Archives for posts with tag: Storytelling in schools

Tell it again, please

June 24, 2011 //

The two-room school was on the river side of Highway 97, about halfway between Wenatchee and Chelan. Fruit trees in central Washington were covered with the blossomed promise of a good crop.

Orondo was too small to offer much more than housing for farm workers and a handful of other families. Their tiny settlement was strung along the east bank of the Columbia River.

Orondo is in central Washington's fruit-growing region.

A quarter of a century ago there weren’t more than sixty children in the school. Kindergarten through third grade met in one room. Grades four through six had their own teacher in the other room. When I parked outside the school, curious children ran up. They knew the storyteller was coming and greeted me warmly.

I told stories to the younger classes, then to the older group. They were sponges, absorbing the stories through every pore. They were so eager, so responsive I was as entranced by the stories as they were. And then it was over, and I had promises to keep in other schools.

Two years later I toured the same schools in central and eastern Washington. Once again, I turned my vehicle into the small parking lot. Once again, curious children ran up to greet the visitor and escort me into the school.

I started with the younger children and told them a whole new set of stories, ones I knew I hadn’t pulled out of the hat for my first visit. Then I joined the older group. Two-thirds of them had been in the younger group two years earlier. I was eager to tell them stories that would be new to them, more challenging, more suited to their growing maturity.

They would have none of it. “Tell us about the hen and the giant. We want to hear about the giant pumpkin.” And so it went, story after story. After the fourth and fifth graders had heard the stories they remembered, the sixth graders insisted on hearing the ones they had heard in fourth grade. Forty-five minutes stretched to an hour, then ninety minutes, until I finally had to stop because the school day was nearing its end.

The children taught me an important lesson that day. I was still a fairly new storyteller and assumed audiences always wanted to hear new material. I was feverishly adding stories to my repertoire so as to never repeat one to a group I’d performed for before.

Stuff and nonsense. When we hear a song that stirs us, a melody that haunts us, we want to hear it again and again. We learn the words, sing it in the shower, belt it out as we drive, buy the track.

The same is true of stories. When they resonate, we want to travel that path again, and not just when we are children.

Years ago, Professor Spencer Shaw told me children want the same book read to them over and over because “the children know what’s going to happen, but the characters don’t”. The children in the two-room Orondo school knew what was going to happen in those stories. They also knew the characters didn’t. So I sent my mind back into the world of those earlier stories. Together, the children and I found out.

Tags Classroom storytelling, importance of stories, power of stories, Storytelling in schools

Categories Storytelling in schools, The art of storytelling

Toy naming and the stories of children

May 17, 2011 //

A toy is an empty space, waiting for a child to fill it with stories. Photo from nerissa's ring Flickr photostream

The brown-eyed five-year-old proudly held up her new doll. As always, I asked what her new companion’s name was. You’ll know this was a while back when I tell you her response: “Strawberry Shortcake”.

Children in the K-3 school where I spent my last two years as a school librarian loved to show off their new doll, plastic duck, stuffed animal, or train engine. I always oohed and ahed appropriately, and I always asked what they had named it. I can’t remember a single time when they had given it a name they hadn’t heard in a commercial for it.

I’d never had children, but I figured not re-naming toys gave story-making power to the corporations that created them. My job was to return that power to the children.

“Does she have another name? A special name you gave her?”

“No. She’s Strawberry Shortcake.”

“What does she like to eat? What’s her favourite game? Does she sleep in her shoes? Does she wear her t-shirts inside out?”

Question by question, I’d encourage the children to create a story about their new toy. Give it character, eccentricities, preferences, secrets only the child could know. Some gave up quickly. They couldn’t imagine a life for the toy that existed outside the confines of the marketing story. I was sad for them but hoped all the stories they heard during their library visits would fill them with enough colourful details to stir their imaginations.

Others entered into the game, whether quickly or reluctantly. After they had answered a dozen questions, I’d say to them, “That doesn’t sound like a Strawberry Shortcake (or whatever other name they’d given). Ask her if she has another name she likes better, a name that is hers alone, a name she’d like you to call her.”

For the children, the new names became signals for the toys’ stories. For me, they were a way to combat the weighty power of marketing by encouraging children to believe in the power of their own story-making abilities. They were born with them, but advertising had been having its way with them, robbing them of some of their belief in their own creativity.

