Storytelling can play a significant role in promoting the overall wellbeing of children.
Storytelling serves as a powerful medium for sharing our experiences. It holds the key to unlocking the realms of personal imagination and fostering a sense of shared love within local communities.
By bringing together the young and the old, storytelling becomes a catalyst for community building and forging lasting connections.
Incorporating storytelling into youth leadership programs and initiatives can empower young leaders to connect with their peers, engage in meaningful dialogue, and drive positive change in their communities and beyond. Storytelling not only enhances their leadership skills but also fosters a sense of purpose and the capacity to inspire others to join them in their endeavors.
Storytelling is a way to live in a world of imagination—and it requires no materials! Storytelling for children is play-based learning at its best and brings the community together. This important activity is rarely part of a school’s curriculum so we develop a Storytelling Manual for extracurricular activities.
CPI’s Storytelling Manual offers effective techniques and strategies for using storytelling for children as a tool to foster creativity, imagination, and communication skills. Join us in our mission to promote the benefits of play-based learning and help them develop essential life skills through storytelling.
Local history and culture come alive through storytelling for many communities. Stories and Storytelling open up a world of imagination, uniting children and their communities. CPI encourages storytelling sessions as a new way of learning that is rarely part of a school curriculum.
CPI champions passing down local stories. It ensures that local people are involved. It also means that the method of recording and transcribing are reproducible at the local level. This involves finding and training local apprentices in skills such as film-making. In addition, instructing local teachers to pass on to students an interest in how stories conserve culture. The students are encouraged to define their own relationship to the oral tradition. They do this by creating works of art that interpret that tradition and perpetuate it as a living practice.
What about societies where there is no concerted effort to collect, preserve, and study the stories that matter to their own self-definition? In these societies, elders tell stories perhaps for the last time, since the next generation – the children – are distracted by cell phones or, worse, by war. The task of preserving these stories – the whole oral tradition of a people – has fallen to individuals and organizations dedicated to that purpose.
Such dedication comes from the immensity of the need, that is, from what is likely to be lost without deliberate preservation. In a recent essay for Terralingua, Luisa Maffi wrote:
“In many societies, history and culture come alive through storytelling. Stories open up a world of imagination, uniting children and their communities, and allowing them to wonder at history’s ongoing drama.”
CPI encourages storytelling circles as a new way of learning that is rarely part of a school curriculum.
The great anthropologist George N. Appell described storytelling as a basic human impulse, a cognate of religion that allows us to re-envision – and cope with – existence by situating all of life within of a narrative order. For Appell, oral literature is inescapably profound:
“It arises in response to the universal aesthetic impulse to provide narratives that explain the nature of life and human response to challenges. It retains knowledge to be passed on to succeeding generations. It contains the history of the society and its experiences. Thus in various forms this oral literature portrays the society’s belief systems and makes sense of life. It provides a guide to human behavior and how to live one’s life. . . As such this literature is a response to the universal human instinct to find balance, harmony, and beauty in the world and the need to understand pain, suffering, and evil. It functions to fulfill the need for religious belief and spiritual fulfillment necessary for human existence.”
Passing stories from the older generation to the younger, all at the level of creativity, is what distinguishes CPI’s methodology. Children are given tools – and the impetus – to envision this creativity as connected to previous generations. Such connection is presented as natural, and it becomes as much. In this sense, storytelling is a great leveler among societies, one skill that all children are able to share and cultivate using their own, indigenous stories. At the same time, storytelling is dynamic; it is both a way to interpret a child’s own society and a way to communicate with and understand children from other societies.
With the arrival of mass literacy and its technological concomitants, this repository of knowledge-as-art disappears in a generation . . . unless there are efforts to preserve it. Accordingly, an array of international initiatives has been mounted, including by UNICEF. Scholars from around the world have published numerous studies showcasing specific projects and outlining their sophisticated methodologies.
When ChildsPlay International records local stories, it ensures that local people are involved and that the methods of recording and transcribing are reproducible at the local level. This involves finding and training local apprentices in skills such as film-making and instructing local teachers to pass on to students’ interest in cultural preservation. Students are encouraged to define their own relationship to oral tradition by creating works of art – paintings, puppets, masks, plays – that interpret that tradition and perpetuate it as a living practice. These works of art are also collected and exhibited, enabling the children to see the direct connection of their own creativity to that of the past.
However, it has been clear from the outset that merely recording and transcribing these stories, without including local participants in preserving them, can be an act of cultural appropriation. Community-based programs of collection and transcription are becoming the norm. The Firebird Foundation, among others, has published extensive guidelines for collectors, emphasizing that the benefits of collecting should flow both ways. The goal is to increase the community’s respect for its own culture and encourage its own efforts at preservation.
This linkage among generations, at the shared level of creativity, is what distinguishes the methodology of ChildsPlay. Children are given tools – and the impetus – to envision their creativity as connected to previous generations. Such connection is presented as natural, and it becomes as much. The idea is to help indigenous children become self-sufficient in story-telling, a skill that children in developed societies take for granted. In this sense, story-telling is a great leveler among societies, one skill that all children are able to share and to cultivate using their own, indigenous stories. At the same time, storytelling is dynamic: it is both a way to interpret a child’s own society, and a way to communicate with and understand children from other societies.
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