The Power of Story Telling
While waiting for a jazz class that wasn’t going to happen, my ten year old daughter and her friend start knocking on the door.
“They bang and cry, let me in! I am the big bad wolf!”
It must be over half her lifetime since she has heard the story The Three Little Pigs and yet, knocking forcefully on the door recreates the big bad wolf image for her.
I started to pay more attention.
She is reading Harry Potter now and concerned about the world turning in on itself, translating Hogwarts reality to her own daily encounters at school.
Her friend finished Hunger Games and bought a bow and arrow set.
Children seem less self conscious in appropriating fictions and alternative realities. That is why story telling in the classroom works so well.
Story telling is the way in which we define ourselves. We tell our own personal story and appropriate narrative forms. We are characters writing plots in different settings presented daily. We can borrow ideas, thoughts, and events to understand and define the world around us.
It is our human condition to identify with others; fictional others, famous others, and the other within ourselves. The other we observe and recreate every time we tell a story.
We share, compare, achieve, rethink, experiment.
