“Can You Describe the Experience?”

Abstract

Like Klonipin. [Laughing.] That's exactly what it would feel like. No really, it was just, it absolutely, it was the best.-Kate, physical therapistIt was definitely a whoa experience. The description would be one that I would liken to meditating or taking hallucinogens. When you came back to reality you're not sure if the other place you were in was the reality or this is.-Lawrence, playwrightI can remember the rug and then the voice and then coming to 20 minutes later with rug marks on my hands, my hands hurt and my feet were stiff. I remember thinking, Wait . . . was I asleep?-Colleen, nursery school teacher1What Does the Listener Experience While Hearing a Story?The above quotations came from adults, recalling a weekly story time in their school library. The story program and its effects are the focus of this article, a precis of our research thus far. This study came out of the desire to examine three things: the history of storytelling in education in the United States, the reasons storytelling seems to have been abandoned as a teaching tool by many, and finally, unique educational benefits that may occur when storytelling is used as part of a curriculum. We chose to do this by tracing the general history of storytelling in education and then examining closely the longest continuously running formal storytelling program in the United States.2 Comments by this program's current and former students, considered alongside the historical rationale for educational storytelling, provide insight into a distinctive role for storytelling in education.Storytelling as an educational tool has been mentioned at least as far back as Plato and Aristotle, who spoke of using story to convey moral values to young children. However, few historical studies have investigated the uses of storytelling in education or the impact that listening to stories has had on individuals as children or adults. In Storytelling: Art and Technique, Ellin Greene and Janice Del Negro write that stor ytelling fulfills a human impulse to communicate feelings and experiences (3). In The Cool Web, the philosopher Barbara Hardy (12) asserts that narrative is a primary act of the mind. Jonathan Gottschall (57-59) says that story is how we simulate life. Jerome Bruner, Jack Zipes, and other academics have described stories as being imbued with cultural meaning that helps people to remember and relate information (Bruner, Actual Minds, Culture, Mind, and Narrative; Hermansen; Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale, Why Fairy Tales Stick). Yet educators and those training them in the United States have, for the most part, moved away from the use of oral story as a teaching tool.Historical BackgroundPrior to the Civil War, American educators extolled the use of storytelling in schools (Barnard, Papers of Froebel's Kindergarten 346, 248-49; Peabody), and by the late nineteenth century storytelling had become an essential part of education. Henry Barnard, a leading American educator in the mid-nineteenth century stated thatthere should be pauses to be devoted to unconstrained oral intercourse . . . which are filled up most suitably by stories. A little story often does more than a long sermon. But it is difficult to tell a story well, and the art must be practiced. More difficult still is the choice of material which must be adapted to the children's point of view. (Papers of Froebel's Kindergarten 88)Martha Gregor, in a historical study of storytelling in the United States, noted that there were urgent calls in the 1890s for the widespread use of storytelling in both society and education. This led to a large increase in the number of books on the art and uses of storytelling published from the 1890s through the 1920s (Alvey; Gregor; Heywood; Sobol, Oracy in the New Millennium, The Storytellers' Journey). Records from this period indicate that listening to and telling stories became commonplace experiences for elementary school students, suggesting that educators felt that there was pedagogical merit in the use of storytelling in the classroom. …