Storytelling, Self, Society

Volume 15 Issue 2 Article 6

8-6-2020

Everyday Storytelling as Teaching: Indian Teachers’ Experiences

of Telling Stories in Teaching
Ola Henricsson
University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Silwa Claesson
University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/storytelling

Recommended Citation
Henricsson, Ola and Claesson, Silwa (2020) "Everyday Storytelling as Teaching: Indian Teachers’
Experiences of Telling Stories in Teaching," Storytelling, Self, Society: Vol. 15 : Iss. 2 , Article 6.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/storytelling/vol15/iss2/6
Everyday Storytelling as Teaching
Indian Teachers’ Experiences of Telling Stories in Teaching

Ola Henricsson and Silwa Claesson

This article takes its point of departure in Bangalore, India, where through
a cultural exchange program, we worked together with storytellers from
a storytelling organization. During the project, we also met many active
teachers; those encounters made us want to find out more about how Indian
teachers describe their experience of telling stories in school contexts. The aim
of this study is to deepen the knowledge about Indian teachers’ experiences
of telling stories in teaching. We found that the teachers’ storytelling is closely
connected to the content being taught and that their storytelling unfolds
in and from the context. In addition, it appears to us that the teachers tell
stories to provide an answer to a pedagogical question about how to make
teaching more relational, emotional, and ethical.

Introduction

Everyone seems to remember a teacher who retold a folktale, myth, or story from
his or her own life, and it is no wonder because storytelling is deeply interwoven
with the act of teaching and learning. Researchers from different fields highlight
storytelling as an important tool for language development (Lwin 72), creating
and re-creating meaning and context (Bruner, Actual Minds 123) and learning

Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2019), pp. 246–269. Copyright © 2020 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201
 Henricsson and Claesson n 247

(Grugeon and Gardner 69–78; Lave and Wenger 108–109). This study aims to
contribute to that research by focusing on teachers’ descriptions of their experi-
ences of telling stories in teaching.
Through a cultural exchange with the Karnataka region in India, our interest
in storytelling brought us to a collaboration with an Indian storytelling organiza-
tion, Kathalaya, in Karnataka, India.1 India’s is one of the great oral storytelling
traditions in the world (Blackburn 14); retelling the great epic works of the Ra-
manyana and the Mahabaratha is kept alive in an oral tradition from generation to
generation (Parthasarathy 241). Volunteers working with Kathalaya visit schools
and perform storytelling sessions with teachers and their students. Through this
collaboration, we had the opportunity to meet teachers from different areas and
schools while we accompanied Kathalaya. A curiosity awoke in us concerning
teachers’ experiences of telling stories. We wanted to find out how the teachers
reflected on their own experiences of telling stories in teaching.

Background

Storytelling is closely linked to teaching and learning. Especially in the past, values
and historical events have been retold as stories as well as religious myths. In an-
cient India, the fable collection Panchatantra was a sample of fables initially used to
teach five (pancha in Sanskrit) treatises (tantra in Sanskrit) of wisdom. The fables
in Panchatantra are similar to the stories in the European fable collection of Aesop.
From a Western perspective, storytelling in education has primarily focused on
nurturing children and teaching content, for example, Aesop’s fables, myths,
and edifying historical or religious legends. The influential seventeenth-century
educator Comenius also argues for storytelling in teaching as a practical tool
because a story can “teach, engage and entertain at the same time” (193).
Philosophers, psychologists, and narrative researchers stress that we, as hu-
mans, possess a narrative way of thinking that enables us to understand something
by organizing events in narrative structures (Ricœur 171; Riessman Kohler 10).
Bruner argues that people have two different ways of perceiving the world. On
the one hand, we have a logical way of thinking as in mathematics and natural
science, and, on the other hand, we have a narrative way of thinking that organizes
experiences of events into narrative patterns (Actual Minds 12–13). According
to Bruner, we construct, reconstruct, and even invent yesterday and tomorrow
248 n Storytelling as Teaching

