Why I Tell Stories
. . . horrible teacher. Instead of explaining the material needed for the test, he tells stories of his geological adventures that pertain to absolutely nothing on the tests. I’ve heard stories about his daughters, mother, father, sister, and uncle; however, I have actually learned very little about geology.
Reading a student review that trashes me as a teacher, such as the one above from RateYourProfessor.com, sticks with me far longer than a positive review. In fact, most teachers I know react to the negative reviews, not the positive. We argue that they are unfair, that the student is vindictive, that the students don’t meet us halfway, that they are lazy, etc. But our attempts to rationalize them away at best numb a bit of the pain but do not remove the knife that has been stuck into us.
A better response is to keep the knife out of the classroom.
I’ve made my living as a science teacher for more than 25 years. I’ve supervised graduate theses and undergraduate research, pub-lished scientific articles, and given numerous presentations. But two years ago, I decided to hire a writing coach, a young adjunct with an MFA. The first thing I learned was how different the training is for a writer versus a literature professor, much less a scientist. As an undergrad, I was an English major until soon after my father died my sophomore year. I love Steinbeck, Doestoevsky, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. My younger daughter’s middle name is Dora, for the madame who ran the whorehouse on Cannery Row. I love including stories as part of my courses. In fact, Niles Eldredge, a well-known paleontologist, has said,
Our narratives—our stories—should give kids a sense of the intellectual (and sometimes derring-do!) adventures of actually doing science. If we let storytelling like this into the science curriculum, we instantly humanize science, make it relevant to the random child, and au-tomatically make it seem more inviting, less hard. We can do this without watering down scientific rigor, with its canons of evidence that are justly the hallmark of scientific research, innovation, and progress.
Do you see a conflict? Eldredge advocates stories of “adventures of actually doing science” and my student reviewer condemns my “stories of geological adventures.” Can you imagine Eldgredge in my classroom?
“I’m pleased to introduce our speaker for today, Niles Eldredge, internationally known paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History.”
“Thanks for inviting me. Geology changed my life. I started college as a Latin major but switched majors when I took my first geology course. Geology is a grand story of the Earth.”
“Clearly, this won’t be on the test. I think I’ll get up to go to the bathroom and not come back,” thinks the student.
An opportunity lost. Or perhaps Eldredge would have a great way of breaking through to the student, to make the value of stories apparent.
Eldredge’s specialty is evolution, and humans have evolved as story tellers—our oral abilities seem genetic, unlike our writing abilities. Stories have survival benefit—increasing group unity, providing purpose and motivations, and giving a group a sense of identity, of being special even to the point of self-sacrifice for the good of others.
Storytelling in science is a bit trickier. Scientists tend to be skeptical of stories, wanting to see the data and make their own interpretations. To them, stories are sales-pitches, propaganda, or pure entertainment. And to students, stories are often old guys wasting time reliving their glory days. In other words, a waste of time—not on the test.
However, storytelling is not without parallels to recent emphasis in science teaching upon “doing science.” The problem with spending lots of time gathering data and working through other parts of the scientific method is that students often fail to make the connections to broad concepts, similar to my students problem with storytelling. Like many Ph.D. candidates, students learn quite a bit about very little.
So what is the solution? Focused repetition with variation. The repetition takes the form of a spiral, coming back to a topic but at a higher level. Each time, we hook ideas into the previous experience and basic concepts. The form this takes when using storytelling in science is something like this:
1. Tell an abbreviated version of the story.
2. Provide students with a written version that is more complete, including key concepts and definitions.
3. Do an activity that utilizes the concepts to solve a real-world problem.
4. Have the students write their own story.
To improve my own abilities, last January, I joined with a the-ater professor to team-teach a course on Storytelling in Science. I also did a one-class test-run of the concept at a nearby semi-nary after Pope Francis released his encyclical on the environment. The task I gave the students was to develop a story from their own experiences about climate change that they could use in their home churches. I was blown away by their creativity. Seminary students. Writing stories about their personal experiences with climate change. Wow.