ONCE UPON A TIME
For Giles Abbott, the ancient skills of creating and telling stories are life-enhancing and can be used in any classroom.
And so, it begins
This starts with a Story. It’s a classroom in a Primary School and a StoryMaking workshop is in progress. After a short prompt, thirty children, sat in circles of six, burst into lively discussion as, collaboratively, they engage with Word Choice and grammatical issues like proper use of verb/adverb, noun/adjective. They are co-creating a new story founded on a proven structure and they’re loving it!
Whilst at the start it was hard to get them talking, now it’s hard to stop them. Story composition itself will take, in total, six minutes, then work shifts to refining, rehearsing and finally performance as each group presents an entirely new story to their peers. This classroom could be anywhere in the world.
The oracy crisis
Primary teachers working in the UK may have noticed a deepening oracy crisis in schools. People may also be aware of the Oracy Commission’s 2024 report, “We Need to Talk”? As a storyteller visiting schools, I have certainly noticed shortening attention spans and plummeting emotional development. The stories I choose for specific age groups have come down by two years since 2019. The pandemic accelerated an existing phenomenon as children are spending more time than ever in non-human-to-human interactions. There are palpable adaptive effects.
My story
I should set these observations in context. I am the UK’s only blind professional storyteller and how my work began is a bit of a story in itself, having suffered severe sight-loss in my 20s. Plunged into post-literacy, I could no longer read text but I could listen and speak. In the 2000s a teacher in Somerset asked me to get the children creating, so I improvised a story with bits missing such that the children could inflect detail, characteristics. A teacher in Leicester then challenged me to create a story from three words chosen by the class. Both these experiences left me thinking – how could I take me more out and bring them more in? The result was developing an approach to teaching oral skills that I call StoryMaking.
Storymaking
In StoryMaking, participants work off simple prompts distilled from the 100s of traditional stories that now jostle in my head. Other people have, of course, done this before – people like Joseph Campbell, Christopher Brooker and like Campbell, I’ve gone deep into the past to source stories older than writing itself.
From this research I have identified 10 types of stories and 4 types of plot which provide templates for children – and adults – to use when creating their own, original stories. This provides a finite system in which limited elements can be recombined limitlessly. In 20 years of StoryMaking there has never been a repeat story told back to me!
In fact, a little limitation frees the imagination. Using StoryMaking helps students of all ages process their lived experiences and reflect on them. In just one week, for example, in a series of different workshops, students at a London Drama School, KS3 pupils in Acton, a blind Afghan girl and kids in a Pupil Referral Unit created a wide range of stories using content-free structures to support their imaginations as they dared to explore their own realities. All their tellings were enthusiastically applauded.
StoryMaking and CPD
Story telling is of course an ancient teaching skill and if developed consciously can bring a completely new dimension into the classroom, whatever you are teaching. You may have doubts about yourself as a teller of stories, but you are at least an ‘expert beginner’. You tell stories all the time, in the staffroom, at the gym, socially with friends and family. We’re working with, not against, the grain of the brain. True, the first few times might be hard but then you’re learning with the young people. And remember how hard it used to be to plan a lesson?
Stories and learning
“If helping children to develop new stories generates new material on which you can then build developmental learning, can we afford not to?” If they have their story to present at its best, they have a reason to work on their language skills, their word choice, their grammar. They have a reason to listen empathically to their peers, to co-operate. And you have a tool you can also use to animate the curriculum, to order factual information in memorable ways.
One group of Year 6 girls, for example, used one of these Story Structures to tell of the Victorian cholera epidemic, of the sewer engineer Joseph Bazalgette and of Victorian plumbing. Members of an East London Youth Group used the technique to write a story which now guides visitors around one whole wing of the Science Museum. What these young people are learning is an ancient skill. Because even though our material culture changes continually, we don’t. All children, including those children who, in time, became us, make meaning, process experience, just as we always did. We order, prioritise, edit, and . . . make Story.
Finding your story
Surely, it’s better we do this consciously? That we teach awareness of the story structure which links Theseus to Luke Skywalker and a barrister’s arguments in court? Awareness of the sales we pitch and those pitched to us? To learn consciously is to acquire skill. To acquire skill is to be ready for life. To ready for life is the Teacher’s vocation. And that journey starts with Story. What will yours be?
Giles Abbott is a story teller, teacher and teacher-trainer based in London. He has worked in schools around the world helping teachers and students develop the confidence and ability to devise and tell their own stories and to use them to enhance learning.
His book, StoryMaking is a practical manual for any teacher who would like to develop their story making skills for the classroom and is available on Amazon and other online bookshops.
Contact Giles on: info@gilesabbott.com
FEATURE IMAGE: manaa graphic For Unsplash+
Support Images: kindly provided by Giles
