The Unfolding Story

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” ― Philip Pullman

Back in November 2019, I completed a FLOMicroCourse: Teach With Stories with DeniseWithers. Denise is an award-winning filmmaker and strategist, who has helped over 100 clients use story design to launch new ventures, transform programs, shift policy, engage stakeholders and accelerate innovation.

The objective of this particular course was to describe how stories facilitate learning, identify ways to use story in our teaching and design an effective, story-based learning activity.

Stories have been used for ages (since cave men) and have always been a critical tool for knowledge management. In many non-western cultures and indigenous cultures, elders continue to use stories as a way to talk about the past and their experiences and share their knowledge and wisdom with the younger generations and the community at large. For me, stories are immersive, engaging and emotional. I often find myself a captive audience for my father’s stories. When I hear a story, I want to relate it to my own experience and find a way to make it useful for my current situation.

As I reflected on the course notes shared by Denise and the inputs from fellow participants, I drafted the following storystorm to highlight some of the ways in which stories can be used for learning:

• to share and learn from mistakes
• to create a scenario or set a context for the problem at hand
• as an emotional glue - to generate emotions and make things memorable
• to situate audience into an alternative reality - one that’s not theirs - so they are more receptive to feedback within that role-play
• to give deeper meaning to data
• to capture the key take-away from a learning experience
• to share knowledge - a key concept or idea when shared as a story is more likely to be shared forward
• to help audience derive multiple meanings from the same story by using alternative endings; the audience may even draft their own ending
• to capture the learning journey of how an expert got from being a novice to an expert
• as a teaser/marketing material to launch new training programs for the organization 

There are many benefits of stories. But there is something to be said about the ethics of storytelling. I am reminded of a powerful TED talk on the dangers of a single story. 

In 2009, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a fabulous TED talk called “The Danger of a Single Story.” The talk focuses on what happens when complex human beings and situations are reduced to a single story thus breeding stereotypes. What are the consequences of a narrative where African children are always shown as poor, malnourished and uneducated? Her key idea was that we need to appreciate and highlight the heterogeneous compilation of stories and that if you reduce people to one story, you’re taking away their humanity.

One of my favourite sentences is from the book, Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide (Sharan B. Merriam, Lisa M. Baumgartner, Pg. 264):

‘Life’s narratives are retrospective, always in process, unfolding.’

We bring with ourselves the stories of who we think we are. But we can also change our own stories and become something we never imagined we could be. Looking at our own life as a story can be so empowering because we can change the narrative anytime. Stories are transformational because we are our own story.