Storytelling

Teaching as Storytelling

One of the most powerful tool for imaginative teaching and learning, particularly in the early years--say, before about age eight--is storytelling. Many teachers who have worked on implementing imaginative education in their classrooms have spoken and written about "the power of story" to engage children and make abstract content meaningful. Examples can be found in the Teaching and Curriculum section of this website.

There are two main uses of the story in education:

1. Telling fictional stories to students. This approach, using stories that carry powerful moral and spiritual meaning, has been a core of most religious educational programs from the beginning of time. It has also been very successfully adapted and developed, and extended, in the Waldorf school movement.
2. Using elements of the story form to make lessons in math. or science, or history, or whatever more meaningful and imaginatively engaging. It is this latter use of the story that we have been experimenting with and exploring in a variety of ways. That is, we have been examining the ways in which we can shape regular lessons and units of study into story shapes, drawing on the communicative and engaging power to make the everyday material of the curriculum more lively and stimulating to both teacher and student.

Given our approach, and our focus on story structuring of regular curriculum content, we have done little with telling stories in the traditional sense. Our work is a little more like the sense of story that a newspaper editor has who asks her reporter "What's the story on that event?" That is, she isn't asking the reporter to make up a fiction, but rather to shape the event so that it will be engaging to the reader. Similarly, we are interested in what are the great stories about mathematics and science and social studies that we have to tell our students.

We labor this point a little, because, apparently however much we emphasize it, many people still think we are doing work on how to tell fictional stories in science, for example. We are not so much interested in including stories in science lessons--though we recognize such an approach can also have positive features--but rather we want to show how a typical science lesson or unit of study can be shaped into a story form.

Please contact us with your own accounts of story shaping your teaching, or with results of research or further ideas on uses of the story form in teaching and learning. Here we will provide a few examples of the kind of work we have been doing, embodied in articles and other texts. In the Teaching and Curriculum section you will be able to find many examples of use of these ideas.

Our work in this regard has taken off from Kieran Egan's Teaching as Story Telling, which has been translated into many languages. Because the book was so well received, and because many teachers asked for further examples, he wrote a Supplement to the book, which we'll also include below.

Supplement to Teaching as Story Telling (PDF)

The cognitive tools of children's imaginations (PDF)