My insistence on children’s giving names and stories to their toys was a tiny gesture in the big scheme of things. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Tags Classroom storytelling, Educational storytelling, importance of stories, power of stories, role of stories, Storytelling in schools

Categories Storytelling in schools, The importance of storytelling

Storytelling lifeline for a homeless boy

January 26, 2011 //

Missing a chance to shine

“Sol’s” story is true, though I’ve changed his name out of deference for the young hero. I met him while working as Storytelling Director for Stagebridge, the US’s oldest senior theatre company

Marijo Joseph, a talented performer who often worked with Stagebridge, was teaching Sol and some of his classmates to be storytellers. The day of their school performance, Sol nearly missed his chance to shine.

When I stopped by the office to sign in, Sol was there on “house suspension”.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“The teacher said I was talking, but it wasn’t me.” Whatever the case, at that moment Sol was about to miss one of his few chances for positive recognition.

Marijo set off to persuade his classroom teacher to give him a reprieve long enough to perform. I chatted with him briefly, then went to the auditorium.

Sol becomes the story

Minutes before he was to take the stage, Sol hurried into the room. When his turn came, he gave a first-person narrative of a slave who had rowed hundreds of others to freedom. Sol was a natural storyteller. When he performed, he was the story. Though he was the only white child in his class, Sol crawled so completely into the character his skin color didn’t matter.

My eyes were on Sol so I didn’t notice a few classmates lifting their arms to sniff their armpits in a gesture of disdain. The mockery was cruel, but Sol often did reek of unwashed clothing on an unwashed body. His home was a van with no electricity. If he did homework it was by the glow of battery-operated tap lights. Baths and clean clothes were luxuries.

The children’s teasing was not surprising. I’d seen turkeys do the same thing. They’d spot a bit of blood on another turkey and keep pecking at it, sometimes until the victim died. In this case it was Sol’s spirit they were pecking.

Sol was one of those children who talk easily with adults but have trouble finding a niche with their peers. He was one of the few white children in the school, but deep poverty and a lack of age-appropriate social skills were what isolated him from his classmates.

He adored Marijo, who inspired him to stand tall in spite of the stones life was throwing in his path. As we left the gymnasium after the performance, Sol came up to her. “Thank you,” he said. “Stagebridge has provoked my interest in storytelling.”

Wondering how to help

Lady Laura performing at the 2004 Tellabration

Success in storytelling did not improve Sol’s classroom behaviour. When she couldn’t handle him any more, the teacher transferred him across the hall, to a classroom with a male teacher.

At Stagebridge we pondered how we could help the talented but troubled young man. We decided on a modest plan to focus his energy on something besides stirring up trouble.

Aside from Marijo, he also knew one of our skilled elders, Lady Laura. She had been his classroom’s special storyteller. She was the one who had first sparked his interest in storytelling. We decided to enlist her in our scheme.

Lady Laura was a retired black school teacher. She had dealt with every kind of challenge a student could throw in a teacher’s path. She graciously agreed to go into the school and let Sol interview her, then help him write a story about her good enough to record on radio.

With Lady Laura and Sol’s teacher both supportive, I drove to the school and spoke to Sol. I reminded him that we thought he was a very talented storyteller and asked if he would be willing to interview Lady Laura and write a story for radio. He would have to agree not to act out in class between then and the radio taping, and he would have to keep up with his studies in spite of the extra work. Sol was thrilled and promised to adhere to his end of the bargain.

A small success

I’d like to report the next few weeks were smooth sailing. They weren’t. Lady Laura found working with Sol challenging. His listening and writing skills were not well developed. And, to be honest, being in close proximity to a child with no washing facilities was not always pleasant.

But they both persevered, and on the day of the radio taping, Sol was one of nine children whose stories were recorded for future broadcast on KPFA.

As usual, I had loaded my van with children and adults needing a ride to the studio. My last stop on the return trip was Sol’s. A day earlier, when I offered to pick him up at the school and take him home after the taping, he told me I could drop him off at the bus stop. He’d catch the bus home.

So I was honoured when he felt comfortable enough to let me take him all the way to the beat-up van he and his mother called home. It was parked on a freeway overpass in a neighborhood so rundown the police probably didn’t bother with anything as insignificant as a broken-down van piled high with a family’s few worldly goods.

The school year ended shortly after the radio taping. Next fall Sol was no longer in the same school. No one knew where he had gone. I’ve no idea what happened to him and don’t kid myself his life was forever transformed by his brush with storytelling.

I do know that for at least a while he knew others saw him as talented and valued. For at least a few weeks he believed he was strong enough to draw gems from the rough stones of his life. I hope the memory was a source of courage on the rough path ahead.

And sometimes, when I think of him, my heart just hurts.

