By Swati Roy
When I think of stories, I think of my grandfather who would surround himself with us, four-five cousins, during the dark evenings adorned with only the dimly lit lanterns on the veranda in our village and would tell us a story, while sipping his cup of tea. When I think of stories, I think of my grandmother (maternal) who would put me to sleep with a story acting as a lullaby also inducing airflow with a hand fan. Interestingly, her stories were from Hindi children’s books and magazines and while she hadn’t gone to school, her interest in stories – from religious texts like Ramayana to books with songs in the our mother tongue – got her to reading. Needless to say, we benefited. When I think of stories, I also think of my history teacher in grade 12 who taught Indian history not by referring to the books, but by telling us the story of India. So when we were covering the History of South India, she asked us what do we know of South India, and while the students said “Tipu Sultan”, “The Chola Empire”, “The Pallava Dynasty” and squeezed out whatever names we could remember from whatever little knowledge we had been able to store in our mind, she smiled and said, “well that’s all alright, but South India is also about yummy idlis and dosa! And beautiful silk sarees” That’s how she captured our imagination.
When I think of stories, I think of my three-year-old daughter telling us stories – a lovely mix of a number of stories she hears from her grandparents, teachers, from her father and from me. “Once there was a jungle where there was an elephant that sat on a lion and a brave little girl fought and shoed them away…” and so goes her stories… When I am reading out a story to my daughter, more often than not it seems that she is not paying attention (she keeps fiddling with a toy, rolling about the bed, interrupting with her queries or even random suggestions) but the next time she sees that book, she recalls the words I said that’s familiar to her and also the actions I described. And since that’s a story only the two of us have shared, we quite clearly bond over it. I never force her to sit for a reading time, it never works.
So when I think of stories, what I also think of are the memories they help create, the bonds they help develop and the imaginations they help ignite. While I may not remember what exactly the stories were always, but I will remember the warm comfortable ambience storytellers create that make the children truly listen to what’s being said.
The age-old tradition of telling stories is widely being revived and promoted in this age of digital world as a great teaching-learning tool, a tool for counselling and a tool for passing on ones culture to the next generation – stories are a great way of introducing children to their mother tongue, to the folk tales that speak of one’s culture and tradition and even to introduce children to a new language. They are a great source of inculcating values in children as all children would want to be like the protagonists – the hero or the heroine of the story. Storytelling today is widely being promoted as an alternative to the screen-time children have with ipads and mobiles as a healthy habit. They are a great way to calm down an upset child. Parents are always coming up with stories – big and small – to get their way with their kids. But amidst all these technicalities that have come to be associated with stories – what needs to be remembered is that story-time should be fun time for children. If they do not enjoy that time, stories will not work at all as the new-age pedagogy that it is being sought as. Stories work not as a formulae or a trick but it really is a heart-to-heart conversation and for every storyteller – be it a parent or a teacher — they have to believe in the stories they tell to children, just as children do when they tell their stories.
So why tell stories. For me, stories should be read and told just for the sake of enjoying them and to have a good conversation, to begin with. As far as using storytelling as pedagogy is concerned, that’s fairly important, but it automatically follows and in fact we won’t even need to put in much effort to develop it as a tool for development and growth if our first objective is met.
Swati Roy is a Delhi-based journalist with eight years of experience in media houses like The Times of India, Delhi and EducationWorld. To know more about her, you can visit her at www.swatiroy.worpress.com.
