Learning together

Storytelling captures people's attention and interest. A story is woven around an event or experience often bound in time and space. It usually begins "Once upon a time" or "In a small village in the hills" transporting the audience to imagined or real, temporal and spatial zones.

High regard for the written text has devalued oral wisdom. The need to talk and listen is a primary human need but is often overlooked because the syllabus has to be completed. Our classrooms have large numbers of children and a participative story time may not be possible. But small groups within the large class can function as a team based activity. Every child in the group must be reached.

Interactive storytelling

A school is ideally an extension of the community for education to be meaningful.

With the mushrooming of diverse kinds of educational institutions, school settings are becoming increasingly distant from reality. A careful juxtapositioning of formal lessons to oral sharing could provide children with a balance to their growing intellectual and emotional needs. This is a two-way process.

Joy in sharing

I was eager to explore some methods to draw the optimal human potential in every child in the group. So I spent one year in various schools in Delhi watching, listening, talking and playing with children of different ages. I created opportunities to interact with the children in their formal and informal time.

I sat with them during their lessons, and when I asked them to share stories they had heard at home, it surprised them. But they did tell some stories and even acted them out.

They listened attentively and also displayed familiarity and excitement and sometimes even became co-constructors of the narrative. Knowing each other's stories generated a renewed goodwill with the knowledge of multiple domains of their social bonding. Folk tales seemed to enliven and energise the group irrespective of age. The content was replete with motifs and themes that the group could easily identify with.

Friendly and familiar content

What would be the place for folk tales or narration of stories in the formal context of schooling? As co-narrators, children often add to the texture of the tale or fill the incomplete spaces. The connection to oral narratives of the culture is deep, generating an excitement that transcends the fear of classroom authority.

It is important to look towards oral modes of communication as they evoke enriched interaction. Moving beyond printed texts would also contextualise the learning material, as local indigenous tales and anecdotes would find space and place. In cosmopolitan situations it would help in including the cultural multiplicity as people from different regions and religions would get an opportunity to bring their knowledge to the classroom.

The interactive storytelling process in the classroom can be a treasure trove for building children's sense of identity and belonging. There is recognition for their skill. Stories offer a wide universe of human experience within the universality of human sentiments.Sharing stories gives cognisance to each child's milieu. It enables children to regard differences. The process brings them to identify that often the stories are similar, only the symbolic references have specific meaning to the people.

Storytelling in the context of schools would serve as a medium for emotional wellbeing as well as being able to incorporate values.

ASHA SINGH, Senior Lecturer, Lady Irwin College, New Delhi

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