Tags Classroom storytelling, Educational storytelling, importance of stories, role of stories, Storytelling in schools

Categories Healing power of stories, Memoir, Storytelling in schools, The importance of storytelling

Learning to be afraid

January 12, 2011 //

No one was more delighted with the stories of Mohammed bel Halfaoui than the storyteller himself. He had learned them from his mother, in the rhyming phrases of Arabic folktales. He would recite them in Arabic, then in French. Though the stories delighted me in the language I could understand, Mohammed always rued how much they lost in translation.

Still, the stories are layered and rich, even in English. This one seems sadly appropriate for the week after a crazed gunman in Arizona opened fire on Congresswoman Gabrielle Griffins. As I type, she lies in a hospital, a bullet hole through her head. Six others died.

It’s the day of their memorial service. Sarah Palin is accusing her opponents of “blood libel” for objecting to her placing shooting targets, aka crosshairs, on a map of Democrats (including Giffords) who voted for health care. President Obama is flying to Tucson to attend the service. His 2008 election unleashed a flood of racism and rhetoric that heightened the pervasive fear broken open by the attacks of September 2011.

The tragic shooting is leading to a lot of soul searching in a nation where bombast has replaced rational discussion in all too many arenas. Mainstream and independent media are filled with discussions about mental health, gun control, political discourse, social justice, and the need for civility.

The simple tale of a mouse and a kitten is ostensibly about two creatures who are predator and prey by nature. Their coming to that realization is normal, in the scheme of things. However, folktales are never about the surface story. Children are not born knowing who is predator and prey. They are not born recognizing The Other as enemy. This little story points out the problem, not the solution, but perhaps it can lead to some open discussion about tolerance and accepting differences.

Here, from the storyteller who gave me Man with No Brain and Habra with the Lion, comes the tale of the little mouse and the kitten.

One day, a little mouse said to his mother, “I’m big now. Let me go outside and play on my own. It’s not fair to keep me cooped up in this hole.”

The mouse’s mother had always watched over him carefully. She feared the dangers that threaten small mice. Most of all, she feared the cat, who would pounce on her child and eat him.

But at last, seeing how much her son had grown and how keen he was to explore the outside world, she agreed. “Very well, but don’t stay outside too long, and, above all, beware of the cat. He is our greatest enemy.”

The little mouse was thrilled. At last his dream was coming true. He was going outside alone, with no parents to scold him.

The little mouse was outside on his own, for the very first time (Photo by Som Juan, somjuan's Flickr Photostream)

He ran outside, cheerful and proud. He felt like a grown-up mouse. He could go anywhere he wished, all by himself. He scurried around. Sometimes he stopped and raised his head, looking to the left, then to the right. Then he ran back and forth, delirious with happiness.

He was full of his new-found joy when he saw a little cat. “Oh, hooray,” he said to himself. “I can have a nice friend if this pretty little creature will play with me.”

The kitten was also out on his own for the very first time. As soon as he saw the little mouse, he said to himself, “What a pretty, sweet little creature. If only he wants to play with me!” He approached the little mouse as softly as he could.

The little mouse was delighted. “Do you want to play with me?”

The cat replied, “Yes, I do!”

The two young animals began to play tag. They wrestled and rolled on the ground. They boxed with their paws. They bit each other’s ears. They ran around in circles, chasing each other’s tails, but always gently, delighted with their game.

Tomorrow we'll meet again and play like we did today (Photo by Buffa from thebuffafamily Flickr Photostream)

They forgot everything else until the sun began to set. The little mouse said to the kitten, “That’s enough for now. I’m afraid Mama will scold me. Goodbye.”

The kitten replied, “I’m sorry we have to stop. Goodbye. But tomorrow morning we’ll meet again and play like we did today.”

The little ones returned to their homes. When the mouse saw her son, she was relieved.

“Where were you, my child? I was so afraid for you. You were gone the whole day. I was very worried. I was afraid the cat had devoured you. Never stay outside such a long time! It’s not safe.”

But the little mouse was full of the day’s fun. He was impatient with his mother’s warnings. Finally he interrupted, “Oh, if I told you everything… I made a friend. We played together all day long. Oh, Mother, if you could see how cute he is, how handsome, how friendly. I’m sure you would like him. From now on, when I go outside, I won’t be alone. Now I have a friend to play with, from morning till night.”

His mother grew thoughtful. “Yes, my son, that’s good. That’s good. But tell me a little about your friend. Can you describe him to me?”

“Oh, Mama, if you only saw him! It’s true he’s a little bigger than I am but not too much. And his head is a little large and round. And his fur is as soft as silk, so nice to stroke. And he is yellow, and his tail is about that long and thick. And he doesn’t talk the way we do. It’s so pretty to hear him. He says, ‘Me…ow! Me…ow! Me…ow!’ Or he says, ‘Me…ew! Me…ew! Me…ew!’”

