the students were left thinking that other people sure had strange customs. I tried to think of a way to get them to see that our customs also might appear strange to others. Then I shared a different kind of story, not a personal story but one to encourage them to see from another perspective. I invited them to imagine they were coming to our school from another planet. They had never been to earth before. Our principal, would reach out his hand to shake theirs, but they would have no idea what he was doing! Are we supposed to reach out a hand too? Left or right? Then what to do next? Students quickly grasped that shaking hands does not come to people naturally, and not everyone does it, but it is one of the customs we use in our American culture.

My students also share stories about themselves, which enriches the classroom as a community and a learning environment. Children are extremely eager to share stories about themselves. I encourage them to connect stories from their lives to what we are learning about or reading. For example, when they connect books they are reading to their own story – what they’ve seen, their adventures, and day-to-day experiences – they are much better able to create meaning from what they are learning about. Stories that connect to your own stories build not only attention, but a stronger emotional charge. Not only will you enjoy the story more, but it can then affect you more deeply and stay with you longer.

These are kinds of storytelling that I feel happen naturally in my life working with youth. I’d like to stretch beyond these kinds of things and think about how I can incorporate media and media literacy with storytelling. Since children are already eager to share stories, I think they would love to create digital stories. I’m certainly no expert in creating digital stories, and in fact, was extremely frustrated with technology when I created my resource review as a video, using JumpCut, a free online editor through Yahoo. If I were going to teach students about creating digital stories, it would be important for me to be very comfortable with the technology and help the students feel comfortable with it too, because the technology needs to be secondary to the storytelling.

Here are some more sites to explore about using storytelling and young people, both digital and nondigital, besides the Bernard site:

From the Center for Digital Storytelling: Memory's Voices, especially The Cookbook section.

Storytelling and youth: An emerging force for social change in communities.

Huffaker, David "Spinning Yarns Around the Digital Fire:" compares blogs/IMing, etc. to storytelling since they provide space to share ideas and feelings. Interesting, if a little old (2003).

20 page source book full of Activities to help youth filmmakers think about all aspects of production.