Importance of Storytelling

What you are trying to do with your OER is to create the best possible story for your subject matter at hand, and in doing so to shape the legacy of your discipline and what you leave behind. As you’re seeing here, storytelling comes into play as an important tool when creating or adapting an OER.

When we think of how this applies to the classroom, learning the stories of your students, as well as sharing your own, is an invaluable practice. We are all complex humans with different lived experiences that influence how we view and navigate the world. Take the time to learn and appreciate the stories of each of your students – as Richard Wagamese notes, when “we take the time to share those stories with each other, we get bigger inside, we see each other, we recognize our kinship – we change the world, “When we take the time to share those stories with each other, we get bigger inside, we see each other, we recognize our kinship – we change the world, one story at a time.”one story at a time.”

This practice of getting to know your students may seem like an obvious one, but think back to how you get to know the people around you. Are you taking the time to make connections with people’s stories and how they move about the world? What values do they hold and how might they be similar or different to yours – and in what ways might they clash or work well together? It’s important to remember that the goal of this is not for any one story to dominate the narrative, rather, the stories come together to tell a much larger story of your classroom, your workplace, your community. You can learn how the people around you (colleagues, students, community members, even friends and family!) like to learn, ways they prefer receiving feedback, best ways to communicate with them, how they got to where they are now. These simple prompts allow us to delve deeper into people’s stories while also allowing them the autonomy of how far in depth they want to share.