Storytelling in the Classroom: More than Just Words

campfire in the mountains

Stories are one of the most important ways people connect to and explain the world around them. Saskatchewan has declared February as Indigenous Storytelling Month, and National Storytelling Week will be celebrated nationwide from January 30 to February 6, 2024. 

Indigenous Peoples have a strong tradition of sharing knowledge from one generation to another through storytelling. Traditional stories can communicate many different types of knowledge and practices, varying from the sacred to the historical. Many stories are filled with humour and told because they are entertaining. Others may focus on transferring social, political, and cultural knowledge. When Elders and Knowledge Keepers tell stories about the first time they went hunting or fishing, their stories include lessons and teachings. These teachings may transfer knowledge of safety practices or share the location of particularly abundant berry patches and hunting trails on their traditional lands.

One of the best ways to honour Indigenous Storytelling Month is to highlight Indigenous voices by bringing Indigenous stories into your classroom. There are a few different ways you can do this! The first is to invite an Elder or Knowledge Keeper to your classroom to share a story with your students. Ideally, spend some time with the Elder beforehand and find out what story they might want to share. This will help ensure you’re ready to support your students as they listen to the story. Having Elders share their time and knowledge is a gift, so remember to thank them appropriately using local protocol practices. If you’re not sure what the proper protocol might be, ask someone who knows!

If it’s not possible to bring an Elder into your classroom, consider looking for an online resource from an Indigenous storyteller, like a video or collection of stories. If you bring in an external resource from an Elder or storyteller you do not know personally, make sure you learn as much as you can about that individual. Which Nation are they from? What type of story are they telling? It’s important students know who the storyteller is and where they come from because each story has a specific cultural lens. Understanding this cultural lens helps students understand the story within its context. Once you share a story, you can encourage students to discuss what happened in the story and to reflect on the lessons the story might contain.

Storytelling is a powerful teaching tool because it helps students connect to, relate to, or see the world from someone else’s perspective. When students learn through storytelling, they can relate their own experiences to the story, which helps them foster a more personal connection to the content. As students hear more stories, they are more likely to draw connections between the things they hear, making topics the unfamiliar feel more familiar. The best stories are rooted in real-world context and experiences. As students hear more stories, they have more ways of understanding and connecting to the world around them. Ultimately, learning through stories helps preserve cultural identity, foster community, and strengthen students’ identities.

Try these other methods of bringing story-based learning into your classroom:

1. Share Your Own Experiences

Consider sharing your own experiences of learning and discovery. Students may be able to relate to your experiences and thought processes, helping them better understand the topic at hand. 

2. Introduce New Topics Through Storytelling

Storytelling is a particularly effective way to introduce a new topic because it can act as an icebreaker. Learning through stories helps students apply knowledge and skills to real-life settings, facilitating better retention and transfer of learning. Learners may think they have no connection to a topic because they’ve never had direct experience with the material. However, stories can elicit emotional responses and give the material more context and significance. There might be a part of the story students can relate to, even if the topic you’re introducing is new.

3. Create a Character

Characters are ways to hook your students in and keep them engaged. Maybe you’re looking for ways to help learners understand the water cycle. Rather than simply describing the processes of evaporation, condensation, and rainfall, consider making water a character. Then, describe their journey from the sea and back again. This character could also talk about what happens to the water cycle when there are environmental changes or when pollutants enter the water system. 

4. Organize a Storytelling Day

Stories are meant to be shared with others. Consider organizing a storytelling day with your students to help them build their oral storytelling skills. We often have students write down their stories without sharing them or reading them aloud to one another. If they get read aloud, they’re read verbatim; the written copy is considered the ideal version. However, anyone who has told an amusing anecdote multiple times knows this isn’t how orally transmitted stories work. As we tell and retell stories, it’s common to add or remove details based on our audience or to adjust phrasing or emphasis to heighten the impact. The message or core stays the same, but we dress it up differently depending on who we tell the story to.  

 Here are some steps to organize your own Storytelling Day:

  • Encourage your students to think of something they want to tell a story about. This could be a life lesson, principle, or value they want to teach others, a difficult concept they want to explain, a historical event, or something funny they experienced. Students can brainstorm and outline their stories on paper, but encourage them to only write down the most important details.
  • Introduce some features of good oral storytelling to your students, like understanding their audience, thinking about the story’s goal, and using body language. 
  • Have your students practice telling their stories in small groups, and encourage them to be engaged in their peers’ stories! Encourage your students to ask each other questions about the story they just heard. Learning what their fellow classmates are curious about might give the storyteller more ideas for what they want to include. 
  • Include a culminating event where each student shares their story with the entire class or an audience of students from a different class!

