Storytelling across the Primary Curriculum

Alastair K Daniel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136580512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Starting from the question 'what is a story?' Storytelling Across the Primary Curriculum leads the reader through the theory and practise of storytelling as an educational method – a method taught by the author over the last ten years through Primary English teaching programmes.

This practical book gives teachers the skills and confidence to use storytelling and the spoken word in new and exciting ways in the classroom. It will also give teachers the confidence to 'put down the book' and trust themselves to tell, rather than read, a story. It provides a wealth of examples of cross-curricular teaching opportunities, including a section on the ways in which the teaching of phonics can be embedded in the 'real' language of story.

Storytelling Across the Primary Curriculum is ideal for trainee and practicing primary school teachers who want to develop their classroom practice within the field of storytelling. Students on BA Primary, BEd, and PGCE courses, particularly those specialising in English, will also benefit from this book's stimulating and intuitive approach to teaching English language and literacy.

PART

1

Classroom storytelling

CHAPTER

1

Introduction: Storytelling as
the social art of language

‘Once upon a time . . .’

‘Long ago, when the world was still young . . .’

‘Once, in a week of two Wednesdays . . .’

The opening words may vary, but the invitation to a story is rarely ignored. If the tale is told well, between ‘Once upon a time’ and ‘. . . they lived happily ever after’, the listener's eyes widen, the lips part and the body leans forward as the tale transports them to another time and another place.

This is a book about the potential of the story told to enhance the way that language is used in the primary classroom. The premise is simple: narrative is the natural way in which humans organise information, and storytelling is the most immediate (and fundamental) means by which that narrative is communicated. There is a renaissance in storytelling both in schools and in the wider community. The fact that all over the country there are people running training courses for business leaders and politicians to improve their storytelling abilities is a testimony to how seriously the effective communication of narrative is being taken. In schools, of course, story has always been an essential component of a full and rich education, many teachers have found ways to bring narrative to life in their practice, and there are schools where storytelling, by teachers and children, is celebrated. However, there are still many teachers for whom the value of spoken language seems to be as a precursor to the written word. Storytelling, when it does occur, is perhaps reserved for a dedicated ‘story time’, or is employed during those literacy activities that are aimed specifically at developing speaking and listening skills (such as Talk for Writing). For some teachers, the thought of putting down a book and simply narrating a story as part of their teaching can be too threatening to contemplate; as one teacher informed a student recently, ‘We read to the children in this school, we don't tell them stories.’ Such reluctance is hard to understand when the teacher quoted will, almost certainly, build much of her teaching on narrative frameworks, and frequently rely on oral transmission of information. Storytelling is part of what we, as teachers, do, and narrative simply provides the means of organising the content of the tales that we tell.

Jerome Bruner's writing on the centrality of narrative to human experience makes him a champion for the deployment of story. In an interview, he remarked:

Why are we so intellectually dismissive towards narrative? Why are we inclined to treat it as rather a trashy, if entertaining, way of thinking about and talking about what we do with our minds? Storytelling performs the dual cultural functions of making the strange familiar and ourselves private and distinctive.

(Crace, 2007)

His phrase ‘making the strange familiar’ places story at the heart of all teaching, rather than belonging only to those times dedicated to the study of English as a subject area. As the most immediate means of communicating narrative (compared with printed text, acted script or danced choreography), storytelling represents a fundamental act of human exchange. From contextualising the teaching of systematic synthetic phonics in early reading to narrating the events of the Battle of Hastings; from explaining the planetary movement of the solar system to leading a whole-school assembly, storytelling provides a teaching strategy that works within the frameworks that humans naturally create for themselves as they organise information.

