A story-based pedagogy (1): An attempt to sketch my story-based pedagogy

This is part 1 of a trilogy of posts - part 2 is here

In my work with young people, I am finding my way towards a ‘story-based pedagogy’.  In school, of course, where ‘education’ as commonly understood is the goal; but also in other settings, where the goals might be other things (therapeutic or artistic or social) but the young people’s framework for forming relationships with guiding adults remains dominated by their educational experiences.

So what does this pedagogy look like?  Starting with the base, the story, it asserts the need for space for the unbroken narrative: the whole story.  This entails the respect for uncoerced attention and response by young people; it trusts that they will enter the liminal state of the listener, with all the deep learning than can occur in this state.  That is, there will not be checking to ensure either comprehension or the ‘correct’ interpretation.  These would fragment both the story itself, and young people’s processes of making sense of it – requiring them to remain in the analytic and socially reactive spaces of their brain.  Matthew Reason (2015) has suggested the term ‘storyknowing’ for the sophisticated form of contextualised understanding enabled by entering into a story; Patrick Ryan (2008) draws attention to the way a storyteller creates subtle webs of causality by conveying embodied sensory experiences to listeners, so they actually ‘live’ them by proxy and thus can form new ideas based on them.  

Over and over again I feel the importance of my own and my listeners’ sensory and experiential vocabulary.  They create bridges of empathy and understanding.  Vygotsky (2004 (1967), p.14) was referring to the same thing when he said that 'imagination always builds using materials supplied by reality.' If I describe the way an old man planted a small tree in the desert by digging a hole in the hard ground with his bare fingers, this specific image will re-emerge in young people’s own versions of this story even weeks later.  It will stand in for any amount of pitying his poverty and cancel any doubts as to his determination.  The whole story will be told using a vocabulary of experiences and senses, not of interpretation.  When a young person pictures this, they may not see red desert soil but the rubble of a piece of waste ground they know; they will transpose it so as to make sense of it – what Italo Calvino (1956, p.xxi) describes as a story drawing ‘pith’ from the culture in which it is told.  And some may focus on the pain the digging will cause the old man, while others will envy his quiet time out in the natural world, away from his noisy family.  Too much description, either of the scene or the man’s feelings, would block these possibilities; as the storyteller Shonaleigh Cumbers says, stories, unlike novels, are passed on in a ‘dehydrated’ form, and the skill of the storyteller is to ‘rehydrate’ them, but only to the minimum degree necessary.  It should still be, to my mind, sparse.

Thus, in a story-based pedagogy, the main ‘work’ by the young people consists of their filling of the empty spaces in the whole story; the main role of any follow-up activities I propose is to facilitate this process.  Follow-up may involve writing, art, poetry, drama, storytelling or animation, ultimately aimed at the young people appropriating the story in some form.  In filling in the space, they draw out the themes of importance to them, make sense of it in relation to their own experience – indeed, ‘stitch’ it onto their own experience.  Walter Benjamin (1936, p.89) was one of the first to describe and value this process of appropriation, made possible by stories because 'the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader.  It is up to him to interpret things the way he understands them...'.  This appropriation can be pictured on a spectrum stretching from retelling, to reemphasising, to transposition, to transformation, to subversion or reclamation (if the story needs it)… It is not the whole story which ‘teaches’ or ‘heals’, but the process of appropriating and transforming it.  This is not a new idea; ‘creative extension’ has been part of the humanities teacher’s armoury for decades or centuries (although it is currently out of favour in England and Wales, replaced by an approach dominated by transferable analysis skills). 

Equally important is that the whole, sparse story is told by me, to you, not by any third party, technology or book, although all sources will be acknowledged.  The story and all the activities preceding and following it must be a genuine dialogue between myself, the young people and any other adults in the room.  There may be a plan for it, but this is not an instruction sheet , rather a guess as to how the session might run.  Julian Stern (2013) uses Martin Buber’s idea of dialogue between ‘I’ and ‘thou’ to make a strong case for the vital role of surprise, even in ‘normal’ teaching: unless both the teacher and pupils are surprised by what happens in the lesson, there can have been no real dialogue between them, and thus no real learning.  This echoes an often-repeated maxim for storytellers: the story (told, not read) must emerge in the space between the teller and the listeners.  If not, it will be hollow, technical, a mere vessel for facts to be conveyed, a ‘golem’ story (to use the word Buber applied to some schooling).  Rather, I as storyteller try to model a lively and risky relationship with knowledge and with my artform.