Mother Mouse was no longer listening. She had nearly fainted. What she had dreaded most had happened. It was a miracle her child was still alive.

“My dear child, your little friend is a cat! Creatures like that eat mice. He must still be very small and not yet know that mice are his daily food. But beware. His parents will tell him. Don’t go near him again.”

The little mouse didn’t understand a thing his mother said. How could such a sweet little friend ever think of eating him? He turned to his father.

Father Mouse laughed softly. Finally he said, “My little son, cats are our most dangerous enemies. Listen to your mother. Stay inside, safe from the cat. We’re warning you for your own good.”

That was the scene in the mouse’s home. Now let’s see what happened when the kitten went home. His mother was also upset and asked why he had stayed outside so long.

The kitten said, “Dear Mother, if you’d only seen the little friend I met. He’s so handsome, so cute. We played together all day long. We pretended to fight. He bit me; I bit him. He made me fall down. I made him fall down. I’m so lucky to find a good friend. I’ll never be alone when I go outside to play.”

Mother Cat was delighted to see her child so happy. Finally, she said, “Tell us about your pretty little friend.”

Little fool, and you didn't eat him? (Photo by Kevin Dooley from kevindooley's Flickr Photostream)

“Oh, Mama, if you saw him! He is little, much smaller than I am. He has a pretty, thin little tail. His little head isn’t round like mine. But he has such a pretty nose, narrow and pointed. His ears are pointed too, and so small. And he doesn’t talk like us. He says softly, ‘squeak, squeak’.”

“Little fool,” said his mother. “And you didn’t eat him? That was a mouse! And mice, you little nitwit, are what we eat. Do you understand? Cats eat mice. Always. And you actually had a mouse between your paws and let it get away and are proud of yourself? I am ashamed to have such a stupid child. Tomorrow, you must look for him. As soon as he is near, pounce. Grab him and gobble him up. Do you understand?”

The kitten could not believe his ears. “Eat him? But why? And then who would I play with?”

His father burst out laughing. “My son, listen to your mother. Cats eat mice and have since the world began. Tomorrow we will see what kind of cat you are. As soon as the little mouse comes near, jump on him and devour him. Show us that you are a real cat.

When morning came, the kitten went outside in search of the little mouse. But there was no trace of the mouse anywhere. Not in the courtyard. Not in the street.

Then the kitten saw a tiny hole. He watched it carefully and recognized the shiny eyes of his little mouse friend, safe inside his home.

In his sweetest, slyest voice, the kitten said, “Hello. Come on out, and we’ll play as we did yesterday.”

But the little mouse cried out, “Never! Everything your father and mother told you yesterday, my father and mother told me.”

And so the story ends, of the mouse who learned about cats and the kitten who learned about mice.

Children can be taught fear. They can also be taught compassion and tolerance. (Photo by Denis Defreyne, Flickr Creative Commons)

A post script: In an opinion piece in the January 11th issue of the New York Times, Robert Wright has this to say: “The point is that Americans who wildly depict other Americans as dark conspirators, as the enemy, are in fact increasing the chances, however marginally, that those Americans will be attacked.” His piece is aptly titled: “First Comes Fear”.

Tags cultural stories, importance of stories, role of stories, Storytelling in schools

Categories Algerian folktales, Folklore, Meaning of stories, Stories, The importance of storytelling

We’re not dumb kids

December 15, 2010 //

From February 2004 through April 2005 I was Storytelling Director for Stagebridge, America’s oldest senior theatre. My job was to work with seniors who were taking stories into the inner-city schools of Oakland, California. At the time, the position was supported by a federal grant intended to support literacy programs. Though reading improvement is hard to correlate with any one thing, the researchers working with the program were able to measure a statistically significant difference between students in classes with a storyteller and those without. “We’re Not Dumb Kids” is just one of many stories from an extraordinary year.

When Jim McWilliams walked into the class, a room full of fifth graders fell silent. They knew something good was coming.

Jim was “their” storyteller. Once a month the retired lawyer came into the inner-city Oakland school to tell stories to the class. When he spoke of leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, he called them Medgar (Evers) or Martin (Luther King). They had been friends and fellow activists, not just names he read in the newspaper.

The school lay in the heart of a city pocked like a bombing target. Some neighbourhoods were so derelict they looked as if they had been abandoned, and in many ways they had been. Drugs were sold openly. Violence was so common when children talked about gang beatings or drive-by shootings they were generally not referring to television shows.

