Storytelling Starters ~ Engaging
It’s arrived. Storytelling for a Greener World is an important new book about how to engage people in our natural environment through stories and storytelling. The official launch date is April 11th and the foreword is by Jonathon Porritt of Friends of the Earth. The inspiration came from Alida Gersie and a wide range of storytellers provide the contents. The essay I feel privileged to have contributed is on the effects on teachers and children of working with a Pembrokeshire legend about the Preseli hills.
Storytelling for a Greener World is meticulously designed to provide a really helpful, inspiring resource. For details for buying it, see below.
My key word:
The key word for me is engagement. I increasingly realise it’s why I do what I do. Again on Wednesday, I felt its impact when spending the day at St Stephen’s Primary School in Shepherds Bush. The children remembered. They remembered me, they remembered my stories. I’d been there last year in their Arts Week. I’d gone there again a few weeks ago on their special day for celebrating stories. Now on Wednesday, their wish to let me know that they remembered came out strongly in all the groups, none of them more than the youngest. The little red monkey, Matty Treweller, Nokomis of the great rain … characters and themes from stories they’d previously heard from me were called out with great joy as each session began. It felt like the children were keen for me to realise that we’d already established a common bond through participating together in the world of story.
Where there’s been one story, there’s always another. On Wednesday, the ones I chose were not especially focussed on the natural world as a theme. Yet in some way or another, all were about engaging with it. A fly who forgets what he’s called; the daffodil wood that materialises beyond a secret door in the hillside; the finding and losing of a precious object; the fear an evil drum represents and the love of a rescuing mother – for me, coming away at the end of the day, I felt that, throughout, I’d been working to bring about a kind of active awareness, a mindfulness of what is inside and outside ourselves.
Leaving after a day’s storytelling, there’s always something else as well. It’s the hope that something of the experience sticks with the children thereafter. It certainly happened like that for me. Two experiences from when I was in Primary School – and they’re pretty much all I remember from then – have stuck with me ever since, as fresh and vigorous as the rhubarb now growing in my garden (see my photo!). One was the bus trip we made one day around important sights of Pembrokeshire, natural and historical. We’d been preparing for it for weeks and it made me fall in love with the place of my birth. The other was the visit of an African student teacher. This aroused in me a lifelong love of Africa and the wider world.
What you do with children is important. It can feed them for life. Storytelling for a Greener World offers a vital resource.
Storytelling for a Greener World is published by Hawthorn Press: www.hawthornpress.com. It’s in their Storytelling Series. The price on Amazon is £17.90.
Tags: Alida Gersie, engagement, Jonathon Porritt, Pembrokeshire, St Stephens Primary School, Storytelling for a Greener World