Stories of telling, telling stories: teachers negotiating the role of storyteller
Julie Faulkner, Monash University
Jane Kirkby, Monash University
Abstract
This paper explores our work as teacher educators and researchers in a multicultural school in Melbourne,
Australia, where we had initially sought to examine and reclaim the role of storytelling in primary school
English curriculum. We aimed to enhance children’s literacy practices through their listening to and
participating in oral storytelling, prompted by a storyteller invited to the school. In the process of our work on
this project, the focus shifted from the interactions between the invited storyteller and the students, to the
classroom teachers’ personal practical knowledge (Clandinin, 1992), and how this impacted on their adoption
of storytelling practices in the classroom. Data gathered through audio recorded professional conversations,
interviews and field notes gave rise to crafted paired narratives (Connelly & Clandinin, 1996). These narratives
suggest that integral to extended communicative practices in the classroom lies teacher confidence in assuming
the storytelling role. This paper reflexively explores the ways that the teachers in this school engaged in small
dialogic group learning (comprising the teachers and ourselves), enabling dynamic classroom storytelling
partnerships.
Storytelling is an oral art form where a teller performs a story with a live audience. In this
understanding there is no book present to separate the relationship between the teller and the
listener. The storyteller holds the story in her mind and uses words and gestures to bring the story
alive before the listeners. (Phillips, 2013: i)
Phillips’ conceptualisation of storytelling above highlights the centrality of the relationship in the storytelling
process. Our study – embedding storytelling in lower primary classrooms – began with the relationship
between the oral narrative and the children. As the project continued, however, it became the relationship
between the professional storyteller and the teachers, and the dialogue among the teachers themselves that
emerged as significant. In this paper, we explore the shifting dynamics present when we invited teachers to
adopt different kinds of classroom identities in order for the children to engage fully in the storytelling. These
new identities were not necessarily comfortable roles for the teachers, as they revealed during the curriculum
implementation.
Why tell stories?
Over the past decades globally, shifts in English curriculum concerns have seen considerable variance in the
place of oral language in classrooms (MacIntyre & Jones, 2013). Some might argue that anything oral has
always been undervalued in schools (Alexander, 2012; Carter, 2002; Wilkinson, 1965), and the surge of
technology has added to the tensions teachers feel meeting the burgeoning range of curriculum demands. .
Rapid changes wrought by digital technologies and high stakes testing regimes are two identifiable factors in
the movement of classroom priorities. Within this changing landscape, we argue that reclaiming oral initiatives
such as storytelling contributes in significant ways to children’s literacy skills and knowledge. We do not wish
to suggest storytelling has disappeared; research confirms that iterations of storytelling continue in the US
(Sobol, 2010), the UK (Bignell, 2012; Brady & Millard, 2012; Coskie, Trudel, & Vohs, 2010), and here in Australia
(Leahy, 2013). However, many teachers feel challenged by including storytelling in the literacy programs,
especially as students move through the school.
Oral storytelling has a less defined place in formal schooling than in early childhood education. While oral
narrative is recognised as an important factor of early literacy development, the temptation is to reduce oral
narrative as children become increasingly proficient with the written word (Dawkins & O’Neill, 2011). Digital
storytelling has recently been a fashionable way to represent narratives through new media, particularly with
older students, and traditional oral storytelling seems to be slipping quietly out of many teachers’ repertoires
if, indeed, it ever was integral. Narratives have long been recognised as central to our human experience.
Barbara Hardy in Margaret Meek’s collection of essays in The Cool Web (1978) described narrative as a
‘primary act of the mind’ (p. 12). We want to argue for the revitalisation of oral curriculum in the form of
storytelling.
Traditional storytelling draws upon familiar and strange forms: fables, folk tales, riddles, fairy stories, myth,
conundrums, and is performed, not read aloud). Told well, stories immerse younger and old listeners in rich
social, cultural, historical and anthropological content, shaped to engross and encourage wonderment in their
listeners. Children, as storytellers, ‘become aware of how an audience affects a telling, and they carry that
awareness into their writing’ (National Council of Teachers of English, 1992, p. 2).
An important question, then, is how this experience connects to ever-increasingly accountable descriptions of
learning and assessment. Empathy is a core element of English, particularly as embedded within the literature
strand of the Australian Curriculum (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], n.d.)
and storytelling provides a link to this element. Traditional storytelling ranges across cultures and witnesses
ways that different cultures represent human experience. Through rich narratives, students are offered access
to understanding themselves and their world. Storytelling, through revealing connections between people
across social, cultural, temporal and geographic divides (Australian Association for the Teaching of English,
2009).
