About the Day
Like scholarship, storytelling is a project of meaning making. Through observation and examination, selection and arrangement, a well-crafted narrative can inspire curiosity, cultivate understanding, or precipitate action. For researchers and teachers, then, masterful storytelling welcomes students into the field, and serves as a powerful tool for influencing the trajectory of that field. For our students, to be authorized as storytellers is to participate more actively and engage more deeply, to be better equipped to transform summary into argument, lists into recommendations.
Thus the 2016 Symposium explored how becoming more conscious storytellers can shape the experiences of teachers and learners both:
- Keynote speaker Jake Silverstein (Editor in Chief, The New York Times Magazine) framed the day by revealing the process behind the crafting of Times Magazine stories. In disciplinary roundtables following Jake’s talk, professional storytellers shared their experiences and strategies, and participants considered how they might explicitly empower their students as storytellers.
- In an afternoon workshop, we turned to the notion of teaching as storytelling: an act of shaping complex content for engagement and understanding. In interdisciplinary teams, participants worked with content portfolios to develop, shape, and tell a story in order to pique curiosity and inspire others to learn more.
You can view the entirety of Jake’s talk below:
Or explore our program, and meet the many facilitators who guided our discussions:
Resources
- Jake Silverstein’s Nothing Happened and Then It Did, Jack Hart’s Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction, and Annette Simmons’s The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion Through the Art of Storytelling were all provided to participants. Be in touch with us for a free copy of any of these books.
- Storytelling Tools. In the afternoon workshop, we provided participants these concrete tools for developing a cohesive narrative from their content portfolios. The toolkit’s contents were selected to be concise and transferable to the classroom, and are particularly useful for introducing storytelling strategies to students.