Most of the houses surrounding the school were in good repair. The streets were home to Black American families with middle-class aspirations, but many of the children in the school were from families barely scraping by or living in poverty. The hills above them were populated be comfortably middle- and upper-class white families. That kind of social disparity has high costs. The average academic ranking of the students in the school was low.

I visited the school to watch Jim in action. He started out with a short folktale, something surefire to warm up his audience. They listened, as they always did when Jim spoke, but they were listless and distracted.

Jim finished his story and looked around. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

The children answered glumly, “They’re closing our school.”

School closures were being announced regularly in the Bay Area, a curious consequence of the federal “No Child Left Behind” program that was mandating standardized tests and minimal performance standards. Schools that didn’t measure up to required standards were losing funding.

“Why are they closing your school?” Jim asked.

“Because we’re dumb kids.”

Jim McWilliams speaking with a young admirer after a performance in Oakland, California

Jim was startled, but he understood after their teacher read part of a news release. It named schools being closed because they were “underperforming”. The kids knew what that meant. They were dumb.

“Are you dumb kids?” Jim asked.

“No,” they chorused.

“So what are you going to do about it?”

It hadn’t occurred to the children they could challenge the school board’s decision. As Jim talked with them and asked them questions, the gloom in the class lifted. Jim organized students to write letters to the school board. He taught them how to protest the closure of the school and their portrayal as underachievers, how to get on the speakers’ list at the next board meeting, how to stand up for themselves, how to contact media and enlist allies. (They learned the lesson well and talked him into coming with them to the board meeting and speaking on their behalf.)

The children’s eyes were shining when we left. They were sitting tall. They were afire with enthusiasm and not because they expected the school board to reverse its decision. Jim had been clear that was unlikely.

Jim had given them something more important than winning a battle to keep the school open. He had given them a new story. They were not “dumb kids”. They were smart, socially active fighters for justice.

I don’t know how long they held onto that new story. I don’t know how many lives were changed that day. I do know a room full of children learned they could refuse to be labeled.

And that is a powerful story.

Tags Classroom storytelling, Educational storytelling, importance of stories, Jim McWilliams, No Child Left Behind, power of stories, role of stories, Storytelling in schools

Categories Healing power of stories, Memoir, Storytelling in schools, The importance of storytelling

Video conversations tap storytelling techniques

August 28, 2010 //

Friends of the Earth have created a very powerful short plea for the “men in suits” to act on what they already know to avert disaster due to climate change. Using a child as narrator and some clever visual storytelling, the video is a graphic summary of the problem and the need for urgency.

I found this through a new Twitter friend, Nick Kellet. He’s CMO and Product Strategist for HuStream, a company that “mixes human psychology video wizardry and web-based technology to redefine viewer engagement.” Browsing around their site gave me all kinds of ideas for using storytelling for promoting, informing and inspiring.

One very exciting example is a “video conversation” that features children from a school that raised $16,000 for a project called “Free the Children“. A second example is a promo video for Isagenix’s Beyond Courage personal development retreat.

There are lots more good examples on the Friends of the Earth YouTube Channel and on HuStream. Have to say I’m proud to know the latter is a company right here in my own home town of Kelowna, British Columbia.

Tags business storytelling, Classroom storytelling, Educational storytelling, Organizational storytelling, storytelling in health care, Storytelling in schools

Categories Business narrative, Health, Organizational storytelling, Storytelling in schools

Bite till the blood runs

April 5, 2010 //

In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle. ~Ursula Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World

For two seasons I traveled the American school route in Germany and England, telling stories to military offspring. The principal approached me before a performance in one of the German schools. It was a tough group, he told me. “Better you than me,” he said, in a voice that intimated he was throwing me to the lions.

They filed in with all the chaos that accompanies a school on the edge of out-of-control. One boy in particular stood out. He slouched into the room with that boneless walk only a teenager can muster. Second row from the back, third seat in, he planted his lanky form. Feet stretched across the narrow aisle, arms crossed, face set, he sat poised to retaliate against the students who would inevitably graze him while trying to clamber over his legs.

He also set the tone for the next 45 minutes. Others would cast side glances his way, to see if it was acceptable to listen or if verbal tomatoes were called for. The first story had to work. Two minutes in, they would accept my offering or eat me for lunch.

Doing a last-minute set shuffle, I chose a short tale guaranteed to settle and center a middle-school audience. I don’t remember what it was now, only that the group was stretched tense as a rubber band aimed in my direction. The story worked. They didn’t fire.

