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?
