Come into my world
I have yet
to meet a child who doesn’t like listening to stories. I’ve told stories to
small and not-so-small children; to sisters, nieces and nephews; to schools full
of children in assembly halls, classes of thirty in the story corner, and groups
of two or three in the playground; and I can honestly say that I’ve never come
across one who has hated the experience. The beauty of storytelling lies in its
simplicity and its accessibility. You don’t need to be level 4 in reading to
listen to, or even tell, a story. You don’t need to draw well, or be good at
football, or be top of the class in maths. All you need are a pair of ears and
an imagination.
A depth of
understanding
Stories are an exciting and valuable tool in learning. Through hearing and
telling stories,
we can experience worlds and cultures entirely outside our own understanding. We
can live in a tribe in an African jungle, travel back in time to the Victorian
era, or simply look at everyday life through someone else’s eyes. Stories make
learning personal; through entering the world of the other, we can develop a
depth of understanding that cannot be gained through facts alone.
Childhood memories
As a storyteller
working for a Christian charity,
The Zephaniah Trust, I use stories to help children understand what Christians
believe and why we believe it. This involves telling Bible stories in
assemblies, making them relevant to the world today. I try to ‘earth’ these
stories into the realm of a child’s experience by first telling something that
has happened to me, or to someone else that I know. Sometimes this means digging
into memories of my own childhood, telling stories of teddy bears and
nightmares, of best friends and falling out with siblings. Other times, it might
involve more recent events, or something that has happened to someone else; I
regularly use a story about my niece getting lost in the supermarket to
illustrate the parable of ‘The Lost Sheep’. Such real-life tales connect with
children because they understand them, they’ve been there. It’s always good to
see recognition dawn in their eyes or catch their nods of understanding when you
talk about the embarrassment of being shouted at by a teacher!
The lost sheep
Once I’ve brought the children to that point of understanding, I introduce the
Bible story. Again, the emphasis is on making it real to them and I don’t tell
it verbatim from the original text. Instead, I take the story and make it my
own, adding to it to ground it in reality and bring home the wonder of the tale.
For example, when the shepherd in ‘The Lost Sheep’ picks up the sheep and
carries it home,
I always take a moment to consider what an act this was – sheep are big, and
dirty, and smelly, and he’d just walked for miles to find it; surely the last
thing he’d want to do is carry it all the way home!
At the end,
I draw the two stories together, making it clear how the same principles are at
work in the Bible story and the one from my own experience, placing biblical
culture alongside that of the contemporary world. I count it as a tremendous
privilege to take stories that are thousands of years old and bring them to life
for children in the twenty-first century. In one school where we regularly take
assemblies, there’s a small boy who sits near the front and never fails to
audibly draw in breath at some point in the story, discovering the wonder of it
as children have done for generations before him.
Not just storytelling
The flexibility of storytelling as an art form means that it opens up many
opportunities to work with other people. For me, this most often involves
working with my colleagues at Zephaniah, John and Mark, who are both musicians.
When I take assemblies, it is usually as part of a team with one or both of them
and they reinforce the message of the story through music and song.
Using
different art forms to work together is something we are developing as an
organisation. Mark, our percussionist, and I are exploring ways of using
drumming and storytelling together, and members of the team are often involved
in arts weeks in schools, where different arts activities take place around the
same theme. I always enjoy these weeks, as the themes usually give me the
opportunity to learn some new stories. Recently, this included learning some
African stories for an arts week on ‘other cultures’. The theme was unexpectedly
brought to life for me when I arrived in the nursery class only to be told that
two thirds of the children didn’t understand English!
I first
realised how storytelling can be used with other art forms when I volunteered in
a year two class one afternoon a week and would sometimes finish the day with a
story just before home time. One boy in the class often misbehaved and found it
difficult to settle to his work. After a week or two, he started asking me about
the characters in the stories I was going to tell and using his free classroom
time to draw pictures of them. He would then stand with me at the front and show
his pictures during the story, boosting his confidence and showing him that he
could achieve something.
Everyone has a story to tell
As much as I enjoy telling stories, the biggest reward for me is when children
want to tell me their stories. I’ve led storytelling workshops in schools and
also been involved in informal storytelling circles in the classroom and the
playground. Involving children in telling stories builds their self-confidence
and develops their communicative skills in a creative way. Interaction lies at
the heart of storytelling and I try to keep that at the centre of all I do. I’ve
found that younger children generally have a lack of self-consciousness paired
with the most amazing imaginations that make them wonderful storytellers. It is
a passion of mine to encourage and develop these gifts in children whilst they
are still young, so that they don’t lose them as they grow up. Storytelling has
a role to play in creating a future generation of creative thinkers who are not
afraid to imagine.
Julie Wilkinson
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