So I told them a fish story to keep them still. (Fish Face from Andy Welsh's photostream on Flickr)

The second story had to keep them hooked, so I chose one that had never failed, “Tayzanne,” from Diane Wolkstein’s extraordinary collection of Haitian tales The Magic Orange Tree. There was nothing noble in the choice. The story is disturbing, haunting, dark enough to calm even a roomful of adolescents. I used it as a club, to dash any troublemakers into silence so I could finish the program and get out of there intact. I’m not proud of the motivation, but it worked.

The lanky boy sat forward and listened, to “Tayzanne” and every story that followed. His compatriots took their cue from him, and the session ended without mishap. I had no illusions that the group was transformed by the stories, but we had all survived without undue injury to their spirits or mine.

A year later I returned to the school. The students showed no recognition of the middle-aged woman who had spun tales for them the year before. Once again, the boy with long legs and attitude slouched in and posted his challenge across the aisle.

When I began the first story, he looked up, his eyes fixed and calculating. He leaned forward and stared. At the end of the story, he shouted, “You the lady that was here last year?”

“Yes,” I replied, expecting the worst.

“Tell that fish story,” he said.

“Yeah,” the others chimed in. “We’ve been talking about it for a year. We still don’t get it. We want to hear it again.”

It was the only story they wanted to hear, the only story they would allow me to tell. When it ended, they peppered me with questions I didn’t even try to answer. Instead, we shared the mystery, the possibilities, the strangeness of the tale and what it revealed about us and about the culture from which it comes.

I left that school with an exhilaration that returns to me as I write. The long-legged boy and his friends reminded me to love the questions. The answers are never clear. They change with each telling of a story, with each hearing of a tale. They change when the events of today mix with the experiences of yesterday.

I have learned to embrace the mystery. I have not found answers, which are as elusive now as when I first understood that the spiritual certainty of my childhood had cracked in the face of a growing appreciation for the questions.

I have learned to be comfortable living in the middle, biting life until the blood runs, knowing Ursula LeGuin was right. “In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.”

This essay first appeared in The Healing Heart: Communities as part of a longer piece, “Seven Lessons”.

Diane Wolkstein’s collection is still a favorite among storytellers:

Tags Classroom storytelling, importance of stories, meaning of stories, power of stories, role of stories, Storytelling in schools

Categories Meaning of stories, Memoir, The importance of storytelling

10 tips for turning students into storytellers

January 13, 2010 //

Someone said to me the other day that good storytelling can’t be taught. People are storytellers or they aren’t, and no amount of coaching can change that.

The same could be said about the best dancers, musicians, and painters. Some have such innate talent that, when they move to music or pick up an instrument or brush, inspiration seems to flow from them.

On the other hand, I’m reminded of the oft-quoted Henry Van Dyke, “Use what talents you possess, for the woods would be very silent if no bird sang except the best”.

I would argue that what Barbara Ueland, in If You Want to Write, says about writing is also valid for storytelling: “Yes, when you get down to the True self and speak from that, there is always a metamorphosis in your writing, a transfiguration.”

When someone tells a story from the “True self”, both the teller and the tale are transfigured. Sometimes all a person needs is permission to be her true self or to speak from his deepest wisdom.

When I began teaching storytelling, I tried all these tips with students. I soon found they were just as successful with adults.

Heather and her grandmother were part of an intergenerational storytelling class I taught at the Naramata Centre in British Columbia.

1. Use pantomime as a means of preparing students to tell stories. Push a heavy box across the floor, up a hill. Walk on a log high over a rushing river. Eat a banana. Be a slug, a seagull. Learn to ride a bicycle.

2. Do action-conversation skits. Be three fish and a heron in a polluted inlet. Be a garbage can, being filled, being emptied, standing in the rain. Be a car with a nail in its tire. Be the tip of an artist’s paintbrush. In each case, accompany the action with the character’s verbal reaction to the situation.

3. Convey impressions through gestures. What kinds of gestures, motions, poses, and facial expressions convey confusion, concern, friendliness, gregariousness, boredom, shyness, tension, fear, joy, confidence, uncertainty, surprise, interest?

4. Tell a story solely with gestures. Have a partner mirror them.

5. Use a painting or photograph as the basis for a story-building session.

6. Pose a character and a conflict, and do a story in the round. The leader starts the story; each person adds a few sentences, and on through the conclusion. Have students rewrite their own versions, letting their minds free for wild flights of imagination.

7. Make up excuse stories: Why I didn’t do my homework. Why I can’t clean my room. Why I lost the library book. Why I’d rather eat with my fingers. Why I can’t comb my hair.