In addition to deeper cultural understanding, storytelling can use its empathic power to raise significant moral
dilemmas, thus challenging listener perspectives and inviting ethical debate. It can engage children
approachably with issues around ethnicity, class and gender. Carefully guided discussions on the part of the
teacher would tease out the tensions and promote extended awareness and respect. Not least, telling stories
is importantly also a generative mode for developing speaker confidence.
Above all, we argue, storytelling can be magical and fun. As a creative form, stories value the power of the
imagination to enrich life. They can be ritualised forms of pleasure or spontaneous and playful; they can be
carefully crafted or improvised and messy. In whatever shape or form, they should be part of children’s
growing experience of the world. Storytelling provides opportunities for vicarious experience of other lives,
places and times, as well as greater understanding of the human condition, and increased appreciation of
spoken language.
The role of the teacher in storytelling
However, to enable direct oral communication in all these ways, the role of the teacher is crucial. In the 1920s,
teachers were in fact directed away from oral telling to reading stories from books, thus mitigating the
perceived limited personal vocabularies of the teachers (Wilkinson, 1965). While this arguably represented a
reductive approach to oral pedagogies, research has continued to explore the relationship between social
contexts and language use. Bernstein (1971) identified the concept of elaborated and restricted codes of
language, linking cultural factors to the ways in which people use language to see their worlds. We now accept
Bernstein’s work as foundational to our understanding of how students come to know, inside and outside of
classrooms. The implication for teachers lies in ways in which we can enrich opportunities for learners to hear
and use language which extends the discourses used at home.
As we have argued, the ever expanding curriculum, driven increasingly by an ‘audit culture’ (Connell, 2009, p.
217), generally leads primary years teachers to forsake oral narrative texts. Pressure builds for teachers to use
technology to engage and further student learning, and the role of oral storyteller becomes increasingly
remote. As there is little available in policy documentation or formal professional learning programs, we were
interested to discover how teachers took on the storyteller role, and what resources they drew upon or
required to feel assured as tellers of tales.
Storytelling and the curriculum
Early childhood educators, such as Paley (1990), have guided the development of ‘storytelling curriculum’,
which impacts positively on psychosocial development. Storytelling curriculum has also been shown to
improve vocabulary usage, complexity of sentence structure and understanding of semantics (Cooper, Capo,
Mathes, & Gray, 2007). Educators working with pre-school children might transcribe a child’s story as it is
orally composed. Howell (2011) outlines her study in which scribes recorded stories that primary children
composed orally. In studies such as this, however, the focus is on creating the written text, rather than using
the spoken words to bring an audience into the ‘hear and now’ of the story experience. Storytelling practices,
as defined by Phillips, are quite particular in their reliance on the potency of the spoken word to engage and
give flight to the imagination. Isbell, Sobol, Lindauer and Lowrance’s (2004) work with pre-school children is
more in keeping with Phillips’ definition of storytelling. Their research found that children’s understanding of
narrative structure improved when they are told stories, rather than when listening to stories being read.
This qualitatively different experience of reading and telling is recognised in Waldorf practices where teachers
are encouraged to engage children in storytelling experiences as both listeners and tellers (Steiner Education
Australia, 2011). Ball (2013) also notes this difference, turning to the Waldorf practices to inform her
storytelling in a Montessori setting. She used a storytelling basket to support development of both her own
and her students’ repertoire for oral storytelling. However, in Australia, storytelling generally remains on the
fringe of school-based literacy learning. All too frequently it is reduced, to watching a visiting storyteller for a
special event on the school’s yearly calendar. By contrast, the literature argues that children as storytellers are
presented with opportunities to see themselves as creators of stories. They are charged with engaging an
audience through the use of voice, gesture, evocative language and imagination.
In Australia, early childhood education policy covers birth to 8 years of age, and aims to foster practices that
will support the transition to formal school settings. Our focus on Prep - Year 2 was in response to the limited
use of storytelling when children shift from the less structured preschool setting to school environments. The
challenge for teachers is to build on the work around storytelling, which is more evident in preschools (see
Stevens, Raban, & Nolan, 2014). The shift into more structured literacy sessions necessitates identifying how
teachers can use this approach. Moreover, we wondered if we could extend children’s awareness of creative
and critical thinking through narratives. Awareness of these dimensions led to our overarching research
question: “How can teachers in Foundation - Year 2 classrooms use oral storytelling to build children’s literacy?”
