"Developing Imagination, Creativity and Literacy through Collaborative Storymaking: A Way of Knowing"

"Developing Imagination, Creativity and Literacy through Collaborative Storymaking: A Way of Knowing"
King, Nancy. Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 77, No. 2. (Summer 2007). 204-227.

In her article, "Developing Imagination, Creativity, and Literacy through Collaborative Storymaking: A Way of Knowing," Nancy King introduces herself as a teacher and a trickster, a storyteller who engages students and sparks their hearts and thinking through collaborative storymaking. Referencing and focusing on her own experience, she recounts how she has developed and used storymaking in her work with adults, children, and youth. King maintains that, by participating in collaborative storymaking, students expand and improve their oral and written expression. She draws on 50 plus years of storytelling in mental hospitals, camps, prisons, and language and literacy programs to support her claim that collaborative storytelling is a powerful method for helping students connect with their learning. Storytelling offers students the opportunity to communicate their lives, their experiences, and how they make sense of the world. King also emphasizes the power of story and collaboration to create a supportive learning community. Here, people can contemplate, share, enrich, and expand their thinking about different issues, themes, ideas, and points of view.

The article focuses primarily on King's collaborative storymaking sessions with students of all ages. Storymaking classes open with the reading of a traditional folktale. Following the reading, King typically gives participants one minute each to create an abstract image in clay or paint a telling moment, an idea, or possible character in the story. Making an abstract image in such a brief period of time shortcuts the student's ability to self-censor or plan. Students write down words that came to mind as they formed their images and share those images and words with the class. King then poses one of a variety of prompts to encourage students to write more deeply about their images and thoughts. When a student shares work with the larger group, others are to ask "non-critical questions" that will deepen the presenter’s thinking. King proposes this manner of questioning en lieu of a traditional critique which she believes can demoralize students. Having written down their classmates’ questions, the students revise their work. To describe revising King talks of how she gives her drafts to friends for feedback and questions.

In her work with teachers and some older students King has found that while adults have not lost their “inborn capacity to create,” they may have lost the ability to access it. To regain this access, older students need to let go of personal, social and cultural shibboleths, and learn to separate the making of a story from the evaluation of early efforts: a process encouraged by strategies like time limited sessions with clay and paint.

Evaluation: This article's strength lies in the lively accounts of collaborative storymaking sessions with groups ranging from elementary children to college students and teachers. An appendix offers five concrete examples of storymaking lesson plans designed for different purposes. While the article offers no references to educational theory other than King’s own, the author is an experienced teacher who tells a good story. She provides the reader with amply information and guidelines for employing storymaking sessions with high school and college level students.