Blog #3: Students as Storytellers with StoryLink

 

Student feedback on the StoryLink project.

This week’s reading included Chapter 10 in Storytelling: Art & Technique, “Children and Young Adults as Storytellers” (Greene & Del Negro, 2010). It reminded me of a project I did with my students nearly five years ago. I want to reflect this week on that project and how it helped students unlock the power of storytelling. I love writing poetry and stories, and to share that love with my students whenever and wherever I can is a blessing. My goal is to continue to that work when I become a librarian.

The Project

I primarily teach high school students. For the 2017-18 school year, I taught a class called Reading Seminar, which is for first time freshman with low reading scores. The goal of the class to provide interventions and reading strategies to improve student reading and writing skills so they can be successful in their English 1 classes, which they had with teachers other than me. My goal was to use storytelling to engage them in literacy. I had the honor of being a Teacher’s Guild Fellow, a program that lasted for one year. During my fellowship I was required to develop a project and implement it with my students by using the design thinking process.

Presenting the StoryLink Project in San Francisco for the Fellowship

 

The name of the project was StoryLink. Here’s a brief summary of the project: One person writes the first sentence  to a story and students use those sentences to write a short story to share with others. The link aspect is the connecting to others: Students received the first line of their stories from someone else, wrote the stories, and then shared the stories with the friends, family, and the school community. Click here to view one class's stories. Once students wrote the stories, we made them available through the See-Saw learning platform, and we posted QR Codes around the school. Some of those flyers are still up in the school amazingly!

 

Reflections

I no longer teach Reading Seminar, but I do have Creative Writing classes, and I can implement StoryLink with them. Honestly, I had forgotten about this project, and this week’s reading reminded me of it. Some feedback I received in 2018 was make the process easier by including less steps and include the school-wide community more. That is feedback I can definitely implement.

 

Since there is four years between that initial feedback and now, I have additional ideas I would like to implement the next time I do this. One thing I want to emphasize for future classes is for students to perform their pieces or at least read them out loud. Students are usually terrified of reading out loud, and I have yet to figure out how to make them more comfortable. The more extroverted and outgoing students usually love to read, while the introverted and shy students usually choose not to read in front of their peers. Perhaps more practice with small groups would be helpful to these students. I really appreciated the step-by-step explanations Shimojima provided in Chapter 10 because it gives me a template I can try with students in the future. If she did that with fourth graders, surely my high school students can do a version of it! Although my initial project focused more-so on the written word, I can add in telling stories orally or audiovisual, and digital storytelling to give students more choice in how to present their stories.

 

Example of flyers that are still around school. The QR codes still work!

 

I find that students get invested in writing assignments when they can express themselves or write about themselves. Sometimes it’s hard for them to get started, which is why one aspect of the StoryLink project was that someone else provided the first sentence of the story, which is sometimes the hardest part! StoryLink could easily be implemented into a school library setting, and there could even be a contest with prizes for the winners and runner-ups. There are so many possibilities.

Reading List for this Week:

 Myths

• “The World on the Turtle’s Back” Iroquois Creation Myth 
• Japanese Creation Myth  
• “Pandora’s Box”
•  “Hephaestus”
•  “Sif and Her Golden Hair” Norse Myth 

Parables

• “The Prodigal Son”
•  “The Emperor’s New Clothes”
•  “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”
•  “Parable of the Good Samaritan”
•  “Parable of the Mustard Seed”

Tall Tales

• “John Henry vs. the Mighty Steam Drill”
•  “Paul Bunyan”
•  “Johnny Appleseed”
•  “Davy Crockett”
•  “Pecos Bill”

 

References

Greene, E. & Del Negro, J. (2010). Storytelling: Art and technique (4th ed.). Libraries

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