Sounds and Sensibilities: Storytelling as an Educational Process

I have always disliked the term "storytelling." It is a makeshift locution, closely resembling the words George Orwell created in his dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four to exemplify the ultrapractical, dehumanized vocabulary he called "Newspeak"—words like "crimethinking" to mean "harboring any politically incorrect opinion" or "bellyfeeling" to mean "having any visceral, emotional, or intuitive response." I can understand, however, why a simpler, more evocative word than "storytelling" did not evolve in the English language (or any other language I have investigated, for that matter) to designate the face-to-face communication of a tale. After all, what we call "storytelling" encompasses so much that it defies an easy label. The "telling" part of the term touches on its most manifest aspect; but it also includes listening, imagining, caring, judging, reading, adapting, creating, observing, remembering, and planning.

Above all, storytelling is a unique educational process. Most modern commentators on storytelling tend to focus on the content of stories—cultural backgrounds, behaviors modeled by the characters (at least from the perspective of twentieth-century adult critics), decision-making patterns, psychodramatic plot events, moral messages, or narrative devices. For an excellent discussion of the educational aspects and possibilities of storytelling content, I recommend Bruno Bettleheim's The Uses of Enchantment. What is especially valuable about storytelling, however, is not the cognitive and structural elements of the stories themselves, but the dynamic learning experience that the occasion of storytelling makes possible.

I would like to put aside any discussion of the informational, consolational, and therapeutic possibilities of storytelling material and focus on the particular advantages of the act of storytelling as an instructional medium. I have organized these advantages into three basic groups (an ironic nod to the "three" symbolism that pervades the content of storytelling tales); and, in accordance with my thesis, I generally refer to the participant in storytelling—listener or teller—as a "student" rather than a "child." Although storytelling is inevitably associated with children, its pleasures and benefits are enjoyed by people of all ages.

The first, and most important, advantage of storytelling is that it encourages one human being to reach another human being in a direct and positive manner. Locally, this social exchange involves a specific teller impressing a specific listener; universally, it involves a chain of people sharing a similar experience, with each individual listener-teller adding his or her own contribution to that experience. In an era that is sorely pressed with the problem of how to instill ethical values in the individual and how to connect the individual to the common-weal, storytelling is rapidly gaining attention as a uniquely humane mode of communication as Anne Pellowski's The World of Storytelling and The Story Experience indicate.

Within the necessarily artificial climate of a classroom environment, storytelling is alive, intimate, and personally responsible in a way that the majority of contemporary educational processes are not. In fact, it can easily be claimed that no other educational process comes as naturally to our species. Throughout humankind's preliterate history, storytelling remained the preeminent instructional strategy. By casting information into story form, ancient instructors accomplished several purposes: they rendered that information more entertaining and memorable (for themselves as well as their pupils); they made that information more relevant to their pupils' lives, because it was already grounded in a recognizably human context; and they expressed themselves not simply as experts but as creative, living beings, which helped their pupils to understand, trust, and emulate them more effectively.

Cognitive scientists are now telling us that we continue to bear the legacy of this preliterate, aural-dominant method of learning, not just psychically but biologically. The primary learning centers of the brain developed alongside the areas that facilitate hearing; and ample evidence is accumulating that many of the basic neurological programs our brains evolved to process instructional data are better adapted (or solely adapted) to stimuli reception from the ears rather than from the eyes (see for example Judith Hooper and Dick Teresi, The Three-Pound Universe and Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind). Although this field of inquiry is still...