However, such a question assumes an unproblematic willingness on the part of teachers to embrace
storytelling as pedagogy. This study thus moved back a step and asked what teachers need to know, feel and
do in order to effectively adopt the storyteller role.
The study
The study arose from a project conducted with a Department of Education and Early Childhood Development
(DEECD) primary school in the metropolitan region of Melbourne, Victoria. The school had participated the
previous year in some storytelling workshops with a consultant storyteller, Julie Perrin, building on the school’s
identification of the value of oral language development as part of the literacy program. Julie had worked in
the classrooms of two of the three teachers (Sue and Fiona). The experiences, however, had not translated
into ongoing practice. An aim of the project now became how teachers could more confidently take on the
‘storytelling mantel’.
Context and research design
The school is culturally diverse, and the idea of connecting storytelling to writing, drawing and reading
emerged as an investigation of how community could be built and oral language strengthened. Moreover, the
study investigated how to effectively bridge home literacies and the formal aspects of student learning, in
particular, reading and writing. However, all these aims were contingent upon the teacher’s capacity to take
up the storyteller identity.
The school already had a strong oral language program that used the notion of student inquiry through an
investigative play-based curriculum, as a means to develop students’ oral language and sense of wonder about
the world.
Across a period of six weeks, spanning the end of Term One and the beginning of Term Two, three teachers
participating in the professional development project engaged in peer observations and several professional
conversations with Julie Perrin (the storyteller) to question and strengthen their own storytelling practices.
Further, they shared personal reflections during a one-to-one reflective discussion with a university partner
(serving as critical friend). These conversations, as well as three professional conversations between the
teachers and the storyteller were audio-recorded, transcribed and analysed for emerging themes. Our
research story developed with recognition that we needed to begin with building teacher confidence,
knowledge and understanding of the art of storytelling.
Stories of Telling: Telling stories
The project gave rise to two stories reflecting the development of personal practice knowledge and that
knowledge in context (Clandinin & Connelly, 1998). Stories of Telling are the stories the teachers told of how
they built confidence to introduce storytelling as a literacy pedagogy into their early years classrooms. A
second, less evident story also began to take shape and this we have called ‘Telling stories”. It suggests that
external factors of curriculum regulation, and proscriptive approaches to literacy teaching and learning in the
early years might make teachers hesitant to introduce ‘fringe’ practices such as oral storytelling. The
interactions between the academic partner, the storyteller and the three teachers raised questions about the
nature of professional learning and the impact of outcomes-based learning (Doecke & Parr, 2009).
Findings - Stories of Telling
Although two of the teachers involved had participated in some storytelling professional development in the
previous year, they all identified that they would like further support in building their ability to select, practise
and tell stories. This uncertainty of teachers in relation to storytelling has been reported in literature (Mottley,
& Telfer, as cited in Miller, & Pennycuff, 2008) and became a significant part of the research design and
approach.
During the feedback sessions, Fiona reflected on the challenge she felt in moving into the storyteller role in her
classroom. Although she had seen Julie in action in her classroom as a visiting specialist the previous year, she
did not readily adopt the approach. She considered what had shifted for her:
I guess I didn’t follow through with it after that term. I didn’t think it was something that I could have
done. I guess just knowing that it was okay. Like that was part of literacy.
This led us to question further in relation to what teachers felt they needed in order to grow as self-assured
storytellers.
Taking on the mantel
Although teachers coming from a theatre background have recognised the link, research on the performative
aspects of classroom remains underdeveloped. R. W. Hanning (1984) links performance to preservice teacher
education when he argues in The Classroom As The Theater Of Self: Some Observations For Beginning Teachers:
[y]ou don’t have a self to be when you start out as a teacher; that is, you don’t have a teacher-self.
You have to develop one, and you do that by acting a part, by performing a role tailored to the needs
of the classroom, by responding to the classroom as you would a theatre (p. 33).
Ozmen’s (2010) research (also with preservice teachers) recognises teaching as a performing art, significant in
identity construction. Understanding characterisation techniques body language, the role of voice, sensory
awareness and so on created “…a significant development in [the] communication skills and professional
identities” of the participants (p. 36).
