It’s been quite a while since I posted last and I’ve been sitting and stewing over a whole raft of ideas after listening to a number of books and podcasts. Two books crystalized some of what I was thinking about last time in the “remixing of ideas” post. The first is “Becoming” by Michelle Obama. Between her own story and observations of her husband (he gained some notoriety a few years ago… made out pretty good for an academic). The second is “Going to the Mountain” by Ndaba Mandela.
Obama’s take on stories is that they connect us to one another. Mandela’s is that stories, once told, take wings and help produce more experiences. Thinking back at the remixing of ideas, these two takes fit nicely. Stories are not for today. The are the means to connect the past and the future. Additions and subtractions from the past can potentially impact the future. Not knowing the past however, blinds us to the future. Or as Robert A. Heinlein put it in Time Enough for Love “A generation which ignores history has no past: and no future”.
This lines up really well when looking at the power and place of storytelling in education, or in any space. A good storyteller is able to put themselves between two groups to enable one to understand the other. The grandest scale for this is the past to the future. But the more macro scale is a student’s current knowledge to what their future state should be. When students aren’t able to make this connection, it may very well be the story that is at fault. Notice, I’m not saying the storyteller – the teacher as it were – but the context or environment of the story.
A story without any emotion as provided by the participants has a hard time gaining any traction. If a student doesn’t want to learn, there must be an emotion in there that can be activated. The challenge is getting that emotion to come out. The second is relevance. This may be why the emotion isn’t coming out. Finally there is reinforcement. Each time a story is told, in whole or in part, the wings of the story flap. So unless the story is insanely significant, one flap isn’t going to be enough to get it going.
I don’t think there is anything here that umpteen generations of educators haven’t already realized. But that’s not the point. The point is just that. To point them out. Some teachers may be able to have success without reflecting on different ways to communicate. There will however come a time when every teacher will be in a situation where there regular bag of tricks doesn’t work. This is where, if they haven’t thought of teaching as storytelling, they may be able to regroup and find success.
This holds true in the corporate or professional space as well. So much of this training is “check the boxes” and exists in only one point in time. I haven’t looked into it, but I would assume that Disney’s “Traditions” course is all about connecting the past, present and future (PPF).
At work, I’m about to dive into revising quite a bit of what we do. I know that there isn’t much of the PPF in the content right now, but I certainly want to put that in now that I have the opportunity. In doing this, I’d be aligning the content with what people are saying in the focus group (without knowing it). People keep asking to know more about the “why”. Just like a toddler it would seem – Why is this? Why is that? Why questions focus on purpose. To my mind, in order to provide the purpose, you need to be able to talk about what needs to be done now, and in the future. But if the past is left out the answer isn’t stable. It’s missing one of the legs.
This three leg idea is something I want to work up a bit.
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