Skip to main content

SHARE YOUR STORY

As I grew up, I listened to my grandparents, great aunts and uncles and my parents spin stories of “the good old days.”  
“Great Grandpa did this…,” my grandma would begin.  
“Oh yea,” My great aunt would reply, “Well, Aunt Beatrice did that…” 
As I sat and listened, my imagination ran wild with pictures, some of which were actually based on places I had visited and people I had known.  I pictured younger versions of the people before me, and my mind’s video editor filled in the rest of the picture for me.
Recently I listened to a podcast about the brain and what is happening when we use language.  In the podcast, Dr. Ginger Campbell interviewed Ben Berger about his book, Louder than Words. Listening to this podcast, I took away some wonderful insight that helps me as a teacher, and it easily connects to stories and teaching. As it turns out, the excitement that helps us remember all of the stories of childhood has its basis in science and how we are made.
It seems that when you describe something to me, many different parts of my brain are built to jump on the task and help me understand what you are saying. For instance, if you share a story with many visual details, my visual cortex activates in a way similar to when I am actually looking at the thing being described. The same is true if you tell me a story full of action.  When you do this, my motor cortex fires up and works in a way much like when I am doing the actions myself.
This information is really important to me when I teach.  When I tell a story to my students, I understand that their brains do many things to engage the material, classify it and organize it.  What seems to be an intellectual process of remembering, turns out to be even more than that, and it is due to something called “embodied simulation” 
By telling a story full of visual imagery, action, and pathos, I am connecting with my students, drawing them in, and helping their minds prepare to grasp what I am teaching. If I succeed in telling the story well, I stand the opportunity of engaging my listeners kinesthetically, visually, and aurally, all at once.  This is important because each person learns differently.
More than, though, we are naturally curious beings.  We want to connect and be connected to those around us.  A story can help achieve this connection for us. It worked for the ancient Greeks with their oral tradition, and it can work for us.
So, who is your audience?  What do you have to share or teach?  How can you use a story to reach your listeners?  
If you have a story to share, please share it.
For an excerpt for the book, Louder than Words, copy this link and paste it in your web browser:
https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/language/v090/90.2.gibbs.pdf
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Caring for our Students through the Work we Assign

November 20, 2015 Caring for our Students through the Work we Assign When I was young, I worked on my grandfather’s farm from February until the harvest in the fall. One day during our lunch break, my grandfather began reminiscing about the “good old days”. Whenever grandpa told a story, we listened, partially because he didn’t tell very many stories. It also owed to the fact that his dry sense of humor usually left you laughing, if you listened well. Grandpa related a story from growing up during the Great Depression and how, to help get people back to work, certain jobs were created. One particular job that Grandpa could remember was the moving of dirt. Each morning, when Grandpa and the other men arrived on the job site, they were handed their shovels and work gloves and sent to the task of moving a pile of dirt and gravel from one side of a work site to the other. By the end of the day, if the men worked hard, the job would be complete. Then they would sign out and
Post a Comment
Read more

Maintaining the Road of Learning

I have spent my entire life living in Michigan, the Great Lakes State, the state of ever-changing   weather,  the state with two seasons (despite claims to the contrary); Winter and Road Repair... a state   loaded with metaphor potential. And in as far as this is all true, I would like to link a Michigan-related  metaphor to learning and an encouraging recent experience. One month ago, I welcomed a brand new group of foreign language students into my classroom. This group had been blessed by the energy of a very gifted and caring colleague of mine for the first three trimesters of their learning, and because of this, I knew that they had come to me well- prepared. So immediately, on the first day of class, we launched into learning...learning about each other, learning about our interests, our fears, our hopes, all of those first day activities. In a very short time; however, it became clear that this class was different from others that I had experienced in th
Post a Comment
Read more

Community in a Time of Struggle

Today I opened the first three volumes of my Great Books series from 1952 by Encyclopedia Britannica, mostly to find the word “community” in the syntopicon which makes up volumes two and three of the set. These two volumes contain over 100 major themes that frame up what is called “the great conversation”.  At first, I found myself disappointed at not finding the word community as an entry or essay topic in the syntopicon, but then I took a second look and recognized a new perspective on the matter. The specific topic of community was not granted an essay in and of itself because the entire series is about community. Every one of the topics who found their themes in the contents of these volumes, every one of the 54 volume set of books, is flooded from cover to cover with community. Whether the theme is angel or aristocracy, hypothesis or habit, liberty or law, wealth or wisdom; from Aeschylus to Freud, these volumes in their contents validate the importa
Post a Comment
Read more