The centrality of story

In The God Delusion (2006), Richard Dawkins suggests that human beings will naturally look not only for reasons, but also for intentionality to explain events in the world around them. Citing the example of John Cleese's comic creation Basil Fawlty, Dawkins explains that people need to feel that the things that happen to them can be explained by reference to the intentional intervention of forces that stand outside themselves. When his elderly car fails him on an essential journey, Basil Fawlty pulls a branch from a tree and thrashes the vehicle and berates it: he punishes the car because it has intentionally let him down. However, Dawkins's scope is far larger than this trivial example. He suggests that, when faced with disasters such as earthquakes, humans look for reasons that go beyond the shift of tectonic plates, and that include an element of agency. From offended spirits to alien intervention, we look for someone to blame for events that lack a personified and intentional instigator. Whatever Dawkins's theorising suggests about the existence, or otherwise, of God, the notion of the human need to seek intentionality does suggest that humans are natural storytellers. Religious myths enshrine the ultimate causes of the fabric of the world, the nature of humankind, the relationships between people, the finality (or otherwise) of death and, of course, love. Fables, parables and folk tales link the folly of human behaviour to its consequences (whether losing the flock of sheep to the wolf, or the elevation of religious purity over the plight of the injured Samaritan). We appear to be programmed to ascribe intention and agency from early childhood. Bruner (1986) cites research in which people's reactions to a film of randomly moving objects were recorded. Adult subjects attributed intentionality to, and relationships between, objects as they moved together, and while this may not be startling, it was then found that six-month-old babies mirrored the reactions of the adults. With this basic ‘programming’ for how to read the world around us, we fill in gaps when information is incomplete, and create stories. While we may think that we know what makes us and our neighbours ‘tick’, in the absence of immediate knowledge, we use our imagination to attribute intention: animals are anthropomorphised so that we can recognise ourselves and others within them; nature assumes character and rewards or punishes (to devastating effect). In other words, humans are perpetually engaged in an imaginative exercise to explain the world around them – it is in this world of imagined causes that a car will decide for itself whether or not it will deliver a frustrated hotel owner to his Torquay destination.

In addition to looking for, and imaginatively creating, the causes and agents of events, humans categorise and sequence them. The experiences that fill our lives are ordered through the past and into the present and, based on these experiences, possibilities are projected into the future. It is in narrative that these events are organised and given meaning, thus we can see narrative as ‘the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of time’ (Porter Abbott, 2002: 3).

Narrative, and its expression as story, may therefore be seen as central to our own understanding of what it is to live our lives in Barbara Hardy's famous phrase, ‘a primary act of mind’ (1978). This representation of our world is not simply an internal process, but is essentially social. In Storytelling: Process and Practice (1986), Norma Livo and Sandra Rietz provide a powerful rationale for seeing story as fundamental to the way in which human beings represent themselves to themselves and to each other:

‘Story’ is its own reality. It is a configuration in memory that is quite independent of the specific details of any given event. We all recognize ‘story’ and are easily able to distinguish between something told that is ‘stories’ and something that is not. ‘Story’ is a way of knowing and remembering information – a shape or pattern into which information can be arranged. It serves a very basic purpose; it restructures experiences for the purpose of ‘saving’ them and it is an ancient, perhaps natural order of mind – primordial, having grown along with the development of human memory and of language itself. ‘Story’ is a way of organizing language.

(Livo and Rietz, 1986: 5)

This capacity to shape meaning through the language of story is a quality that has received increasing attention in education. In 2001, curriculum guidance on ‘Storytelling aspects of narrative’ was provided to English schools, which stated that narrative:

is central to learning . . . It helps children to understand themselves and their world, giving shape and meaning to their experiences, organising their ideas, and structuring their thinking and, ultimately, their writing. Different cultures and communities make different use of stories, but storytelling and thinking through story remain universal human competences.

(Storytelling aspects of narrative 2001)¹

The writers have recognised not only the imaginative capacity of humans, but also their need to organise and, crucially, express their ideas and experiences (although writing is still regarded as the apogee of children's activity). It seems reasonable, therefore, to assert that when creating opportunities for children to learn, we should engage with narrative form and develop both our own competence with the language of story and that of the children we teach.

From narrative to story to storytelling

Before discussing the qualities that are particular to storytelling as a form of narrative expression (as opposed to story reading or story writing), these fundamental terms, ‘story’ and ‘narrative’, need to be clarified and differentiated.

In his meta-analysis of research into the use and effects of story and storytelling, Kendal Haven defines story as ‘a detailed, character-based narration of a character's struggles to overcome obstacles and reach an important goal’ (2007: 79). Story is descriptive and expressive; it creates mental images of characters, their struggles and their journey towards their goal. By contrast, the term ‘narrative’ is more functional, and is used in this book to refer to the underlying structure around which story is built. Narrative deals not with the descriptive and expressive elements of story, but with the way in which ideas are combined (later on, this distinction will help us apply storytelling techniques across the curriculum).

Of course, ‘storytelling’ is itself an ambiguous term. One may speak of storytelling and describe the works of novelists, playwrights and actors, and by utilising the word, these arts are located in an ageless tradition. However, such a catch-all description dilutes the meaning of ‘storytelling’, so that it comes to refer to any activity in which a story is created or communicated. In the classroom context, this has meant that storytelling has often been c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Content
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Classroom storytelling
• Part 2: Storytelling across the primary curriculum
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index