{"id":43265,"date":"2018-04-12T13:43:58","date_gmt":"2018-04-12T20:43:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=43265"},"modified":"2018-04-12T13:43:58","modified_gmt":"2018-04-12T20:43:58","slug":"the-dying-art-of-storytelling-in-the-classroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/the-dying-art-of-storytelling-in-the-classroom\/","title":{"rendered":"The dying art of storytelling in the classroom"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\nStorytelling may be as old as the hills but it remains one of the most effective tools for teaching and learning. A good story can make a child (or adult) prick up their ears and settle back into their seat to listen and learn.<\/p>\n

But despite the power a great story can have,\u00a0storytelling has an endangered status<\/a>\u00a0in the classroom \u2013 partly due to a huge emphasis on \u201cactive learning<\/a>\u201d in education. This is the idea that pupils learn best when they are doing something \u2013 or often, \u201cseen to be doing\u201d something.<\/p>\n

Any lesson in which a teacher talks for 15 or more uninterrupted minutes would be regarded today as placing pupils in too passive a role. Indeed, even in English lessons teachers now very rarely read a whole poem or book chapter to pupils,\u00a0something which now worries even OFSTED<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Bringing history to life<\/strong><\/h4>\n

By contrast, teaching, particularly in the humanities, before the 1960s was heavily dependent on storytelling by teachers. A teacher would give a class, say, an account of the English Civil War, based on her own knowledge, reading and imagination.<\/p>\n

The teacher would try to bring the febrile context, the battling causes, and the battles themselves to life. She might add an anecdote of her own visit to a village in which Charles I was said to have hidden out. The pupils would then write their own individual accounts of the history \u2013 the story \u2013 they had just heard, perhaps \u201cfrom the perspective of a common footsoldier\u201d.
\n

\"\"

Storytelling can be a powerful tool for teachers. Shutterstock<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

Clearly, this approach has many limitations. There was often very little scope for critical discussion and pupils were over-reliant on their teachers\u2019 view of events. But we mustn\u2019t lose sight of the value of what was happening in that history classroom.<\/p>\n

Pupils had the chance to become deeply absorbed in a context that was utterly alien to them \u2013 and their life experience was extended. Their imaginations were able to stitch this exotic secondhand experience to their library of personal experiences. In their retellings, they were never \u201cjust\u201d copying, but making sense and interpreting.<\/p>\n

Layered learning<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Influential educational thinkers such as\u00a0Jerome Bruner<\/a>\u00a0have recognised the deep, contextually embedded, multi-layered learning that a story enables as a form of knowledge in its own right. My colleague Matthew Reason and I have called this \u201cstoryknowing<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

And in this way, the storytelling of teachers and the storytelling of pupils can nourish each other \u2013 as I found in my long-term collaboration with secondary humanities teacher Sally Durham.<\/p>\n

A story from me about my German mother-in-law\u2019s World War Two experiences would trigger anecdotes from pupils and teaching assistants about their own relatives\u2019 opposite perspective on the same events \u2013 until we had built a three-dimensional picture of the situation, and gained respect for each other\u2019s experiential knowledge.<\/p>\n

A tree falls in the woods<\/strong><\/h4>\n

One day our topic was rainforest destruction. We asked the pupils to share their most powerful memories of trees and forests, until the classroom atmosphere began to feel almost \u201cwooded\u201d. I then told the story of an indigenous Indonesian chief who was approached by government officials to sell his people\u2019s land for logging, to make space for poor tenant farmers.<\/p>\n

The usually rambunctious pupils, without exception, listened avidly for 15 minutes, until I paused at a crucial point. They then experimented with their own endings to the story (many were by now confident storytellers).<\/p>\n

At first these endings were optimistic, but as the pupils played out the tensions and power dynamics of the interactions between loggers, forest people, tenant farmers, experts and officials, the likelihood of the forest\u2019s destruction hit them.
\n

\"\"

Effective storytelling lets children get to the heart of the action, however complex the tale. Shutterstock<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

At the group\u2019s suggestion, we went online to research the work of organisations which support indigenous peoples worldwide to defend at least parts of their homeland. The level of complexity in the pupils\u2019 stories and questions was such that we felt more like university lecturers than teachers of a \u201clow ability\u201d class of 12-year-olds.<\/p>\n

What all this reveals is that we need to challenge the idea that pupils listening to a story are in a passive (or non-learning) role. As one of the pupils in the class I worked with explains:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s just \u2013 you know when you\u2019re telling a story and some of us put our heads down like that [puts head down on folded arms] \u2013 it\u2019s only because some of us do it to, like, picture the images in our heads (Joe age 12)<\/em><\/p>\n

And as my story shows, the more complex the area of human experience, the more need there is for building knowledge through an exchange of stories.<\/p>\n

Author Bio:<\/strong> Catherine Heinemeyer is a Postdoctoral researcher and arts practitioner at York St John University<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Storytelling may be as old as the hills but it remains one of the most effective tools for teaching and learning. A good story can make a child (or adult) prick up their ears and settle back into their seat to listen and learn. But despite the power a great story can have,\u00a0storytelling has an […]\n… learn more→<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":43266,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15645],"tags":[185137],"coauthors":[11733],"class_list":["post-43265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","tag-story-telling"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe dying art of storytelling in the classroom - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/the-dying-art-of-storytelling-in-the-classroom\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The dying art of storytelling in the classroom - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Storytelling may be as old as the hills but it remains one of the most effective tools for teaching and learning. 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