|
|
‘Stories are places where worlds meet - our world and the world of story.’ Susanna Steele
Storytelling has a significant part to play in contemporary education from pre-school to lifelong learning. Storytelling performances, workshops, story-making and story collection work can be used to support teaching and learning in both formal and informal contexts. Storytelling has enormous potential to support family learning and community education projects and has beneficial applications across the National Curriculum at all key stages in many subject areas. It can also play a key part in out-of-school visits and combines well with a range of other art forms. Our list of educational storytellers is available on request
Speaking, listening and imagining
Oral stories stimulate immediate and vivid imaginative responses in the listener as each audience member conjures images in the cinema screen of their mind’s eye. Hearing and re-telling stories give pupils access to narrative without the boundaries of paper, pens and print. Retelling stories draws on language and speaking skills, requiring children to sequence events, select language, develop characters and evoke settings for whoever their audience may be. For older pupils storytelling provides direct access to narrative lines and structures, and can be used to develop sophisticated improvised language and performance skills. | |||
Crossing boundaries Stories cross boundaries of time, geography, and culture. They offer many opportunities to stand in the shoes of character after character understanding their motives and emotions, their actions and the consequences of those actions. They engage both tellers and listeners with debate over decisions, and predictions of outcomes. Collecting stories from friends and relatives builds relationships and emphasises commonality between people, within and across generations and cultures. We are all natural storytellers. Because narrative is the most familiar way of organising experiences, children implicitly know a lot about stories, how they're constructed, what to expect and how to respond. This familiarity allows stories to deal with big issues and big ideas. | |||
|
Who are the storytellers? The Crick Crack Club can recommend storytellers for work with pupils from year R to post 16 and in adult education. These artists can provide a range of services from one-day performance or workshop visits, to longer residencies. They can support events such as ‘arts weeks’, ‘book weeks’, calendar festivals and other projects or celebrations of narrative, history, myth and culture. The Crick Crack Club can also organise training workshops for teaching staff. In many schools the teachers or classroom assistants are the storytellers, in others older children regularly tell stories to younger year groups, and some schools have thriving storytelling clubs. Children may also be involved in inter-generational projects collecting stories - personal or traditional - from their elders in the local community or further afield. | |||
| |||
|
What stories? Storytellers work with folk tales, fairy tales (wonder tales), myths and epics from across the world and across history. They will also deal in jokes, proverbs, tongue twisters, riddles and rhymes. Local storytellers may also know of local stories and legends. A storyteller is a walking library of narratives that can provide a rich resource for work within the classroom. When working with a storyteller, you might have themes you want them to work with, but storytellers are artists, so you’ll get the best results if they have some choice in how to respond to work you’re doing, and if they can choose the stories they tell. | |||
|
Curriculum links There are endless ways in which you can link storytelling to the curriculum, and follow up storytelling and work with stories in school. The most obvious curriculum links relate to literacy, speaking and listening, The enormous diversity of story content can also be used to support most subjects within the National Curriculum, from history and RE to the causal processes of science. Further more, the socialising content of many stories provides a good basis for the teaching of PHSE and citizenship. |