Additional Resources

Check out these resources for more ways to honour Indigenous Storytelling Month and bring storytelling into your classroom.

Library Services for Saskatchewan Aboriginal Peoples (LSSAP)

The LSSAP committee organizes in-person and online events to celebrate Indigenous Storytelling Month. Check out their website to stay up-to-date on their offerings. 

National Centre for Collaboration in Indigenous Education (NCCIE)

NCCIE highlights innovative examples of Indigenous education from across the country, celebrating the dedicated work of communities to strengthen Indigenous education for all generations. They have a variety of lessons and resources you can use in your classroom.

Why Pop Culture has a Place in the Classroom

Comic books can bring pop culture into the classroom.

Incorporating pop culture and media into the classroom is a divisive issue amongst educators, and not without reason. While pop culture has its benefits, it could be distracting if integrated inappropriately. It can also be intimidating for an educator to relate to learners of a different generation without feeling out of touch.

However, the benefits of teaching using popular media are substantial. It helps engage learners, brings lessons off the page, and addresses controversial topics. Furthermore, it could be a fun lesson for the end of the semester or a light distraction during tense academic periods.

Why should educators include pop culture in the classroom?

“We cannot sit back and let our students passively digest the material. No, instead, teachers should actively engage students in discussions about the controversial material bombarding them,” Mark Hauser wrote in EducationWeek, rallying educators to stare down music with inappropriate themes rather than shy away from it.

Hauser notes, correctly, that “clean” versions of popular songs mask the profanity but don’t modify the inappropriate themes that come with the chosen language.

The net result is that learners believe the moral shortfall is in specific profane terms. However, the overarching theme of the content is more damaging to a student’s life view.

Pop culture provides a great jumping-off point for discussions on ethics, morals, and current world events regarding controversial themes.

Music, movies, and entertainment inspire richer discussion than news articles. Articles require a reader to see a rolling coverage to understand and engage on the topic.

The educational consultant’s other resounding point is that pop culture lessons help educators meet learners in the middle. They relate to each other in ways learners understand. Educator Clay Morgan endorses this point.

“Lucky I know about zombies,” he petitions before detailing how he used the 2009 film Zombieland to explain the Morgenthau Plan. This strategy made a bored class come alive.

The Morgenthau Plan sounds like something dry in a heavy textbook, perfect for closing and taking a nap. Introducing the topic through the Zombieland rules of zombie apocalypse survival, in this case, Rule #4, “The Double Tap,” as Morgan does, can draw more interest from the outset.

How should educators include pop culture in the classroom?

Would Benjamin Franklin be a Facebook user? How would Abraham Lincoln’s presidential campaigns look on social media? What would the Great Fire of London or the toppling of the Roman Empire look like on Twitter?

Teach learners a lesson about digital media while deeply exploring historical figures and events. Have learners create social media accounts for important figures and events.

The task calls upon digital literacy and storytelling elements that they feel comfortable with while challenging them to think critically about history and social media.

It can be daunting to incorporate music lyrics and movie references for an educator from a different generation than their learners. Educator Tim Weedon, however, provides a three-step framework for educators using pop culture in their classrooms.

Stage 1: Prep

Weedon begins by casually asking learners about their tastes in music (his pet area of interest). He then analyzes the responses from his learners for relevance to topic areas covered in the curriculum course. Weedon pays close attention to lyrical content and themes, ensuring they fit the class’s age.

Stage 2: Development

Using pop culture in group activities is a great way to break the ice in a new class. Weedon suggests assigning learners reading and developing song lyrics/poems in groups. You can read a full breakdown of his lesson plan on Development Education.

Stage 3: Practice

Primarily useful in teaching literature analysis, Weedon asks learners to analyze their favourite song lyrics and how they would be relevant to the course.

The educator subscribes to the same view as Hauser on any inappropriate subject matter. He says, “It is better to discuss the text rather than avoid the subject matter without offering any educational choices or advice.” He does, however, state that he looks closely at the chosen songs and doesn’t guarantee their use.

