Finding your story...

Life is all about stories.... telling stories, listening to stories, remembering stories, living stories... As a child our favorite times were spent at story time, and as teachers we love sharing stories with our students....

As I am working on my video module for this week's class, I am sorting through what story it is that I want to tell. I really connected to last weeks readings, especially, "Storytelling: The Film-maker as Story-teller." I found myself making a lot of connections between the article and education, all of which are helping to guide my planning with my video project. These connections are referred to as imaginative bridges, in that they are my own cognitive link between the design and experience of art, and the design and experience of education.

The article explained that a film needs to have a purpose, an answer to the question of "so what?", and a reason for the audience to even watch it. This is the purpose of the film. I found a strong link between the need for the film to have a purpose, much as a teacher needs a rationale for teaching a lesson. Kids ask all the time, "why do we need to learn this?" and a good teacher will always have an answer to that question. There must always be a reason for every task, lesson, assignment, or activity. If not, participation and motivation are completely lost, just as attention is lost in a movie with no real purpose.

I quote the article, "This is the most important element in a good story, whether it's a film, or it's told orally, or written in a book, whether it's a happy emotion, or a violent emotion-- or whether it's sad or funny, it has to have an emotional punch-line." I really liked this quote, and found an important imaginative bridge here, because it backs up my strong philosophy of relating lessons to students' own lives and constantly making connections between the lesson and the real world. This makes learning meaningful and keeps students engaged. When I think about my favorite films, I can relate them to my own life someway, and when I think about the things I learned best in school, was when I could relate to it.

In planning for my video module, I am strongly taking in the advice that, a story does not always need to start and flow in chronological order. In fact, many great stories, start somewhere in the middle, and keep our engagement trying to figure out what happened in the beginning to create this event. The story should begin where it will spark the interest and hook the audience. We tell student's this all the time when they are writing stories, to find an attention grabber. As teachers when teaching a lesson, we could also keep this idea in mind, to begin a lesson where it is most likely to grab interest, and go from there.

To wrap this up, I want to end with this objective taken from the article:

To have a person really experience something- the sooner the audience experiences the story and REALLY feels something, the better the story is.

I end there because this is my written goal for my video module. I also end with it because I can again relate it back to education, if you replace the word "story" with "LEARNING", and that is my goal as a teacher.