Week 3: "Listen! And I shall tell you a tale..."

The opening line of Beowulf captures the imagination and attention of anyone exposed to them, whether they are read or heard spoken aloud.  This ancient mode of learning, through story, has been used throughout the ages.  The Iliad, The Odyssey, Beowulf....all were spoken tales related to the listener in such a way that they would not be forgotten. 

 In an age of bullet points and slides filled with "just the facts," it is refreshing to see that people are still using this ancient method of teaching.  In fact, the website Digitales exists for just this purpose, providing a resource for teachers and others to use in teaching lessons through story.  This method is becoming more widely used in other areas besides the classroom.  Presentations made in the workplace also make use of the story as a medium for communicating ideas in a manner which listeners and readers can easily remember and recall.

While people have always loved a good story and often used them to teach, we are only just beginning to understand the science behind why telling stories is so effective.  Using stories to teach is effective because it activates parts of the brain which would experience the actions of the story.  Stories make things "come alive" in a way which a recitation of facts cannot, because they only activate the parts of the brain related to language processing.  Although this method could be used in the study of many different subjects, it would be especially effective in teaching history, a subject which quite often is thought of as a memorization of dull, uninteresting facts involving people dead a hundred years ago.  By using storytelling, the events and people of those eras will live again in the minds of the listener, just as the opening of Beowulf resurrects the ancient hero for the reader today.