Teaching through storytelling
Storytelling
Telling and listening to stories is the primary way that we make sense of the world and our place in it when we are young and developing linguistic skills. Stories written for children are almost always designed to allow them to reflect on their growing awareness of social conventions and attitudes to morality. The smallest child understands without explanation that Aesop’s tale isn’t really about a fox and unobtainable grapes, it is an exploration of how humans sometimes struggle to rationalise failure and disappointment.
Psychologist Jerome Bruner (1990) argues that humans have two primary methods of cognition: paradigmatic cognition and narrative cognition, and that the latter, our narrative mode, with its power to transform our experiences into memorable stories that we can learn from, archive and retrieve at a moment’s notice, is undervalued in western societies and under-exploited in western education.
Stories are the ultimate aide-memoire. An ordinary person can easily remember the content and meaning of hundreds of books, films, plays, songs and poems. Stories are a way of storing complex sequences of events and the corresponding emotional responses in an easy to memorise package. Why do we not do more to exploit this inherent ability in higher education?
Why do we tell stories?
We tell stories to communicate ideas and attempt to influence others but also in the process, telling stories gives us the chance to reflect upon past experiences and learn from them. Furthermore, the process of telling stories forces us to question our own understanding of past events in the light of the new knowledge and experiences that we have acquired in the interim. Stories are an agent of change.
Incidental learning
With many stories we need to understand the context before we can make sense of the part that is really of interest to us. Consider a complex news story, the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 on 8th March 2014 for example, and realise how much one might have learned, without conscious effort, about avionics, flight data recorders, triangulation of satellite information, the geography of the Indian Ocean and the limitations of global surveillance systems.
“The best way to learn is to teach”
Frank Friedman Oppenheimer
How well do we know something if we cannot communicate that concept to a wide range of audiences?
Good essays, dissertations and presentations all have a coherent narrative structure that takes the audience on a journey from question or hypothesis to a deeper understanding of the topic in a logical, coherent way. Those written dissertations that are a pleasure to read, invariably employ a clear narrative that tells the story of the project in an engaging style.
Irrespective of subject area, encouraging students to develop their storytelling skills will make them better communicators who are more aware of the needs of a target audience and consequently increase their employability.
Digital Storytelling
Why digital? Digital storytelling allows students and educators to tell powerful stories using rich media, (video, graphics, photographs, music, voiceover etcetera). The finished product in the form of a short film, podcast etcetera can easily be shared with peers for critique and evaluation.
The process of creating digital stories can also be an effective device to facilitate collaborative learning. The University of Warwick’s Celebrating Dickens website is the result of a collaboration involving students and academics from the Schools of English, Law, History, Theatre Studies and Computing as well as scriptwriters, actors and museum curators from outside the institution. The documentaries, podcasts and articles that were produced examine aspects of Dickens’ life from multiple perspectives, providing fresh insight into the nature of the man, his works and the context in which they were created. The first documentary in the series won the prestigious BUFVC Learning on Screen ‘Education In-House Production’ award in 2013.
Fluent users of social media can now bypass the mass media and create uncensored digital stories that can reach millions of people. Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 video, which was created to highlight the issue of child soldiers has now been viewed 100 million times. Students need to learn these digital storytelling skills if they are to be activists, agents and contributors and not just consumers in modern democratic societies.
Entrepreneurship
The Greenwich Graduate will have developed:
“skill in using a range of visual, verbal and digital forms to present ideas” – The Greenwich Graduate
These are also essential 21st Century skills for the entrepreneurial student seeking to monetise an innovative product or idea. Traditionally, the fledgling entrepreneur would rely on bank loans and a local network to attract investment. Web 2.0 allows the potential for entrepreneurs to access a global network of potential supporters and investors if they have the digital literacy skills required to tell the story in an engaging and persuasive manner.
Websites like kickstarter and indiegogo have allowed thousands of entrepreneurs to attract millions of pounds of investment using basic tools that can be found on just about any modern computer.
Industrial design student Anirudha Surabhi created a digital story to document his final year project to design a safer and more environmentally-friendly cycle helmet.
In the wake of the considerable interested generated by the digital presentation, Surabhi’s design has now been licensed to some of Europe’s foremost cycle helmet manufacturers and is now in production.
Irrespective of subject discipline, we need to be preparing our graduates for the demands that will be made of them in the digital economy. The successful 21st century graduate needs to be a fluent communicator, able to connect with diverse target audiences using a plethora of digital methods in order to attain and sustain graduate level employment.
In part 2 of this series, the practical and pedagogical implications of integrating digital storytelling into teaching practice will be considered.
References
Brunner J. (1990), Acts of Meaning, New York: Harvard University Press