Once they have decided on their topics and songs, they break down the song structure through vocabulary, spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and linguistics.

A popular and effective format for lessons is song. Educators use the melodies of well-known songs or match a popular style to teach a lesson. It takes confidence, but it is fun for educators and makes content incredibly catchy and memorable for learners when done well. I’ve been singing math lessons in my head all day on more than one occasion!

There are many resources to guide you through using pop culture in your teaching. It’s an element of pedagogy that can give an edge to your teaching and provide a deeper reference to content. Join one of the many communities online, connect with educators on social media, or dive into music, movies and tv. It isn’t as intimidating as it seems.

These are some great resources for you to explore incorporating pop culture in the classroom:

Browse Tim Weedon’s full series here: https://developmenteducation.ie/feature/exploring-popular-culture-in-education/

Visit the Popular Culture Pedagogy Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/popculturepedagaogy

Blogging as a Cross-Curricular Teaching Tool

Blogging is a teaching tool.

As technology increasingly becomes a part of schools and classrooms, we must use these tools in the best possible manner. One of these practices, becoming more and more popular, is blogging as a teaching tool.

The Practical Applications of Blogging

There are many reasons why an educator would start a class blog and many insights a learner could gain from the practice. Blogs can help boost literacy & critical thinking skills. They can bolster a learner’s digital skillset, be a hands-on lesson on navigating the online world, and foster deeper learner engagement with a topic.

There are many platforms your classroom can use, from WordPress to Weebly to Tumblr. However, before you get to that stage, you need to create a code of ethics for your learners online. You can create the code of ethics collaboratively with the class and sticky the post to the top of your blog, which acts as a lesson hub.

Okay then, let’s dive right in!

Whether you teach English, math or science, elementary or high school, you can be creative in having your learners blog to enhance their learning experience. In particular, blogging emphasizes cross-curricular, outside-the-box thinking. Here are some suggestions.

English language arts

Reflections on Readings

During class discussions, you probably have a handful of very eager learners discussing the book or article you assigned. What about the quieter learners? Some learners are not comfortable sharing their opinions out loud. Further, this can be a paper-free way to keep track of learners’ assignments & journal entries.

Essay of the Month

Miriam Sullivan & Nancy Longnecker studied class blogs as a teaching tool to promote writing and student interaction. According to their study, most learners agreed that they write better when they know other learners will read their posts. Why not use this (positive) peer pressure to motivate learners to write well? An essay can be highlighted as “essay of the month” and shared with the wider community!

Cross-Curricular Idea

There are oh-so-many possibilities for an English class to get creative with blogging. Just check out this awesome blog about idioms blending ELA, Art and ICT competencies by Jenny Young!

Science

Scientific Papers  

A key part of the scientific process is for scientists to communicate their findings with peers through scientific papers. This “communication to other scientists ensures that new findings become part of a growing body of publicly available knowledge that informs how we understand the world around us.”

But what about your learners who write papers? What is their end goal besides a grade? If it’s not published in a journal, how can the educator motivate learners to increase their science literacy?  

The answer you may have guessed is to go ahead and publish it on a blog. It is also the perfect way to practice and demonstrate the peer review process, a crucial stage of scientific publishing.

Lab Reports

If your learners have a lab exam at the end of the year, you want them to recall the experiments they did over the year and understand them. While handwritten or typed lab reports are the norm, another possibility is to have the learners write them up on their blog. The additional factors of other learners in the virtual world being able to access their results and upload step-by-step images of the experiment make their experiment more repeatable. It is a great opportunity to get into how the scientific method is carried out in the real world, that “scientists must be able to read anyone else’s report, follow the steps exactly the same way, and compare their findings to the original test.”

Cross-Curricular Idea  

Use blogging as one means of using art in the science classroom. Learners learn the names of so many scientists, like Einstein, Coulomb and Newton, but who were these people? Have learners use their digital literacy skills and learn some interesting history by creating a video or recording a song about these great minds, then posting it online!

Math

All in Order

There is nothing like a blog to share your digital lessons with learners and caregivers. Use blogging to keep them all easily in the loop about upcoming assignments, recommended links for extra practice, and even share fun videos to enhance the learning experience!

How else would you use blogs as a teaching tool? Let us know in a comment below or tweet @learningbird!