Storytelling and Imagination: Beyond Basic Literacy 8-14

Rob Parkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136863240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Storytelling helps pupils develop a wide range of skills. Do they dream and fantasize? Do they lie, waffle and distract? These are not just bad habits but marvellous starting points for teaching an art that can help them to pass on experience, train and use imagination, develop language skills, promote their own confidence, communication and creativity and much more. Storytelling and story making may indeed be essential catalysts in developing critical and analytical thinking skills too.

Storytelling and Imagination: Beyond Basic Literacy 8-14 is the complete guide to using creative storytelling in the primary school classroom and for transitions to Key Stage 3 at secondary school. Taking a holistic approach incorporating reading, writing, speaking and listening, this book covers the skills of developing stories from conceiving a tale through to performance and the oral tradition. Tried and tested by the author and by teachers in hundreds of workshops, this book provides:

• ideas for sparking children's imaginations and harnessing creativity
• information on using storytelling in cross-curricular contexts with examples and ideas
• games and practical activities in each chapter
• a range of original and traditional stories for use in the classroom
• different stages of work to suit all abilities
• joined up thinking about stories and storytelling.

More than a box of good tricks, this book is an indispensable guide for all literacy co-ordinators, practising and student teachers who are looking to create an inspiring and cross curricular approach to literacy.

1
Thinking about story

It’s a powerful treasure that’s invisible and weightless. What is it?

The importance of story

The way we think about story is vital to teaching, as it is to many other sides of life and the way we live it. Perhaps you won’t mind too much if I spend this first chapter explaining why this is so and exploring the implications and evidence at the start of a practical book about practical ideas you can use to develop a good, ongoing, creative and rewarding storytelling culture within a school context in particular, a culture that links to and feeds literacy and also reaches out beyond, making teaching of many other areas of the curriculum more effective and imaginative in general. There are insights that will make much more sense of those practical ideas than would be the case were I to present them simply as a box of good tricks.

Now by ‘story’ I mean the whole field of story making, storytelling, story writing, hearing stories, reading stories and all sorts more that will become clearer by the time you are familiar with the contents of this book. Why do we tell stories? Why do we read them? Why do tales fascinate us? It’s customary at this early stage of writing on storytelling to point to the very clear evidence you can get, that we do tell and take in tales constantly, by simply listening to people all around you, as they are passing on the news and gossip, telling anecdotes and jokes and all sorts more. Some also point to the way we so easily become absorbed in the ‘stories’ the media hook us in with, or the politicians spin for us, or the advertisers pitch for us. Others (myself included) have liked to flag up the way that we all, in a sense, make a story of ourselves, a story that we revise and edit from time to time to suit different people and different contexts, different circumstances, a story of how we have been, are and will be. You can add to that the way, according to neuroscientists, the brain constantly constructs a narrative from the clues of our essentially limited senses. Then there are the weird stories we tell ourselves in dreams. And all that is before anyone gets to the more obvious day-to-day story magic – say the way you have only to start a good story, in the right circumstance and with a reasonable degree of competence, to have a room full of recently restless young children staring at you, wideeyed, wondering and apparently awake in a new way, or indeed the not dissimilar effect you can get (trust me, I’ve tried it many times and it works) by doing something not altogether different, if suitably disguised and cunningly presented, with adult professionals from therapists and health workers to hardened sales reps and business executives – and even (on a good day) teachers. Stories are a natural medium to us; we take to that medium with the ease with which week-old ducklings take to the water and swim in a line behind their mums. Perhaps the answer to the ‘why’ questions with which I started this paragraph should simply be ‘It is so, so it is.’ Perhaps we should leave it at that.

On the other hand, that might just be selling the curiosity that ought to be aroused by giving some attention to the ubiquity of tale telling in one form or another a little short. Because, if stories are natural to us, how and why did this all start? Why is it that our nearest relatives, the apes, appear not to spend much time clustering around bardic bonobos or peering at imaginative scratchings on banana peel? After all they are, by some estimates, as much as 99 per cent genetically the same as us. Language and cultures, thinkers point out here, make a very big difference, not to mention human intelligence. But why and whence language and culture and, indeed, human intelligence?

These are not questions to which glib, quick answers are acceptable – there are contending, considerably elaborated theories amongst experts. None of us was around to witness how it all happened anyway, so we are left with speculation and speculation on speculation – an assortment of just so stories if you want to be cynical. But, beyond cynicism, most would agree that the point at which our ancestors were able to focus and use imagination to some extent must have been pivotal in our development. You can’t have language that recalls the past or suggests the future or even accurately registers and records the present without imagination – the ability to represent mentally, to form mental images, to follow where those images lead, backwards and forwards in time. And you can’t have much of a culture without language, even if that language is partly non-verbal and is figured more in images in stone and paint and signs and symbols. Language of any degree of sophistication, you could say, is a kind of story – not just a set of labels for this, that and the other, but a framing, a way of thinking about and understanding the world and how we exist and act in it. Culture too is a shared tale we tell ourselves of what we are, how we are, what is important to us. A sense of story, in other words and in brief, underpins both language and culture. It’s the capacity that holds imaginings together, makes them coherent and usable.