An example: recently I was anxious about my rough plan for a session with a low-ability school group around the life story of a Bedouin matriarch, because I did not know whether they would be able to form any connection to such a complex and foreign tale of social change.  It did not quite ‘feel like a story’.  The teacher and I agreed to play it by ear.  I warned the pupils that I was nervous about this story and indeed I felt a faltering as I told it, a sort of ‘What’s the point?’ atmosphere.  Then one (disruptive and argumentative) 14-year-old pupil proposed enacting scenes from it, and the others were excited by this idea.  The scenes they created transposed the exotic tasks of sheep-shearing and desert farming to recognisable domestic worlds, embedding them in family relationships which made sense of them. In the five minutes remaining, at the teacher’s and my suggestion, the group rapidly created a class poem based on the memories of the central character, which carried a sense of what had been lost in the changes she had seen in her life.  The young people had reclaimed the story for their own by subtly transplanting it into their own soil.  Only you can generate knowledge and understanding from the whole story; my guidance is necessary but insufficient.

This example also illustrates two other things: the vital role of collective authorship in a story-based pedagogy, and the embracing of the risk that young people may choose not to engage with work based on the story.  Both of these points bring me back to Benjamin (1936) and his vital point that storytelling is an inherently communal practice, dealing in shared experience rather than the isolated responses of the novel reader.  The usual hierarchies of the class or group are loosened by storytelling; they are replaced by other unwritten rules of community.  Teachers or facilitators, visiting storyteller, young people, meet on the basis of a certain kind of temporary equality of status: all are holders of knowledge.  A storyteller cannot reserve the right to coerce young people into creating knowledge out of the raw material of a story, or even into listening attentively; this would undermine the relationship.  Collective authorship is, however, a valuable tool in giving the process the best chance.  While the telling of the story was a dialogue between me and each listener, the extension activities they carry out together involve the nurturing of dialogic encounter between the listeners themselves.  The understanding they achieve collectively then becomes a resource for their future learning – thus, as they go on to study ‘deserts’ in geography, they will have an experiential starting-point to understand the human significance of a harsh climate.  The whole, transformed story becomes an asset of the learning community.

To draw all these strands together, a story-based pedagogy:

·       *  is focused on a whole story, told without interpretation by me to you,

           * which you then appropriate or transform collectively, if you choose, by filling in its ‘gaps’ using    creative means,

·         * to create a new, rich resource of experiential knowledge which belongs to your community of  learners. 

REFERENCES

Benjamin, Walter (1936) ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’ in Hale, Dorothy J (ed.) (2006) The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900-2000, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing.OFSTED (2012) Moving English Forward: Action to raise standards in English

Reason, Matthew (2015)
Ryan, Patrick (2008) ‘Narrative Learning / Learning Narratives: Storytelling, experiential learning and education’, Lecture for George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling, University of Glamorgan, Thursday, 29 May 2008

Stern, Julian (2013) ‘Surprise in Schools: Martin Buber and dialogic schooling’, FORUM  55:1, pp.45-57.
Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich (2004 (1967)) ‘Imagination and Creativity in Childhood’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 42:1, pp.7-97

Research talk at York Festival of Story

I am greatly looking forward to the upcoming York Day of Story (see www.yorkfestivalstory.co.uk for full programme details) where I've decided to contribute a performance/workshop based on my research so far with adolescents.  The audience, I hope, will be anyone who works with, lives with or is intrigued by the possibility of storytelling with, adolescents.  I am by now so used to the quizzical or anxious looks people give me when I tell them I work with teenagers using storytelling, that I want to give the audience a flavour of just how receptive and generous they can be.  Tickets are available at http://www.skiddle.com/whats-on/York/Friends-Meeting-House/Storytelling-with-10-18-year-olds-Tales-from-the-Front-line/12287409/

An opening statement - towards a performance around gender

In every story I tell, indeed in every episode of every story I tell, the decision as to how to represent the characters’ relationship to their gender is posed.  It is never unproblematic.