The role of the storyteller and the relationship of the storyteller to the listeners emerged as one of the key
characteristics of our study. How the teacher might build and sustain effective literacy practices through
storytelling began with the confidence and efficacy of the storyteller persona. The participants needed to
discover and define, through a number of processes, ways in which this role differed from that of the teacher.
Defining ‘the storyteller’ was one element in this process. Rebecca and Dayle raise the distinction:
Rebecca: And it’s trying to do it in a storytelling way, not a teacher way.
Dayle: That invitational way rather than …
Julie and Rebecca (overlapping): Yeah
Julie: And – given that they have heard it a number of times, in a way, you almost, it’s a different
relationship to story.
Scene setting
First, the classroom storytelling space needed to be transformed, as the storyteller (Julie Perrin) put it, “from
the ordinary to the fabulous.” Spatially, this was achieved through allocating a corner of the room to
storytelling, to create a “ritual space”, and marking the area with a “beautiful cloth”. It created “a sense in
which you invited the children to come over from this teaching space to enter that [new] space.” The
storyteller sits behind the cloth, which creates a special boundary. Moreover, she does not sit on the floor as
she normally would with early primary-aged children:
Julie: … they read that sort of gesture and I thought, Ah, the conductor’s really at work here …
Dayle: Yes. I think that she’s on a chair helps too.
Julie: Yes
Dayle: Because you’ve got that space between.
A small number of props are used as visual complements to further set the scene, for example: a basket, a bell,
a candle extinguished at the end of the story.
Creating the persona
Aurally, the voice is used with expression and added to gesture to create a further compelling invitation into
the storytelling world. Rachel claims
I am quite a loud person – I purposely change my tone and really drop it to be quite soft ... and really
use the expression on my face just to change – just to set – just, you know, to set the scene. To take
on the mantel ….
She further notes the importance of using particular linguistic cues to begin a story. Thus, the presence of the
storyteller was signified in a number of verbal and non-verbal ways, as summarised by Julie Perrin:
You’re telling with absolute beautiful aplomb and expression. You’ve all got great facial expression,
beautiful clear gestures, lovely vocal contrast … you probably need to know that, like most humans,
we need to inhabit, we need to kind of stretch between what we naturally do and what we have to
take ourselves to.
These forms of “honouring the role of the storyteller”, as Julie puts it, are iteratively signalled through vocal
cues (whispering, repeating a phrase and chanting), prompts (hand gestures, pictures) and gestures, such as
rounding off for bread, squaring off for butter and shaping a beehive for honey. Julie explains it thus:
you hang up this banner, play this instrument, you say these words, and they’re all part of helping
them cross the threshold of what this … [what] Margret Read MacDonald calls ‘the threshold between
the ordinary and the fabulous’.
Storytelling features, like voice modulation, chanting, rhyme, rhythm and pacing, further enable novice
storytellers to move from the teacher to a storyteller role, while cueing and engaging young listeners. Julie, as
professional storyteller, effectively coaches the teachers as they try out the complexities of their role:
Julie: And – one thing I was concerned about when you stated the story – because your voice is very
soft, I thought, are we getting enough contrast here?
Sam: Mmm.
Julie And the first time you did a gesture of coming up the hill. It was still very … in that soft voice
mode …
Sam: Oh yeah. Yep.
Strategies employed to practise stories, such as ‘passing a story’ and ‘stepping stones’ were also used as
explicit approaches to building narrative assurance (Kirkby, Faulkner, & Perrin, 2014). Once aware of these
strategies, the teachers used them to practise their own storytelling, and introduced them to their young
students to encourage them to expand their own telling and re-telling of stories. Rachel, Fiona and Sue shared
examples of how these strategies had been adapted in the classroom. Fiona was first to ‘pass the story’ in her
class and allowed her students to pass with their eyes or add to the story as they felt comfortable. Rachel
found that stepping stones worked effectively in her classroom. She commented
And I first demonstrated how I would step to tell part of a story and then they came up and joined in
and did it form start to finish. Even one of my students said “Oh, you don’t have six pictures like our
storyboard, there’s only five story cards.”
Rachel highlighted the increased complexity of one student’s retelling, linking this to his improved capacity to
create the ‘steps’ in a picture sequence. Sam recalled how some of her students were elaborating on the
pictures and using gesture and pace as their understanding of how to tell a story increased.
