Use Your Imagination

Storytelling shouldn’t be confined to a corner of the curriculum, says Tim Taylor. It taps into children’s innate ability to make sense of complex ideas – in every subject...

Visit any primary classroom and you will find a corner dedicated to books and reading. These are often lovely, comfy spaces, scattered with soft cushions and displays to capture the children’s imagination. They reflect, despite the growing importance of technology in schools, how books continue to play a central role in the education of young people. This is widely accepted and understood. Teachers tell their students stories from the very first day and children’s storybooks are better made and more engaging than they have ever been. Yet stories are an underused medium for learning, forgotten or neglected when the study of more ‘serious’ subjects begins.

This is the claim made by Kieran Egan in his challenging and provocative book, Teaching as Story Telling.

First published in 1986, Teaching as Story Telling is widely read in North America, but largely unknown in the UK. It questions the objective­led planning and teaching model predominant in the current system (which views education as a production line delivering discreet units of information in tiny packages) and argues that we underestimate children’s capacity for learning – in particular the central role of imagination in making meaning of the curriculum. “Technologized” teaching, he says, is a clockwork orange – something that appears to be one thing, but lacks its essential essence.

His main idea is that stories are a powerful medium for learning and we should combine the elements that make them so effective into strategies for teaching. When planning, he argues, teachers should ask themselves the same question a newspaper editor asks a reporter: “What’s the story on this?” That is, how can we make this particular knowledge something people will understand and connect with? The problem with most educational experiences, Egan argues, is that the focus is too much on the dispassionate ‘cognitive’ aspects of learning and not enough on the emotional ‘affective’ dimensions. Good stories, with characters, tensions and narrative events, have the effect of drawing us in and making meaning of complex ideas. They are more memorable than disconnected facts taught in isolation.

It’s an idea taken up by Daniel Willingham, who describes stories as “psychologically privileged”, meaning they are treated differently in the memory to other types of material – quite a claim, when you think about it. Stories, Willingham argues, not only expand the mind’s ability to make sense of information, they also make that information more memorable. Therefore, if we put knowledge, ideas, and values into stories then children are more likely to understand them and more likely to remember them later. We don’t even need to teach them how to do it, since children come to school with this cognitive ability already built in. As Willingham says, “The human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories.”

Egan’s argument, in a nutshell, is that we should acknowledge the psychological advantages of stories and rethink the way we create learning opportunities in the classroom. We need to start treating imagination as a tool for thinking and cultivate a richer understanding of the child as an imaginative thinker, using stories – in the words of E.D. Hirsch – as “vehicles” for teaching.

Egan describes stories as “narrative units”, involving problems or conflicts that need resolution, and suggests the internal structure of a story determines what should and shouldn’t be included. Children can use these elements to form a model of the story in their minds and make meaning. Information, concepts, and different perspectives can be woven into the material of stories to create imaginative learning environments in which children can explore the curriculum.

Teaching as Story Telling is compelling in this regard and Egan’s argument is forceful and persuasive. However, his book is much less convincing with regards to strategies; that is the how, rather than the why. The second half of Teaching for Story Telling is a collection of lesson studies that outline Egan’s planning and teaching approach; they are not great. Egan, it seems, is a better academic than he is a teacher. For the how of teaching using stories, we are better off turning elsewhere – in particular, I would suggest, to the work of Dorothy Heathcote, who used drama and storytelling throughout her work and research over 40 years. Although Heathcote was also an academic, she was an academic who taught children regularly. As a consequence her work is more practical and better suited to the classroom.

About the author

Tim Taylor is a teacher, freelance consultant, and associate lecturer. He blogs at imaginative- inquiry.co.uk