Value in creating stories
How can learning to author stories and authoring stories be beneficial? We would propose the following advantages:
1) Stories are appealing to an audience. While this has always been the case, it seems reasonable to present the capacity to tell an engaging story as more important in a 21st century context. This argument proposes that multimedia communication offers a competitive advantage because the tools are now available to nearly everyone and those who can use these tools most effectively will benefit.
2) Storytelling provides an opportunity for generative processing. There are benefits when we struggle to find ways to personalize important ideas no matter what the content area. One way to explain how this happens is to argue the claim that a structure requires transformation. A structure can require we take information we have at our disposal either stored in memory or accessible from external sources and fit this information to a purpose. Finding a way to fit what we know about bullying to the story arc is different from listing all we know about bullying. Those who argue the benefits of writing to learn (Chapter 2) make a similar differentiation when describing knowledge telling versus knowledge transforming.
3) Storytelling buildings requires other important academic skills. Ohler (2008) suggests that the story itself is the tip of the iceberg below which are the planning documents, storyboards, drafts of scripts, and other products that could be part of the preparation to create the story. Depending on how the teacher structures the storytelling project, these other artifacts could be used to evaluate understanding and procedural skills.