8. Tell personal experience stories: I was so embarrassed… I’ve never had a pet like that before… That was my best birthday ever… I was so scared… I really got in trouble for that… I laughed until I cried… I’ll never forget my favorite tree…

9. Tell stories into a tape recorder. Listen to them. Improve on them. Add vivid description, lively dialogue. Record them again. Tell them to other students, to your family, to the class.

10. Tell folk tales. Learn the story as a series of images rather than as memorized words. Read the story over and over. Draw pictures of the important scenes. Use them to tell the story, then just tell the story.

NB: In my opinion, Barbara Ueland’s book on writing is still one of the best. I’m delighted to see it is still in print.

See also:
Storytelling in the Classroom
10 ideas for bringing storytelling into the school day
15 ideas for expanding students’ understanding of a story

Tags Classroom storytelling, Educational storytelling, Storytelling in schools

Categories Storytelling in schools

15 ideas for expanding students’ understanding of a story

January 6, 2010 //

The tips below can also be used as writing prompts and not just in schools. I started using these years ago, when I taught a group of third-grade students to become storytellers.

One child in particular stands out in my mind. Robbie was a shy boy, the kind who can easily be overlooked because he never speaks up, never acts out, always does his homework. I was stunned when he applied to join the school’s first storytelling troupe.

Though she had never met me, Irish storyteller Liz Weir, welcomed me into her home and set up a storytelling tour for me. This was back in 1988. Liz was a librarian at the time and has gone on to a distinguished career as a storyteller and writer. Here I

I was a school librarian at the time and asked his teacher if she thought Robbie could learn to be a storyteller. I can’t remember her exact words, but it was on the order of, “If you can teach a dishrag to dance.” She wasn’t being mean, just honest.

Still, Robbie’s mother was my best volunteer. I’m not proud of myself for having approved Robbie’s request to keep his mother onside.

Within a few weeks, Robbie not only chose and learned his own story. He learned everyone else’s. He became the troupe’s coach. When a storyteller froze on stage and couldn’t remember the story, Robbie quietly fed her lines until she recovered. When another fell ill, Robbie stepped in and told his tale.

And Robbie could spin stories like a master. He didn’t just recite the stories. He became the stories. You could see it on the enthralled faces of his audiences, children and adults alike.

Robbie telling stories as a member of the Longridge Elementary Storytelling Troupe

At the end of the year, his mother told me she had been shocked when Robbie asked her to sign his application. “Why do you want to be a storyteller,” she had asked. “You’re too shy.”

Her quiet son had replied, “I think it’s time I stopped being so shy.”

I’ve no idea if Robbie’s life was changed by his transformation from invisible boy to animated storyteller, but I know mine was. If I’d had the slightest doubt of the transforming power of storytelling, I lost it as I watched Robbie take the stage.

1. Identify the beginning, middle, and end of a story. Draw pictures for each. Retell the story using the pictures.

2. Act out scenes from familiar stories. Crawl right into the characters. How would a troll rise from under a bridge? How would a wolf speak to a child in a red cape? How would a chicken run from a falling sky?

3. Compare as many variants of a folktale as you can find. Choose variants that come from different cultures. In a study of world cultures, folktales reveal both similarities and differences. The Cinderella story is a good example. Similar stories are told around the world: Aschenputtel in Germany, The Magic Orange Tree in Haiti, Vasilisa the Beautiful in Russia. Nancy Keane has put together a list of many of these variants.

4. Write a different ending for a familiar story. Supposing the queen had not guessed Rumpelstiltskin’s name? What if the frog had never turned into a prince? What if the three bears had lived in a city apartment?

5. Retell a story from the viewpoint of one of the characters. How would the witch tell the story of Hansel’s and Gretel’s nibbling on her house? How would the oldest step-sister tell the story of Cinderella?

6. Write imaginary conversations between characters. Have Jack and the Giant talk about the magic beanstalk and all the things Jack stole. Bring together characters from different stories. Molly Whuppie and Jack could compare notes on their adventures with giants. They could write letters to each other.

7. Have students retell a familiar story in pairs. One begins; the other takes over when you call, “Switch.” This is a challenge to listening, sequencing, and memory skills.

8. Change the motivation of a central character. Rewrite the story from that point of view. Make Snow White’s stepmother into a sympathetic character. What if Rumpelstiltskin was trying to save the queen from a king who only wanted to marry her because she could spin gold?

9. Describe characters in a story. What does little Red Riding Hood look like? The Frog Prince? The giant who confronts Jack?

10. Describe the landscape of a story. What does the Three Bears’ house look like? What kind of a forest surrounded the house of Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother? What was the weather like when the goats came tripping over the bridge?

