There are many Benefits of Storytelling To borrow the words of American literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall: man is the storytelling animal, and he always has been. Over the course of our history, the stories that have been told and the means of telling them have changed as much as we have. Today, in our world of 2015, stories and the art of storytelling have become more important than ever in shaping the way that we live and – more importantly – the way we learn.
Whether we’re out in the real world or navigating the virtual waters of the web, one thing becomes clear: People are talking about storytelling. Of all the conversations we’ve seen that focus their attention on stories, the one that we’ve found to be the most interesting addresses the power of stories and storytelling both inside of and outside of the classroom.
The Benefits of Storytelling – In Any Capacity
While it may no longer come as a surprise to the savvy parents of 2015, the sheer volume of research supporting the significance and importance of reading and storytelling in a child’s life – through adolescence – is nothing less than astounding. One of the more recent pieces to catch our eye here at CHP was a 2010 study that examined the relationship between a scholarly culture at home and academic performance across 42 countries. What were the results of the study, you ask? It was found that across all 42 countries there was a direct, positive correlation between the scholarly culture of the home (i.e. how many books there were in the home library) and a student’s academic success – making the moral of this story study, a simple one: a home can never have too many books!
The truths and benefits of stories and reading that have been highlighted by studies like this one become even more powerful when we, as parents and educators, choose to pair the strength of traditional storytelling and reading with the reach and scope of digital technology.
Benefits of Storytelling | When Traditional Meets Digital
With each passing year, more and more technology becomes available for both home and classroom use. As a result, the world of education has seen the birth of a Digital Storytelling. Much like the name implies, Digital Storytelling takes all the elements of traditional storytelling and combines them with the features of digital technology. In doing this, Digital Storytelling is able to defy some of the limitations that have come to define traditional storytelling.
Ordinarily, stories and storytelling find themselves bound to a single medium at any single time (be it vocal, visual, textual, or otherwise). Digital storytelling completely eliminates this limitation. With digital technology it becomes possible to simultaneously incorporate multiple mediums into a single story. Further still, traditional stories often find themselves limited to a single point of view or perspective at any given moment; with Digital Storytelling it becomes possible to view or create multiple perspectives that exist concurrently within a single story.
By eliminating the limitations imposed by the traditional characteristics of storytelling, Digital Storytelling brought the art of the story into the Digital Era while simultaneously affording children the opportunity to create and imagine in ways that had never before been possible.
Benefits of Storytelling | Takeaway
It doesn’t matter how your child chooses to consume and create stories so long as they are creating them and consuming them. Reading and storytelling are inherently tied to a child’s ability to imagine, create, and grow.
