What I´m Doing Now - Listening to Stortyellers

What I´m Doing Now, originally uploaded by CTJOnline.

http://voicethread.com/share/223202/

"Stories have the felicitous capacity of capturing exactly those elements that formal decision methods leave out. Logic tries do generalize, to strip the decision making form the specific context, to remove it from subjective emotions. Stories capture the context, capture the emotions...Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package, information, knowledge, context, and emotion."
Don Norman

I just finished reading to all of our fantastic storytellers-educators. Evânia, Márcia Sawaya, Moacyr, Beckye, Kamyla, each one bringing a different perspective to what it means to be an educator. The interesting thing is that most of those educators, instead of talking about themselves, mainly talked about their students and learning, which means that they have the true spirit of lifelonglearners, generous souls who are inspired by their learners. Every story represents bits of our lives worth being told. The richness storytelling brings to the classroom is incredibly powerful, and I do hope many of us get inspired by them.

Telling a Story, Developing Multiliteracies

I just got this video via Twitter (a microblogging site) from a dear friend, Ana Maria Menezes, a mineirinha, who has a bag full of tricks to share.




The story is simple, but then, I just realized that it is a wonderful springboard to explore language. Imagine a group activity, or even a collaborative project with sister classes in which they have the same claymation and learners are responsible for creating the stories to go with the animation. They could even record the stories.

How motivating would that be? Is it the kind of experiential learning we could add more frequently to our lesson plans? Do you have any other ideas to go with this video? Or do you have any other video that could be used for the same idea?

Originally posted on Thursday, October 2, 2008