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7.2.docx7.2 The Importance of Storytelling
While we can take in information in multiple ways through our senses and process that information through behaviors, graphic representations and logical arguments, stories are how we learn naturally and best. Stories show us how the pieces of the world fit together. As we listen to stories, we learn that actions have consequences and that there are reasons for the way things are. We learn about emotions—what they are, what can cause them, and how they affect behavior. We learn about the moral codes and conventions of our cultures—what's considered right and wrong, and when it's okay to break societal rules in the service of a higher order of morality. We learn about people—strange people, scary people, silly people, ordinary people. We learn about ourselves as we relate to characters and understand our own fears and aspirations in new ways. We learn about other cultures and other ways of doing things. We learn what is meaningful in life and how we can make our lives meaningful.
We learn about good and evil and what role we play in the pull between the two. Through stories, the events of our lives take a shape and point to something beyond the randomness of just stuff that happens. Stories enable life to make sense.
The process of telling stories shows our listeners that we care about them. We are sharing ourselves with them, opening up our lives to them, inviting them to know us. We are taking time with them, giving them the gift of our attention and our words. Through stories, we can offer guidance without preaching. We release the power of interpretation of our stories to the listeners, granting to them the dignity of response and of being able to think for themselves.
Explore and Reflect: The Importance of Stories in Everyday Life
See how many stories you tell, hear, or encounter throughout your day. When you wake up tomorrow, be prepared to keep a log of all the stories that you hear or tell throughout the day. Your child might tell you about something that happened at school, your mom might have a tale to tell about her friend, you might relate an experience you had at the drive-through to a colleague. Count the stories you hear on television (the news, a sitcom, the stories within the sitcom) as well as ones you read. Looking over your log, consider and write down the purpose(s) of each of the stories. What can you conclude about the many reasons we tell stories to each other and what purposes they serve in our daily lives?
Learning the Characteristics of a Story
As we noted in Chapter 5, listening to stories helps children develop their audio and linguistic literacies. Storytelling is different from conversation in that stories use sensory details to create a world that is usually different from the space and time the storyteller is immediately sharing with the audience. However, stories report conversations, so the teller might use different voices or direct speech tags to indicate who is speaking and how they sound. Oral storytelling is closer than ordinary conversation to mimicking the kinds of language children will find in written texts. As they listen to stories, then, they are learning by sound the special ways written language is used to create meaning.
In addition to the content and style of stories, and the process of telling them, storytelling also teaches children the structure of stories. As we noted in Chapter 4, stories have plot structures. They start with exposition or a narrative hook, introduce a conflict, build through complications of that conflict to a climactic moment where the outcome is assured, and then resolve themselves in some way. Stories have characters who fill the roles of good guy and bad guy, of helper or henchman, of background chorus who reflect the reader's or listener's role inside the story. Stories have settings—landscapes that direct the flow of the movement or present obstacles to be overcome—and time periods that indicate and limit what is possible. Stories have themes—ideas to communicate, lessons to learn. As children listen to stories, they internalize these structures to use in shaping their own stories.
Which bring us to the next benefit of storytelling: Storytelling creates storytellers. As children listen to stories, they begin to tell their own. As with most of their speech acts, form precedes meaning. Their first attempts at stories may make no sense at all, but you know they are stories by the way they sound: They may have a conventional beginning (such as "Once upon a time" or "This one time"), incorporate dialogue (which you can recognize by the way they change their tone of voice for characters or through the use of speech tags), have connectors (like "and then" or "so"), and eventually, they end (again with a conventional ending of some sort). When my daughter, Blair, began telling her own stories at the age of 4, she had two stock endings: Happy stories ended with a wedding, and unhappy stories ended with everyone getting eaten by dinosaurs.
