Once upon a time, I used many stories to teach in my band classes. At first, it seemed that I told stories to simply increase student interest. These stories were not very instructional at first. Most were anecdotal, and, while they may have been good for a laugh, or an 'oh really?' moment, they did not seem to add much to class, except for the fact that I enjoyed telling them, and students enjoyed listening. I told them because I remembered how much I enjoyed my teachers' stories, and how much I looked forward to these moments. They seemed to be downtime, a brief break from the work of learning. Then one day, I was teaching a high school group how to develop an internal sense of rhythm, as the students were diligently (and heavily) stomping their feet to help them keep time. The concert: two days away. It was the group's first rehearsal together on a concert stage. The band sounded beautiful except for one thing: the students, as trained, were tapping their feet to keep time. The result was a beautiful, transcripted adagio aria punctuated with the sound of a slow death march, feet drudgingly pounding out the beauty of the melody. To put it in visual terms, it was like a beautiful painting being repetitively stabbed with a pencil.
To help them, it occurred to me to tell them a story I remembered from music history class.
The hero? Jean-Baptise Lully. French composer of incredible renown in his time, he was the leader of an orchestra, back when an orchestra was something of a new thing, and a very, very big deal. His compositions were loved for their rich harmony, and he was widely celebrated. Unfortunately, his demise came from precisely the problem my band was having. "You see" I described to the class, "He used a rather heavy and pointed stick to keep time for his orchestra. I tap my baton on the podium sometimes to help you keep time, but, maybe I should, maybe we should, learn from the fall of this hero. You see, was furiously trying to get his orchestra to stay together, pounding his stick on his podium - which turned out to be a fatal mistake. In a careless move, he stabbed his foot with the stick. His wound? It became infected with gangrene, which killed him." The students, somewhat shocked, needed a little description of how this could be. After a short description, I said "Let's not follow in his footsteps. Feel the rhythm with your body, not with your foot, but in your torso..." This initiated a lesson on how to do exactly that. The resulting lesson went very well.
This served as my first experience of the use of stories to serve a specific instructional purpose.
Reading the Andrews article, and attempting to categorize the various types of stories I have told is a very interesting idea - and it crystallizes for me the usefulness of planning stories ahead of time, and being intentional, rather than 'spur of the moment' in my use of storytelling. While I feel that storytelling best suits environments where success is difficult or important, I also wonder about its applications in other settings. What are your thoughts?
Peter,
ReplyDeleteGlad to be your Hoosier Buddy for the next couple of weeks! You pose a couple of interesting points with your posts related to storytelling.
Truth versus fiction: This is a very difficult concept to negotiate. I think it's important to be upfront with your audience about the factual nature of the story. Recently, NPR had to pull a story by Mike Daisey about Apple's factories in China. He originally created the story as part of a one-man show in which he went to China and interviewed factory workers at Foxconn and was there to tell their stories. Later on it was revealed that he had gone to China, but that he had embellished, and in some cases, made up details and facts to enrich the story. In theatre that may be fine, but he let the piece air on This American Life as a factual news story. Ira Glass ended up doing a segment on his show apologizing for airing the story. One of the blogs noted that the theater defended the performance, saying that "In the theater, our job is to create fictions that reveal truth—that's what a storyteller does, that's what a dramatist does." Maybe it's the difference between telling a story and telling a tale -- either way I think we owe it to the audience to let them know which it is.
Uses of storytelling. I agree with the notion that effective storytelling is an art that for some comes naturally, and for others requires practice ... especially in an educational/training environment. Ensuring that the story relates to the learning objectives, is one that the audience can connect to and is interesting enough that it maintains their attention requires a lot of forethought ... and sometimes practice! Jonassen and Hernandez-Serrano pointed out some interesting uses of stories in trade positions. They talked about stories affording 'technicians a means to form and express their identity as technicians and to assist others in their initiation'. Some other points made included those of using stories and cases to create situational awareness generate expectancies and options. The idea of indexing or cataloging stories is a very interesting one. Making that process part of regular business operations would take a great deal of forethought and intentionality. I wonder how many organizations are doing this.
I hope that you had a good weekend and I look forward to continuing our conversations!
I don't know that I agree that truth vs. fiction is difficult to negotiate - I think it depends on the function of the story. If someone is reporting news, doing research, reporting to a supervisor, or, in general, doing anything where the function is communicating verifiable facts, then truth is the principal value. In these instances, storytelling is merely a matter of telling facts in a way that juxtaposes said facts in a way that increases interest. As instructors, these types of stories can be used, but it is very difficult to design a story in that way because stories have specific formal and emotional requirements that must be met in order to be effective.
ReplyDeleteFor example, in our class last week, all of the stories told were fictional advertisements for our final project, none of them were instructional in nature. Also, in each case, we all presented an idealized version of the results of the instruction we will be designing. Does that decrease the value of the stories? Only slightly! Stories serve to highlight the most important aspects of an experience. Because of this, truth is a value, but not in the same way as in reporting. In fact, I think that elements of fiction serve to facilitate instructional ends. A good instructional story uses a blend of truth and fiction in order to make students remember one single, important, and true fact. The rest of the story may be a whopper - but we all remember whoppers!
That said, it is also important for there to be cues, so that learners can seperate storytelling from telling facts. This can come in a tone (as we all used in last week's class), or it can come from a facial expression, or a rhythm of words, or simply "Once Upon a Time..."