11. Read pourquoi (how-and-why) tales that contemplate the origins of natural phenomena. Then have students write their own. What are rainbows? How did skunk get his special weapon? What formed the mountains? Why do koalas sleep most of the day?

12. Experiment with body language. What one gesture could characterize the princess who slept on a pea? How would the Beast stand and move in the presence of Beauty?

13. Have students write in a journal as though they were a story character. What would one of the dwarfs write in his on the day Snow White appears? What would a robber write in his after being frightened by the Brementown musicians? What would Cinderella have to say about her stepsisters?

14. Publish a newspaper with folk tale headlines and articles. “Chicken leg fools witch.” “Blowhard wolf meets his match.” “Hundred-year sleep ends with kiss.” (Imagine how the Personals column would read!)

15. Ask students to write a song or chant for the characters in a story. What does Jack sing as he climbs the beanstalk? What does the princess chant when the frog asks her to take him home?

Storytelling in the Classroom
10 ideas for bringing storytelling into the school day
10 tips for turning students into storytellers

Tags Classroom storytelling, Educational storytelling, Storytelling in schools

Categories Memoir, Storytelling in schools

10 ideas for bringing storytelling into the school day

January 4, 2010 //

My storytelling career began back in Rochester, New York, where I was a school librarian in a suburban community (Greece) north of the city. I didn’t think of it as storytelling when I told high school students stories in order to lure them into reading. Sometimes it backfired when a whole classroom of students would rush to borrow the one copy of the book.

It wasn’t until I asked the school district to move me to an elementary school that I began to put a name to what I was doing. Placed in a school with grades K-3, I found myself with 24 classes a week trooping into the library. Teachers got a 45-minute break, and I got a library full of squirmy children. They did not need the research skills I’d been teaching teens. They did need stories.

One day I decided to try telling them a story, instead of reading it. “Where’s the book?” the kindergarten class wanted to know.

“In your head,” I replied.

As I started the story, I felt an unfamiliar stillness in the room. This class had always enjoyed hearing books read to them. This was different, as if every child in the room was holding his or her breath while the story unfolded in their heads.

A five-year-old with straight brown hair and wide brown eyes leaned closer and closer as the story unfolded. When it ended, her eyes were still glazed, as if she were reluctant to leave the landscape of the tale. Finally, her whole body relaxed and she sighed, “That was a good story.”

During a very special fifteen months, I was Storytelling Director for Stagebridge, the oldest senior theatre troupe in America. This was a scene I saw over and over, delight on the faces of intergenerational audiences, listening to Stagebridge storytellers.

I was hooked. I still read books to all the classes, but I also told stories, letting the words spin through their minds, triggering a kind of intense listening unlike anything else I did with them.

When I left teaching to take to the road as a professional storyteller, I discovered that intense listening occurred with people of all ages. And I realized the teachers who still shine in my memory were all storytellers.

Here are ten suggestions for making storytelling a natural part of classroom culture.

1. Use stories to explore various phenomena: stages of growth, old age, customs and traditions. Stories abound on the Web. A good place to start looking for them is on Jackie Baldwin’s Story Lovers Web site.

2. Enliven the study of history by telling anecdotes about the famous and not so famous.

3. Read or tell stories to begin the study of a new country, a new concept, or a current issue.

4. Reluctant or struggling scholars like to know that Einstein had problems in school or that Galileo got in trouble for telling the truth. Share with them the people behind the scientific discoveries.

5. Tell stories about yourself: childhood memories, struggles and triumphs, humorous anecdotes.

6. Share your excitement whenever you read or hear a story that moves you to laughter or tears or a sense of wonder. Don’t worry that you may not remember all the details. Your enthusiasm will tell them more than the words alone.

7. Encourage students to share their own stories: the puppy’s mischief, the monster in the closet, the first lost tooth, the first week in a new school. Having a chance to be center stage, to have everyone listening is a powerful experience. So is learning to be sensitive to an audience, to shape a story so that it captures the listeners.

8. Examine television and newspaper for stories. Talk about them with your students. Look at story structure, the natural rhythms of the story, character motivations and types, differences in styles.

9. Watch for story references in advertising. What familiar characters do you find? Share them with your students. Have them find others.

10. Tell a story for no reason, which is often the best reason. Revel in the pleasure of watching students listen to you more closely than they do at any other time. Know that your stories, told with enthusiasm and conviction, are one of the greatest gifts you can give your students. Don’t give a thought to technique while you are telling. Enter the story wholly. Your pleasure will be contagious.

Storytelling in the Classroom
15 ideas for expanding students’ understanding of a story
10 tips for turning students into storytellers