This structure begins fairly early with children who are familiar with stories, but a genuine understanding of narrative emerges more slowly, beginning at around age 3 or 4. Children at this age are in the stage that Piaget called preoperational; they believe that all objects have motivations and intentions, and they use fantasy play and storytelling to make sense of both everyday and unusual things that happen to them. For instance, they might play house by imitating their own home environments, or they might respond to a fire in their neighborhood by playing out a story about the fire with their toys. By the time most children hit kindergarten, though, they can tell a simple story on their own.
Because children in the preoperational stage are not yet logical thinkers, they need stories to help them understand abstract concepts. To take another example from my own experience, my storytelling daughter Blair told me an outrageous tale on her first day of kindergarten about how she had gotten sent out of the room for being disruptive. First, she said, she had talked when the teacher was talking and was given a "green card." Then, she complained about getting the green card and got a yellow card and was asked to go to time out. She refused, and instead stood in the doorway and stomped her feet. The teacher then gave her a red card and made her stand outside until the morning break. I was mortified! When I apologized to the teacher the next morning, she looked at me curiously and said that the incident had never happened and that Blair was quiet and attentive all morning. The teacher told me that she had described her discipline system to the children—a first offense earned a green card, a second one earned a yellow card, and a third resulted in a red card. We reasoned that Blair needed a story to understand how such a sequence of events would be possible, so she made one up!
Blair's story shows how Kohlberg's theory of moral development works with Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Preoperational children cannot understand abstract moral principles or sequences of cause and effect unless they can be shown in concrete terms that relate to the children themselves. They can, however, engage in fantasy play and understand and tell simple stories. Stories with characters they can relate to can thus fill the gaps in their understanding of how actions can result in either punishment or reward.
The Development of Memory
The ability to track a series of linked events over time and ultimately create such a narrative depends on the development of memory. In turn, the development of memory depends on the ability to construct a narrative. This type of memory is crucial for intellectual development, as Lise Eliot (1999) notes,
. . . because the brain's enormous capacity to store information is what makes every kind of learning possible. Whether it's bonding with Mother, recognizing Aunt Betsy, mastering crawling, associating words with objects, or figuring out that water is wet, every mental advance depends on the brain's ability to file away experience and then use this stored information to act with greater wisdom and efficiency. (p. 330)
Memory takes different forms, of course, such as short- and long-term memory; procedural, or implicit, memory, which is the memory of how to do things; and conscious, or explicit, memory, which is the memory of life events. Every part of the brain is involved in the development of memory.
The relative immaturity of babies' brains means that memory develops slowly. The first sorts of memories that babies develop are implicit ones and act more like conditioned responses than actual memories. Babies can recognize familiar sensory input almost immediately; we know this because they pay more attention to new sensory inputs than they do to ones they are familiar with. Recall memory, which is the ability to remember things that aren't visible or present, emerges at around eight months, when babies first start showing signs of object permanence, separation anxiety, and word-thing correspondence as we discussed in Chapter 5. These early experiences create neural pathways that are crucial to brain development, habits, and later intelligence, but babies still suffer from what is called infantile amnesia, which means that they don't develop conscious memories until the areas of the brain responsible for long-term storage are sufficiently mature.
However, what they do develop prior to conscious memories are habits of behavior, so it is very important that we pay attention to our own actions and speech patterns from the start. Toddlers, for instance, can perform what researchers call "deferred imitation." Deferred imitation refers to the ability to repeat an action that they have been shown in a laboratory setting. While 8-month-olds can repeat the action up to 24 hours later, 14-month-olds, with no intermediate exposure to the action, can return to the lab up to four months later and repeat what they saw the researcher do with the props they are given (Eliot, 1999, p. 346). This is a rather stunning warning to parents and caregivers; as Eliot notes, "If toddlers repeat, even several months later, actions they've seen only once or twice, just imagine how watching their parents' daily activities must affect them. Everything they see and hear over time—work, play, fighting, smoking, drinking, reading, hitting, laughing, words, phrases, and gestures—is stored in ways that shape their later actions, and the more they see of a particular behavior, the likelier it is to reappear in their own conduct" (p. 347). Deferred imitation research also corrected the erroneous assumption that children can't remember what they can't talk about. Eighteen- and nineteen-month-old children participating in these experiments were able to ask about things they remembered from their prior visits at thirteen and fourteen months old when they could not talk, so researchers now believe that children under the age of six can remember more than they can talk about (Eliot, p. 348).