I have realised that you cannot just let stories ‘speak for themselves’; you are always, as a storyteller, making decisions and editing; you hold power as the one in control of the narrative and with this power comes responsibility.  This is particularly so with young audiences growing up in a world of towering gendered performativity, hypersexuality, girlification, pornification, competition, scrutiny and judgement.  The vulnerable young people I work with are lightning conductors for these difficulties, perhaps extreme sufferers of their impact, but nonetheless they highlight issues of relevance to all young people.  They have to come to terms with, accept or reject the strictures of 21^st century gendered life. 

My storyteller’s decision of how to represent gender is thus paralleled by young people’s equally constant decision matrix as to how to perform their own gender, what relationship to hold to it.  This is something I can show dynamically in a storytelling performance.

The performance should show different ways of being a woman / a man.  It should move towards allowing the audience to get some critical distance on society’s gendered expectations – to externalise things that feel like tumultuous internal pressures.  It should (perhaps above all) show the story-ness of these stories – that the characters’ relationship to their gender is a decision made by the storyteller and can be told other ways. 

A new year's moment of 'breathing in'

I think one of the risks with practice as research in applied arts is that you can end up spending much of your time doing stuff (facilitating, storytelling, leading workshops - and all the related preparation and reflection) and less time learning from how others do stuff.  Your own practice can take on a primacy that might be dangerous. 

Thus at this point, after a very busy 2014, I feel the need to regroup, backtrack, and contextualise my practice in various ways. 

For example, although I am working in secondary education, I have hardly ever witnessed a 'normal lesson'.  I don't really know what pedagogies are habitually employed by teachers - I make deductions and assumptions based on staffroom chat and official National Curriculum policy.  How can I know then in what ways pupils experience the sessions I lead as different?  And most particularly, how do I know what modes of communication dominate between teachers and pupils, and whether storytelling is one of them?  So over the next few weeks I am going to spend some time in the English Department, just observing teachers' practice, helping out a bit where feasible.  And to get a bigger picture, I am going to meet with one of the programme leaders of initial teacher education at the University of York. 

I hope to gradually get a better sense of:
* whether and how storytelling (in the widest sense, as a mode of communication) is already employed in secondary teaching;
* whether it is counter-cultural or supportive of currently dominant pedagogies.
(Behind the second question is a shadow question: is 'pedagogy' even a salient concept for teachers in these days in which they are increasingly trained 'on the job'?  And thus, by what roads could storytelling be further explored and introduced?)

The same 'breathing in' and contextualisation needs to happen on other fronts too.  So in the mental health setting I work in, for almost the first time I will be joining in some sessions led by the professionals who work there, as a participant, rather than leading sessions myself.  And in my research for a performance around the idea of gender in adolescence, I will be visiting a group of 16-18-year-old youth theatre students to plumb their expertise on the subject - through drama of course. 

Practice as research is a demanding discipline - you're a pendulum ever swinging. 

Surfing the performance spectrum

I get storytelling vertigo, sometimes, these days.  In the course of a week I tell stories to a group of three 14-year-olds who are playing with clay and interrupting me continually to tell me what ought to happen next; to a roomful of silent, wide-eyed, troubled, inscrutable adolescents whose reactions are unpredictable and momentous; to an adult audience in near darkness in a theatre with lighting and staging. 

Any storyteller would recognise this.  It’s what Mike Wilson (1997) calls the ‘performance spectrum’ – from very informal, almost conversational storytelling at one end, to ‘performance storytelling’ more akin to theatre at the other.  But the cramming of my current working life with all of these varieties on top of each other makes me keenly aware of their different ethos and demands. 

More than that, it maybe makes me uncomfortably self-aware, of my own habits and processes.  Putting together a performance with musician colleagues recently, I was almost paralysed with embarrassment when we rehearsed – perhaps because the whole idea of ‘rehearsal’ is anathema to ‘everyday storytelling’.  ‘How will you end that one?’ ‘Emmm….I’ll probably repeat the thing about the mountain and cock my head to one side…’ All my tricks and tropes became evident; I had to give them reliable cues to start playing; they helped me shape the stories to make certain points; I squirmed when they heard the same lines repeated each time.  We found ourselves incapable of any banter between stories, because this highlighted the lack of spontaneity in the rest of the show.  

