Saturday, March 18, 2017

Your Classroom Story

Learning through story-telling is likely to be as old as humanity; long before we had pen and paper, we learned through listening. Stories were passed down through generations and generated knowledge that helped us survive and flourish. As a result, our brains are wired to engage through stories and with the story-teller. In the preface of their book Learning through Storytelling in Higher Education, McDrury and Alterio make a compelling argument for why storytelling is an enduring learning tool:
      “Stories are everywhere. We hear them, we read them, we write them and we tell them. Perhaps on occasions we feel them. We use them to motivate others, to convey information and to share the experience. We tell stories to make sense of the world around us. As we tell stories we create opportunities to express views, reveal emotions and present aspects of our personal and professional lives. Frequently we engage in this uniquely human activity in creative ways and in doing so stimulate our imagination and enhance our memory and visualization skills. Our ability to communicate not just our own experience but the experiences of others enables us to transcend personal frameworks and take on wider perspectives. This attribute, together with its international, transhistorical and transcultural usage, makes storytelling a powerful learning tool. It is therefore no surprising that it has endured.” 

The book is a guide of how to use stories and storytelling as a compelling teaching tool in higher education. I often wish that I had the natural skills of a great story teller. Story-telling for me is work, but every time I’m intentional about it and tell some tale, real or fictional, to my students, I know that they are listening and exams often show that it was one of few things that they recalled nearly verbatim about a topic.  
Besides using stories as a teaching tool, I am always curious about the story that each student brings to the classroom. Story is what makes us different from each other. We each have our own individual story – in a sense, we are our stories. Our unique stories were shaped by our life experiences, but we also become who we are because of the stories we were told. If you tell children that they are worthless and will never be able to read, write or excel at math, those words often turn into the children’s own stories – stories that they tell themselves and the world. Ultimately, many projections of worthlessness or failure conveyed to children, turn into life-stories of underachievement.  In your classroom, you are likely to have students who bring diverse stories. The stories that you tell them about who they are – and can be – also make enormous differences for who they become. Our classrooms are filled with these stories; the stories that our students bring, spoken and unspoken, the ones that you bring, and the story that is woven when your story blends with those of the students’ and becomes the whole classroom’s story. I would love for my students to remember how to solve genetic linkage problems, when in reality, I know that they are more likely to remember the story I told them about a friend who had a late miscarriage because her baby had a genetic disease – if only I had a compelling story about linked genes!
It goes the other direction as well; the stories that I will remember from my favorite class may not have to do with mastery of learning outcomes, but instead the compelling life-stories about students’ struggles with tuition bills and imprisoned boyfriends, or the jubilant success stories of students accepted to summer internships and medical schools.

What are your classroom stories? Do you use story-telling as a teaching tool? What is the story that you tell your class about yourself and the world? What story do you tell the world about Lincoln?

6 comments:

  1. I sometimes use traditional African stories about the original spider-man, called "Anansesem," in class. They were used in some traditional African societies as a tool for reflection and moral instruction among children.

    Unfortunately, stories can be ambiguous or subject to interpretation (or misinterpretation); and, hence, sometimes a dubious teaching tool or source of instruction. Students can get or take different things from stories. I am curious to find out how effective storytelling is, overall, as a mode of instruction.

    I think the best stories are the real or true (nonfictional) ones you get, everyday, from the news around the world. Here, below, is one I used at the time of the event. I do not know whether students interpreted it as a story about writing, logic, crime-detection, or education in general.

    Bad Spelling Leads Florida Cops to Suspect, AP - Wed Jan 14,11:21 AM ET

    GAINESVILLE, Fla. - A suspect in a series of bank robberies was done in by his own bad spelling [and a former teacher who noticed it], police said. Robert C. Whitney consistently confused the words "dye" and "die" in robbery notes given to bank tellers. A note used in the Gainesville robbery read "I have a bomb. Put this note with the money. If a die pack blows, so do you," police Sgt. Keith Kameg said the note read. The same wording had been used on notes in two Volusia County robberies, he said.