The language and the words early humans spoke are of course lost to us and, with them, the stories they told. What we do have is archaeological evidence that shows something remarkable. From around 35,000 or 40,000 years ago, there was a sudden acceleration in the complexity, style and type of artefacts created by our ancestors, as evidenced by surviving fragments. Figures that are part human and part beast along with decorative patterns of increasing complexity begin to appear in (for example) carved and shaped materials retrieved and duly dated by experts, indicating the existence of increasingly complex mythologies – stories of one kind and another, stories present at the very birth of what we know as human intelligence. Interestingly, there is speculation that these probably did not come out of an arbitrary process of combination, but out of our capacity to dream awake, to imagine, to tell ourselves stories. Animals, it seems, may well have dreams – they certainly have the rapid eye movements (REMs) sleep research has shown indicate the dreaming phase of sleep. Humans, uniquely so far as we know, can daydream and fantasize. It’s a sophisticated faculty, closely allied to our storying capacities – and possibly at the very root of them.

Now that’s a very rapid gallop through territory that deserves a fuller explanation – which indeed I have previously given it in an earlier book, in which it was more appropriate to explore the idea at greater length (Parkinson 2009). This book, as I say, is a practical book of practical ideas, though I will come back to some different angles on this theme in the ‘Framing ideas’ section at the beginning of each chapter. But what is the relevance? Just this. Stories are natural to us, as I said. They are not just accidentally so, however; they’re the natural mode in which we think about life, review our relationships, relate to each other, make guesses about the future, plan, design, create, explore, express and pass on experience. It is from stories and associated imagination, from our capacity for metaphor, combined with our ability to be logical and rational (sometimes) and to be social creatures sharing cultures that we get and sustain our intelligence. It is bred in the bone. You can trust it to be there, at least in some degree. Granted it can be damaged, stunted, compromised, underdeveloped, starved and all the rest, just like any other faculty. It is there all the same. You can find it if you look in the right places in the right way.

You cannot live without telling a story. Once we connect with and understand this very simple fact, a lot of pennies start dropping – or, putting it another metaphorical way, a lot of hitherto separate and sometimes puzzling pieces start slotting into the jigsaw with a satisfying click. Being a human being is being a storytelling creature. The other species don’t do it, can’t do it so far as we know. Hence children are storytellers – naturally. Hence in story work you can draw on what is a basic given of human nature. You really can make teaching of and through stories much more effective once you grasp the implications fully. You really can apply the understanding that comes out of it way beyond the more obvious sphere of story work as a branch of literacy. These are themes I’ll be amplifying throughout the book.

The proof of the story

I’ve known this vital importance of story to come as an epiphany to some who have never considered it fully before – and, if we are honest, few of us do consider it as fully as it deserves. Yet this is not exactly an original notion. Recent decades have seen the beginnings of a confluence amongst thinkers, with people in many different disciplines with many different perspectives converging on the importance of narrative in human intelligence and indeed existence.

Take Antonio Damasio, for example. He has been described as ‘a pioneer at the furthest reaches of the human brain and human intelligence’ (Charlton 2007). His first two highly influential books, Descartes’ Error (Damasio 1994) and The Feeling of What Happens (Damasio 2000), were thoroughly grounded in a deep understanding of neuroscience, coming out of his role as an internationally famous physician and leading expert on the neurophysiology of emotions. For Damasio, storytelling is a fundamental of human brain functioning: ‘Telling stories precedes language, since it is, in fact, a condition for language.…The brain naturally weaves wordless stories about what happens to an organism immersed in an environment’ (Damasio 2000: 189).

Or take leading evolutionary psychology theorists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. They have this to say about sources for the power of story:

We evolved not so long ago from organisms whose sole source of (non innate) information was the individual’s own experience. Therefore, even now our richest systems for information extraction and learning are designed to operate on our own experience.…We process [such information] more deeply when we receive it in a form that resembles individual experience.…What form is this? People prefer to receive information in the form of stories.

(Tooby and Cosmides 2001: 24)

Then again there is Jerome Bruner, one of the most influential educational thinkers of the last half-century, with major contributions to cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology, a major inspiration behind so-called narrative learning theory. Bruner reckons that narrative thinking – telling ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Thinking about story
• 2 Practical protocols
• 3 Telling tall tales
• 4 Likely legends and marvellous myths
• 5 Dreaming awake
• 6 Learning stories
• 7 Stretching stories
• 8 Stealing stories
• 9 Fooling with forms
• 10 Performing stories
• 11 A storyteller’s vision
• Appendix A A plan for a storytelling activity session
• Appendix B Simulating oral traditions 1: ‘Pass it on’
• Appendix C Simulating oral traditions 2: three more ways of spreading stories
• Appendix D Using professional storytellers
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index