This was an introductory presentation for The You Show (originally posted as a You Show event)
“Storytelling” is a long time resident of the charts of educational ideas. As a topic of workshops and presentations (I’ve done plenty), books (none for me), TED Talks (definitely not), the word conjures the idea of performance. Combine this with our own internal conversation– “I’m not a storyteller” and the use of story gets easily pushed aside.
But peel away the connotations of campfires, cave drawings, and performer, the elements of storymaking are much more important than the show. A hook of interest, the shape of a narrative, a character to care about, suspension of belief, using less, media metaphors are techniques that we can integrate into our work as educators. While technology provides plenty of tools to tell stories, more compelling is what they afford us to practice and develop our own skills of making and incorporating story not only into teaching, but many forms of expression.
I will share my own experiments in improvisation (pechaflickr), visual storytelling (Five Card Flickr Stories), and some new tools developed here at TRU— not as magic answers but perhaps a way of thinking about story elements beyond the performance aspect.
Learn about the open You Show open seminar we are running at TRU as a means to apply these methods and media to create online portfolios or ways of sharing our research to a broad audience.