    "If anything says education is important to your future, this case says that," Kameg said. "As simple as spelling one word wrong was instrumental in solving three bank robberies." Gainesville police issued a warrant on Tuesday. Whitney, 39, was arrested in Leon County last week. He already was wanted in connection with two bank robberies in Volusia County as well as other robberies in Hillsborough County. Kameg said the bank robberies in Volusia were identical to the Gainesville case, including the misspelled word on notes and the piece of paper used to write the notes that came from a day planner book.

    Safro Kwame

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    1. Kwame, regardless of how your students interpreted the story, I think this is a great example of relating learning and education to life experiences. The beauty of using stories in general, is that they often are up for interpretation. By allowing students freedom to interpret and discuss different interpretations with each other, they are exposed to diversity of thought, which can lead to many teachable moments.
      Just like you, I wonder how effective story-telling is in instruction. According to the literature on story-telling, it is very effective as long as it includes reflection. Advocates of using reflection in learning would argue that it is the reflection rather than story-telling that makes this type of learning so powerful. All I know is that a good story can have a classroom mesmerized!

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  2. I have discovered some of my shortcomings in teaching a long time ago, but continue to become cognizant of some new ones, particularly since gradually switching from teaching mostly CSC major courses to CSC Gen Ed courses. Of course like others, if possible, I try to work on those weaknesses. When I tried story-telling, my students said to me “please stick with what you’re good at!” Once I tried to explain how Steve Jobs and Bill Gates found their motivations for their work, but it turned into a somewhat of an uncomfortable debate with students and I forgot what I was supposed to teach that day!

    Assuming one is good at storytelling, the challenge (at least for those of us who teach in Math or Computer Science) is how to cover a ton of formulas and algorithms and find room to relate it to some good or historical stories in our field (other than in a course designed for that). I think it was proven that I am horrible at trying to relate a story to what I teach. Ironically, I also have been told by some CSC majors that I lecture the topics of my courses in “form of stories.” I never planned to teach that way, but apparently it comes across that way! So, here was the story of last week (minus the snow day) in my Computer Organization class: On Monday we tested a known fact that in a C or C++ Language statement such as “float alpha =-132.56f;,” the base 10 data: -132.56 will be stored as a 32 bit base 2 (binary) number in a particular arrangement (sign-1 bit, Exponent-8 bits, and Mantissa-23 bits) in the memory section reserved for alpha. Story of Friday: Now that we learned the details of how computers organize a floating decimal point data in a 32-bit related variable, there is a mystery we can try to solve. How in the world a computer can later read the 32 bits of zeros and ones in memory and display it back in the original base 10 format via a “printf” or “cout” statement (both mathematically and technically)? --at that point, you need to be able to show sincere passion when you say it :-) Like any story, not all my audience liked it, but in a day when majority of students get into the details of story, it is a great day at office!

    Ali Barimani

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    1. Ali, it sounds like you are skillfully weaving stories about programming into your class. We probably have a few things in common - and it is definitely not the computer language knowledge (I was lost at the beginning of Friday in your story) - but rather the realization to stick with what you are good at in the classroom. If traditional story-telling is not your thing - it is definitely not mine - then we shouldn't push it; there are many other ways to reach students. Non-traditional story-telling is one, showing passion - whether it is for the story or the subject in general - is another great way to engage students.

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  3. Storytelling could work well in lower level Liberal Arts Math classes (Math106) and also in higher level math classes such as Discrete Mathematics (Math213). It is a needed tool in humanizing mathematics as a way of engaging both the learning minds and their cognitive instructors. Sometimes, one may have to tailor a story such that students correlate that to learning math.
    To sell difficult concepts in mathematics, it is good to begin with some similar easy concepts in a story. To work on world problems such as related to "upstream" and "downstream" problems, I tell, if needed, to my Math106 and Math099 students my own experience of boating in a creek and ask their similar experiences. Some Math textbooks are loaded with some story telling problems to help students understand math. I wish we had a course “History of Mathematics” as one of the math major classes.
    It is interesting to know what Professors Barimani and Kwame do in their classes. Thanks to them and also to Professor Hull.

    Ranjan Naik
    Math

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    1. Ranjan, I'm so happy to hear that you are using stories in your math classes - thank's for sharing. I think many students struggle with math because it can be so abstract unless the instructor relates it to the real world. In the end, whether they need to make a family budget or build a space shuttle, it is the application of the math in the real world that is likely to be of use to most students.

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