Despite this early development of recall memory, however, children's ability to remember events in their lives grows only in conjunction with their ability to tell stories. Stories put events and people together in settings and relationships of cause and effect. Studies have shown that when parents and caregivers ask 3-year-olds to remember things, such as what they did, who they were with, and what happened, children's memories improve (Eliot, 1999, p. 350). This sort of reinforcement is very helpful for children since they need to learn to build narratives of events in order to store them as memories, and the interaction helps confirm and elaborate what they think they remember. You'll recall that age 3 is also the beginning of the development of fantasy play, so it is sometimes difficult for children to distinguish between something they actually did and something they played at or pretended they did; while they can distinguish between reality and fantasy, they may become so engrossed in their play that they lose track of whether it was real or not.
Memory, the ability to use language, and a child's sense of story grow in conjunction with one another; together, they are absolutely necessary skills for learning print literacy. Storytelling is the single best way to help children develop all three of these competencies.
The Development of a Theory of Mind
Another competence that storytelling both requires and helps develop is a theory of mind (ToM). As we noted briefly in Chapter 5, theory of mind is the ability to imagine that other people have intentions, beliefs, desires, and knowledge that may be different from your own. It's called a theory because the mind's processes are not visible. A person could be plotting world domination or wondering what sort of pie she wants for dessert, but if she doesn't verbalize or make some gesture or facial expression that reveals her intentions, no one knows what she's thinking.
Developmentally speaking, a theory of mind arrives upon the scene when children are around 4 years old, but as with most skills, it requires a scaffolding to build on. The scaffolding of theory of mind has three parts:
One of the first components is joint attention, which we discussed in Chapter 1. Very young children can point to things and can understand that the gesture of pointing is meant to direct their attention to something. What they learn from this is that people pointing have the intention to refer to something. This is foundational for a theory of mind—children need to understand that, just as they themselves do, other people have intentions, plans, and purposes.
Another crucial competence, one related to audio literacy, is understanding the use of language to make things happen or change people's behavior. For instance, parents use a distinct tone of voice to soothe children. They may perhaps have a bedtime ritual that includes a particular song. Over time, that song or tone of voice becomes so associated with sleep that a child who does not want to go to sleep may react with creative forms of resistance when he hears it. This shows that the child understands the functional use of language and the intentions behind it; he knows what his parents want, even if they haven't actually said it. Children learn what people's intentions are from their tone of voice.
A third component necessary for the development of a theory of mind is understanding the connection between others' emotions and their actions. Visual and gestural literacy is key in the development of this understanding, as children learn to interpret cues such as slumped shoulders, frowns, skipping, and so forth, as external expressions of various internal states. Even children whose theory of mind is compromised, such as children on the autism spectrum, can be taught to read these sorts of visual and gestural cues. For neurotypical children, these cues are a precursor to understanding how a person is feeling, but for children on the autism spectrum, they may serve as a substitute for that understanding.
Storytelling engages all of these components of a theory of mind. Storytellers direct joint attention and use their voices and gestures in functional ways to display emotions and actions and in direct ways to express what characters are feeling and what those feelings cause them to do.
Because of their ability to assist in the development of language, memory, narrative structure, and theory of mind, stories are critically important as children enter preschool and kindergarten where shared attention, memory, linguistic competence, and social interaction need to come together for the purpose of acquiring print literacy. Thus, it is clear that children who have not been adequately prepared for school need to listen to stories, but it is also clear that children who have been reared in literacy-rich environments also need to listen to stories. A child's sense of narrative isn't really fully developed until they are 8 or 9 years old, and indeed, stories—telling them and listening to them—remain one of the most important factors of our experience throughout our lives.
