Princesses, Dragons and Helicopter Stories

Storytelling and story acting in the early years

Trisha Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317631743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Stories and fantasy play engage all young children and help them to draw connections and make sense of the world. MakeBelieve Arts Helicopter Stories are tried, tested and proven to have a significant impact on children's literacy and communication skills, their confidence and social and emotional development. Based on the storytelling and story acting curriculum of Vivian Gussin Paley, this book provides a practical, step-by-step guide to using this approach with young children.

Covering all aspects of the approach, Artistic Director Trisha Lee shows you how you can introduce Helicopter Stories to children for the first time, scribing their tales and then bring their ideas to life by acting them out. Full of anecdotes and practical examples from a wide range of settings, the book includes:

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• Clear guidelines and rules for scribing children's stories, creating a stage and acting out stories

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• How to deal with taboos and sensitive issues in children's stories

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• How to involve children who are unwilling to speak or act

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• Supporting children with English as an Additional Language

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• Links to show how the approach supports children's holistic development

Providing an accessible guide to an approach that is gaining international recognition, and featuring a foreword by Vivian Gussin Paley, this book will be essential reading for all those that want to support children's learning in a way that is fun, engaging and proven to work.

Section II
The why

Storytelling and Story Acting

Who are these people who dare to reinvent mythology? They are the children found in every classroom thinking up plot and dialogue without instruction. And for the most part without the teacher’s awareness.

(Vivian Gussin Paley 1990)

5
The enchanted place

Why is story so important?

Going on a bear hunt.

He went to go to the cave.

And then a bear come and say ‘raa’.

And then he tried to eat them.

And then they ran home, through the snow storm, and they went home.

They locked the door, and the bear wanted to be friends with them.

(Martha, age 3)

Three-year-old Martha was so engaged with Michael Rosen’s story ‘Going on a Bear Hunt’ that she readily followed in the tradition of oral storytelling throughout the centuries and narrated her own version. She recalled many of the stories details – the cave, the snow storm, the locking of the door. She also changed the ending. In Martha’s version the bear wanted to be friends, which is logical; even a three-year-old knows that life is so much easier when we’re able to befriend the bear.

This act of hearing a story and then reshaping and retelling our own version of it takes place amongst children in every country across the world from an early age. It happens regardless of their background, their living conditions, or the amount of food in their bellies. Children in wartorn countries are as eager to engage in make-believe tales as those from middle-class suburbia.

And stories are not just the playground of children. As adults we spend vast amounts of time consuming, creating and sharing them. From the first cave dwellers, who made up legends to explain the world around them, to the people of the twenty-first century who sit watching films or reading books, story has always had a powerful role in our lives. When we sleep, our brain uses story to process the events in our unconscious mind. Story is the method we communicate with, huddled around the water cooler or in the staff room, sharing with friends our tales from the weekend. We often creatively colour these, like all good narratives, to add dramatic flavour, reinventing our lives with a sprinkle of exaggeration and a sparkle of magic.

When adults tell stories

At the first training session I ever delivered I asked a volunteer to dictate so that I could demonstrate scribing. I still have this first adult story, and I remember the way it was acted out.

One day there was a mother who went home, opened the front room and found that the dinner was cooked, the house was quiet and that the children were playing nicely.

When I asked the teacher which role she wanted to play, she smiled and said, ‘The mother, of course’. We acted it out. One of the teachers became the door that the mum opened as she entered the house. We created a stove made out of two teachers, and a third played the dinner bubbling away. Finally, when we came to the ‘children playing nicely’, I asked how many there were. She told me ‘four’.

The teachers who took on these roles sat smiling angelically at the mother. The stove and the dinner bubbled away in the background, and the mum surveyed the scene with a look of joy and relief. As we clapped thank you and cleared the stage, I noticed that the author sighed. I asked if she really had four children. It was no surprise that she did. My next question was whether she ever came home to such tranquillity. She shook her head.

How wonderful to use Storytelling and Story Acting as a way of experiencing our dreams, creating the perfect homecoming, after a day at work, escaping for a moment the reality of our lives.

At a conference, in front of 1,500 people, a man told a very different story.

Once there was a tote bag at a conference. It had thousands of tote bag friends. But no one came to get them. So it sat there, disappointed, waiting for someone to come. They didn’t. Eventually the tote bags were given to passers-by.

It turned out he was one of the organisers. I will leave you to guess what area he was in charge of. But it’s not only adults who use story to mask their anxiety. This is exactly what children do when they confront the monster or hide from the dragon.

A fundamentally human thing to do

Listening to and telling stories has always been a fundamentally human thing to do. If this function served no purpose other than to help us pass our time on this earth, then surely, over the centuries, it would have become redundant.

So why do we engage with stories, and what benefit do stories serve in the lives of the children we work with? In his book Consciousness Explained (1991), Daniel Dennett explores the way evolution has produced creatures that are able to maintain the ‘distinction between everything on the inside of a closed boundary and everything in the external world’. This can be seen in tribal or pack behaviour, the home and its defined borders protecting us from the dangers of the world outside. It is equally as relevant to beings that survive on their own, like the snail, growing its shell to create the boundary between itself and everything external to it.