Respect for the storyteller is counterbalanced by the storyteller’s relationship with the listener, articulated by
Sue as “a really important space where you respect me as a storyteller. I respect you as a listener by telling you
a good story.” The strength of the narrative content is a further element to boost narrator confidence. For Julie,
a ‘good’ story to tell is one “that has a sense of landscape, or visual journey that you can go through.” With
practice, as all these elements combine, performance and narrative skills build in the teachers. This process
was enhanced through peer support, where colleagues watched each other tell stories and discussed
responses and questions afterward. In this way, the role of the storyteller is mentored, rehearsed, naturalised
and shared.
Findings: Telling Stories
All three teachers engaged enthusiastically in the project to rethink their practice, and the dominant story was
one of positive learning and action. However, a second story, Telling Stories, emerges from an outcomesbased landscape and provides a brief insight into the tensions of aligning new practices with the prevailing
expectations of the day. Few primary teachers employ oral storytelling as a regular, embedded teaching
approach (Dawkins & O’Neill, 2011; Phillips, 2013) and the teachers in the project were certainly complete
novices in terms of this approach.
From the earliest interactions with the storyteller and the academic partner, the teachers were concerned
with how they would know if oral storytelling was worthwhile as a literacy practice. An audit of the newly
implanted Australian Curriculum demonstrates the possibilities of oral storytelling in Australian classrooms
(Kirkby, Faulkner & Perrin, 2014, p.v). However, the uncertainty of adopting storytelling practices given the
understanding of literacy teaching and learning was suggested by Fiona’s early comment when she recalled
her lack of action after the professional development session in the previous year with Julie, the storyteller.
The neoliberal climate that has impacted on education practices globally was recognisable in the need to see
changes in children’s learning quickly, even while the teachers’ own practice was developing. The emphasis on
measurable outcomes impacts on what is valued as ‘quality teaching’ (Kostogriz & Doecke, 2013) making it
difficult for teachers to explore new and unusual approaches.
The teachers had been working with Julie to learn, introduce and tell a story, a skill that can be complex and
challenging for the novice. She had been maintaining the focus on the teachers’ skills and they had yet to gain
feedback from a peer about their own storytelling. As the conversation progressed, the teachers raised the
question over how they could provide feedback to the children about their capacity to manage storytelling
patterns. The moment indicates how quickly teachers seek to justify changes at the potential expense of
reform.
Rebecca remained acutely aware of needing to defend her practices in terms of readily recognisable
connections with student progression. In another instance, very early in the professional conversations, her
comments suggested a shift in the focus from the teachers as tellers to monitoring student learning.
Rebecca: If we’re looking at that impact [of us telling stories] on children through their own stories
and their own telling and own rewriting, are there particular things we need to actually have down for
ourselves, be thinking about what we want to see?
Rebecca: How then do we see that influence [of storytelling] reflected in other areas through reading
and writing? How do we judge that? I see my students particularly making gains in how they’re
writing and drawing stories. Now is that supported by [storytelling], which I dare say it is. How much
is that or how much is it because we’re [the teachers] really focusing ourselves on that because we’re
becoming more aware that those skills impact, and taking the time to draw and talk?
Sam reflected at the end of the project that she would have liked a template for practice from the beginning so
she would know what to do with a story. This was is spite of her highly articulate recall of key moments in her
learning, which included a shift in her sense of validation as a storyteller and her increased understanding of
narrative structure. Although she recognised the growth in both her own and her students’ learning, she felt
that oral storytelling in her classroom remained threated by the need for attention to the “mechanics of
literacy”.
While the school setting provided a safe and nurturing place for the teachers to inquire into their practice,
expectations of accountability against readily discernible learning outcomes were a constant part of the
landscape.
Conclusion
Our study strongly suggests that storytelling can impact favourably on oral, as well as written and visual
capacities in young learners. However, teachers themselves need to access resources and draw from a range
of strategies to enact and project the role of storyteller convincingly. The relationship between storyteller and
listener is multidimensional and requires modelling, defining, exploration and rehearsal to develop. Our
findings suggest that this kind of complexity is not easily achieved in a highly regulated school environment.
Telling stories is not an ad hoc process, as the teachers in the study have revealed. We argue that the
individual and collaborative effort required constitutes a valued, if sometimes difficult to access, form of
teacher practitioner inquiry. Learning to tell stories well is as important as learning to actively listen, engage
and interpret; key features of dialogic communities and effective professional learning.
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