Encouraging students to tell stories: Introduction
When is a story a “story”, and if the focus is on potential benefits to the story teller, does it matter?
If you know where to look, you can now identify a group of theorists promoting the educational benefits of student storytelling. We do not feel the need to offer a list of citations - try a search using “storytelling” and “education”. A reaction to this emphasis might be captured in the question “Why stories and not essays, reports, or research papers?” While educational priorities are not always best understood in terms of either-or decisions, there are limits imposed by the time available and by the cost of the learning curve when new technical and authoring skills are required. Do we need more stories and fewer reports?
One specific argument promotes the value of this skill in a new media culture in which effective storytelling is proposed as a useful 21st century skill. This seems an argument based in the vocational and interpersonal advantages of communicating using stories as a tool when we all now supposedly have the opportunity and the technological means to generate stories. This seems to me an argument that might previously have been advanced by composition or speech teachers adapted in reaction to obvious changes in our world.
Perhaps we need to make the effort to describe “story” in a formal sense so you can consider how important this position seems to you. Since we have already questioned whether a concept such as story should be considered as having a preferred interpretation, let us say that what we are attempting is to offer an interpretation we perceive to be consistent with the perspective of storytelling as 21st century communication skill. The emphasis on 21st century skill implies the opportunity and value of communicating via stories and obviously is not claiming that communicating via stories is new. Of course, stories have always been an important method of communication and predate even technologies such as the printing press and television.
Classroom stories
We are now to the point at which we might propose a couple of questions for consideration. These questions offer different sub-questions or extensions of the following question - How do you as an educator use cases/stories to benefit students? The sub-questions take us in two directions:
1) What stories/cases/examples do you offer and how do you engage students in processing these stories?
2) What stories/examples do you ask students to offer? How do you guide the development of these stories as potential learning experiences?