There is security in the known, and survival depends on our being clear where safety ends and danger begins. Dennett compares this evolutionary process to the occurrences that takes place in humans as we develop our sense of self. He believes that narrative gives us a method to govern what goes on both inside and outside our personal boundaries, providing us with the ability to self-protect, self-control, and self-define.

Just as beavers build dams and spiders spin webs, people tell stories.

(Dennett 1991)

Dennett proposes that it was out of our evolutionary need for preservation that we began to spin tales. He calls this the ‘centre of narrative gravity’, which instinctively unifies all the fragments of information it comes across, as if they were from a single source. In the stories that we share, we unconsciously construct the image of ourselves that we project to others, and we also make sense of the world and how it is portrayed to us. The fact that this is done, for the most part, without our conscious awareness results in our having an instinctive understanding of narrative structure and metaphor. This is present as much in young children as it is in adults.

But where do they come from?

Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us.

(Dennett 1991)

This notion of the unconscious nature of story resonates with the work that I do in theatre and improvisation. Often during the devising process, ideas seemingly come from nowhere, as if everyone in the room has tapped into the same supply line but no one quite knows where it was or how we found it.

Long-form narrative improvisation consists of groups of actors creating hours of interconnected stories in front of an audience with no prior rehearsal or discussion; they are just making it up as they go along. Watch any group of children engaged in deep play where they are telling a story or becoming characters, and you will see an improvisation troupe, also making it up as they go along.

Narrative runs deep inside us, and when we open ourselves up to it, we never quite know what stories will emerge. Then, some days, those creaky, uninspired, grey days, nothing comes.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, spoke about this ‘elusive creative genius’ in her TED talk (2009). Searching for answers as to why the imaginative source is sometimes there and at other times you feel as if you were wading through treacle, she finds herself revisiting the belief system of ancient Greece and ancient Rome. She discovers that in those days, ‘people believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons’ – a web that we spin, that we’re not in control of.

Story proof

In the book Story Proof by Kendal Haven (2007), this senior research scientist turned professional storyteller sets out to uncover the science behind the astonishing power of story. He examines how our brains are evolutionarily hardwired to think in story terms and presents evidence to show how we seek out narrative connections within the information we are given.

Here is an example of one of the proofs that can be found in his book.

Here are three sentences.

He went to the store.

Fred died.

Sharon went hungry and cried …

Did you assume that the ‘he’ in sentence one is Fred? Did you try to connect the first two sentences and wonder if Fred died because he went to the store, or while at the store? Did you presume that Fred went to the store to get something for Sharon to eat? Did you assume that Fred and Sharon were connected and that she wept in part because Fred died?

(Haven 2007)

Even though the sentences above are disconnected, our minds unconsciously create a story that joins them.

Haven demonstrates how easy it is for us to relate to something once it is presented as a story. He believes that narrative works as a natural and flexible teaching and learning tool, a superhighway to the brain.

Story is emerging as the interstate express carpool lane into the mind. Why? Just as traffic engineers designed those specific lanes to speed traffic into major cities, so, too, evolution and the brain’s experience during its plastic years have engineered story pathways as express routes into the human mind.

(Haven 2007)

A rehearsal of reality

But what is the point of this fast lane, and what does it enable us to do?

Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal (2012), shares how psychologist Keith Oatley describes stories as ‘the flight simulators of human social life … stories safely train us for the big challenges of the social world. Like a flight simulator, fiction projects us into intense simulation of problems that run parallel to those we face in reality’.

Story offers our brains a flight simulation of the events contained within the narrative, so we go through the ups and downs, but thankfully we are still alive at the end. We haven’t suffered the unattainable love or faced the danger of certain death; our heroes have done this for us, and we have wept alongside them.

Oatley proposes that although we enjoy engaging with stories, nature developed our ability to do this, to enable us to practice situations, encountering them in our minds, rather than waiting till we meet them in real life.

The more I think over this concept, the more connections I make between my work in theatre, which in essence is about creating and sharing stories to engage audiences in thinking in other ways, and the participatory approach of Augusto Boal, explored through his Theatre of the Oppressed (1979).

Boal was a Brazilian theatre director who developed an approach called Forum Theatre. The actors create a short play that rotates around a central protagonist and the escalating difficulties the protagonist faces as he tries to achieve his goal. At the end of the show the character is in a worse situation than he was at the beginning. The Joker/facilitator speaks to the audience, asking if they see any places where the action could be changed in a way that would alter the consequences of the story. The play starts again, and the spectators (or Spect-actors, as Boal names them) are empowered to stop the action at any point and take on the role of the principal oppressed, trying out different solutions. This is defined as a rehearsal of reality, a flight simulator that enables us to engage with problematic situations without actually getting hurt.

Glance in the dolls corner of any nursery or reception classroom and you see children readily engaging in their own rehearsal of reality, trying out the role of a mother searching for a lost child, or burning the dinner, or being cross. We see princesses and superheroes, monsters and dragons, confronting danger, challenging evil or running home to safety in a helicopter, where they know the doors can be shut and the bear can be left outside.

Aristotle was the first to notice the paradox in fiction, in that it gives pleasure but most of its content includes events that are unpleasant. A story where th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Vivian Gussin Paley
• Introduction: The girl with pigtails
• SECTION I The how Helicopter Stories: The four stages of introduction
• SECTION II The why Storytelling and Story Acting
• Books by Vivian Gussin Paley
• Bibliography