Storytelling: the secret gift
By: Alejandro Gonzalezco
Tags: Médium, Matlupb, First Post, Education

When I was in high school, the classes I remember most were those in which a story was told, tales that didn’t always have something to do with the subject matter or the class itself, but that stuck in my mind easily as if they were a drill going through wood. The knowledge transmitted through those stories is touched by the emotions and feelings of its narrators, elements that in the end were more difficult to forget for me than the laws of factorization or how to calculate the mass of an object.

Many years have passed since I was in High school but, being capable of telling stories haven’t become less relevant to my practice as teacher in formation. During methods and approaches of pedagogy course on demo Friday class with Dr Mora, we (his students) explored the characteristics of reading aloud and storytelling, in which we learned how to proceed with a lesson plan were the main point is to use a story to teach anything you want, in our case: English. He took a book from Dr Seuss´s tales called: Green eggs and ham. Then he gathered us as close as possible, asking to seat around him in the floor; latter he proceeded with the lecture. During the reading he tried to show us as many images as he could, if there was movement, he moved with his arms and legs trying to immerse us into the tale; he read fluently and with lots of emotions following what characters felt during narration, also he changed the different intonation that each character had to make clear the differences between them.

The result was amazing. I became suddenly interested in the outcome of events that the narration followed, even if those were simply a repetition of words and sounds (which I thought could be very usefully for “drill” method for vocabulary and structure acquisition just like what I felt resulting of my teachers’ narrative discourses). It was experience so pleasant that when he stopped, no matter how old were we or how many different books we have read, we asked him to continue saying “I don´t like Green eggs and Ham, Sam I am”. This didactical use of lectures and stories made by Dr Mora remind me of the way stories were told in my school, especially the ones that marked the path that made me choose my degree in education sciences and helped me realize the effort that requires being a teacher.

Once again, the course showed me a different perspective of simple things that teacher does to improve in his teaching practice; how storytelling is a method that help students get close to new vocabulary, structures and narratives which could lead to learnings in the matter of text production, pronunciation if it’s made with passion.

I have found many learnings in Dr Mora´s class, but this one I find remarkable in the sense that: every class there is a story, a tale, whether it has comical tone or tries to give morals about student life and teacher professionality (serious stuff), it is always there. Now, after opening my perspective over such a simple doing, I see it as part of a plan, the lesson plan in an academical way; one important step of connection between the subject of study and the teacher´s own subjectivity, creating a narrative dialogue during the class and inside our heads.