Storytelling Starters ~ Advocacy
With the new school year in England and Wales on the verge of beginning, it was heartening to read Philip Pullman talking about fairytales in a Guardian newspaper interview last weekend.
Grimm Tales for Young and Old comes out in paperback from Penguin Classics on 5 September. It’s Pullman’s retelling of 50 of the Brothers Grimm stories. The Guardian interview was occasioned by the forthcoming publication and the best thing about it for me was that Pullman not only encourages the reading of such stories with children – indeed, he thinks it is vital. He is a terrific advocate of telling them too.
Oral storytelling needs this kind of advocacy. The telling of stories is not a new piece of technology that would inevitably get huge publicity and become desired as the next have-to-get thing. It’s been there over all the centuries of human development. But, sad to say, its enormous and magical power is currently receiving insufficient recognition in the educational world. For anyone who employs it with children – as Pullman himself used to do when he was a Middle School teacher in Oxford – its positive effects quickly become apparent.
Children have an enormous sense of fair play and, according to Pullman, this is the central reason for the appeal of the fairytale to them. Fairytales see that justice gets done. Besides, fairytales have a direct no-nonsense approach to story: there’s never any hanging about, action and event are all-important. This, too, makes them appealing to children. But that’s not the end of the potential of the fairytale for them.
When Philip Pullman was training teachers at Westminster College, Oxford ( where in years gone by I used to give storytelling workshops) he would encourage students to ‘get a few stories into their heads well enough to tell them to a class without referring to the book.’ His Guardian interview attests to the effect on children of doing this: they attend to stories that are told and, years hence, will remember being told them.
Parents would also do well, says Pullman, to take on board the power of oral storytelling to gain and keep attention. He suggests that parents, like teachers, get some stories tucked into their heads for telling.
Hear, hear! Storytelling in no way replaces reading. But it can go along beside it. It has powerful educational and social effects.
So that’s the message – oral storytelling has enormous power – and it’s a message that all storytellers who go into schools would wish to put across to staff as well as to children. At the beginning of the new school year, the message is particularly well worth thinking about. May it be heard loud and clear throughout the educational world.
P.S. My photos this week are of two fairytale figures that appeared one day on the sea wall at Abereiddi beach in North Pembs. The figures were cleverly composed of stones. They looked like magical creatures. Alas, they are no longer there.