It was easier to accept the fact that this was, essentially, a scripted performance, and remove any pretence of its being otherwise.  When we did so, I was able to relax, and welcome their (extremely helpful) input, which enabled me to present something more crafted, more careful than I usually might.  But I feel there is an elusive form, beyond my current abilities and instincts, where the planned and spontaneous elements of a storytelling show are more synergistic.  Where the audience still come away with a feeling that they helped create the show, and have been given the stories to keep.  I can think of a few performance storytellers who manage this, but not many. 

This was all at the forefront of my mind while I was reading Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.  Benjamin suggests an interesting way of looking at this spectrum within artforms, according to how reproducible and transportable they are.  He points out that the original function of art was primarily ritualistic – it had a cult value, even if (or because) few people ever got to see it – like the engravings high up on the walls of the Minster.  I think you could understand a ‘traditional’ storytelling event like my small gatherings of teenagers to be of this kind, in a secular sense – it is unrepeatable; you have to be there to bask in its ‘aura’.  Its social or ‘cult’ value is perhaps of greater significance than its artistic quality.

As technology developed so that art became gradually more reproducible (e.g. woodcuts, lithographs), it became correspondingly less sacred and more about exhibition and artistic value.  And its form started to change to meet the different demands of exhibition.  Here I think you could place ‘performance storytelling’.  Virtuosity is important here; ‘authenticity’ in the sense of uniqueness is much less so.  There is an acceptance that the same performance will be repeated elsewhere; it is not about the particular set of people gathered here to listen today.

Benjamin suggests that as art becomes ever more reproducible (and of course he could not foresee the digital revolution), the form changes once again.  Artistic criteria diminish in importance again, and the primary purpose becomes political – it’s about communication, voice, participation.  And here I think you could locate most of digital storytelling, and a lot of what drama practitioners mean when they talk about ‘storytelling’.  No wonder that when people profess an interest in ‘storytelling’, it’s not obvious what they mean without probing a little further.  It is in fact several different artforms.  When I say I feel vertiginous from surfing this continuum within storytelling every week, it’s because I’m sliding along a scale which has big bumps along it. It demands that I reset my sense of purpose and role.

As a postscript: Benjamin’s comments on film in this essay cast some light on my discomfort in rehearsals.  The close-ups, slow-motions, the perfect detail of film allow a testing and examination of an actor’s performance, while alienating him from his own body.  The absence of an immediate audience against which to form his performance make him perform a language of gesture in a kind of vacuum, in which each of his gestures are subjected to scrutiny which is not social, but technical.  Likewise, informal storytelling allows huge latitude for idiosyncrasy and habit – the usual inconsistencies and inaccuracies of face-to-face communication can pass unnoticed, or are just taken in subconsciously as in everyday life.  Whereas performance storytelling under a spotlight, with the audience removed by poles of light and darkness, forces the performer to consider the effect of each gesture, analyse his own habits, and commit to them in advance.  Perhaps this is why it leaves me feeling exposed and inadequate – and also why it feels like a rigorous discipline I should not shy away from!

The devising process and storytelling

I had a really useful chat today with the drama practitioner who leads the acting group for teenagers with additional needs, which I have been working with for six months now.  The group has been using a devising process based on myths - some brought by us adults, others by the young people themselves.  Their responses to these myths brought out themes which the lead practitioner wove together into a script - no easy task!

We reflected together on what storytelling has brought to the group - already fluent in many theatre skills.  Working with stories including Romeo and Juliet, Dracula, Baldur and Loki, Llew Llaw Gyffes, Sho and the Demons of the Deep, individuals in the group found they were good storytellers, able to hold an audience.  The stories were 'meaty' grist to the mill of their drama work - allowing them to bring out challenging themes such as betrayal, dependent love, bullying, identity, jealousy, revenge...


The resulting play needed a setting of suitable grandeur - also devised by the whole group:

Smooth stones