narratively (Making Stories 93). For these reasons, telling stories is an important
tool to create meaning, commitment, and interest in teaching situations.
Grugeon and Gardner show that a single story might help students to under-
stand how seemingly unconnected events or objects are linked in subject teaching
(69–78). When a teacher strives to unfold the subject matter of teaching with
the aim of encouraging students’ self-reflection and meaning-making, one way
of doing so is to tell stories. In her research on teachers’ storytelling, Dougherty
found that the participating teachers developed a new understanding of what
she called the pedagogical core. One of her most important findings was that
when the teachers started to tell stories in their teaching, the reciprocal aspect of
storytelling helped the teachers to understand the importance of the pedagogical
relation (231–234). Telling stories in teaching is a mutual sharing of experiences
and not just reporting facts or opinions.
Despite the fact that storytelling in teaching has long been known as a teach-
ing tool, most contemporary research addresses storytelling in teaching merely
as a method of promoting language development. Teachers today are mostly
presented with research on how to use storytelling for a specific purpose, for
example, to teach vocabulary in a first language (Lwin 89), to teach English as
a second language (Xueping 119), or as a technique to develop communication
skills (Gan 210). However, there are studies concerning storytelling in teaching
in general, for example as a way to support learning in social studies (Combs and
Beach 6), to improve mathematics skills (Casey, Kersch, and Young 171), and
as a thinking tool (McManimon 212). Jack Zipes stresses that teachers should
recognize the worth of everyday storytelling, not just seeing it as a performance
or communication skill but to be aware of the potential of storytelling as a teaching
tool in a broader sense (34).
This aspect of storytelling as a way of teaching in general was also found in our
previous study by the authors involving Swedish teachers and their experiences
of telling stories in teaching. We found that the teachers say that they sometimes
spontaneously use storytelling as a teaching method and that they express ambig-
uous experiences which highlight the complexity of their teaching practice. We
argued that the teachers’ ambiguous, embodied, and situated knowledge, when
using stories in teaching, could be called tact of telling (Henricsson and Claesson
44), paraphrasing van Manen’s concept, tact of teaching (Tact of Teaching 187).
Kuyvenhoven’s ethnographic study on a storytelling teacher and her class
states that a teacher should listen carefully to students to know when it is time
 Henricsson and Claesson n 249

for nourishing “storytelling participation in social awareness” (208). Listening

to students is equally importance when telling traditional stories, such as fairy
tales and trickster tales. McManimon shows that mostly traditional stories are
conservative and prejudiced when viewed from a gender or a socioeconomic per-
spective. Therefore, McManimon calls the teachers together with their students
to transform the stories creatively and critically to create links to the everyday
life of the students in order to emancipate them (223–224).

Collaboration with Kathalaya in Bangalore

For a few years around 2010, the Västra Götaland region together with the Univer-
sity of Gothenburg carried out a cultural and educational exchange with Banga-
lore, which aimed at sharing experiences in different cultural areas, for example,
music, design, and film. One of the areas concerned storytelling and teaching.
Storytellers and teachers from India visited Sweden and vice versa. During the
visits to Sweden, conferences and workshops were arranged for teachers and
student teachers. In Bangalore, the Swedish group shadowed the storytelling
organization Kathalaya’s storytelling sessions in schools. Geeta Ramanujam, the
director of the organization, and her colleagues visited well-equipped private
schools as well as state schools on the outskirts of the city where the teachers
mostly work with inadequate resources. The storytellers told fables and fairy
tales, and, in connection with the storytelling occasion, they also performed a
practical aesthetic task such as, for example, singing, painting, folding paper,
or dancing.
India has a long history of multiculturalism. There are countless religions,
languages, and cultures gathered in this heavily populated country. For example,
each state has its own state language in addition to Hindi. In Bangalore, the prin-
cipal language is Kanada, but many teachers we met also talked Hindi, English,
and Tamil. One teacher remembered a student who, as well as talking about his
mother tongue, referred to his father’s language as his “father tongue.” According
to the folklorist and scholar A. K. Ramanujan, different cultures, religions, and
languages have been interwoven for thousands of years in India, and they have
created a way of writing and telling stories that is more context-bound, where
coherence, not unity, seems to be the aim of the story (“Is There an Indian Way”
47–49). For example, in Tamil, folktales do not begin with “Once upon a time,”
but rather with “In a special place” (Blackburn 20).
250 n Storytelling as Teaching

To describe the exterior landscape is also to describe the interior landscape.

In the great myths, there are stories inside stories, where the smaller story gives
an image of the larger and vice versa, container and contained. Even the Indian
literature of the nineteenth century usually presents a framework, where stories
unfold within a larger context. According to Ramanujan, storytelling in India is
context-bound to such an extent that the perception of the story itself becomes
more context-sensitive than the Aristotelian Western definition of the story as a
unit with a beginning, middle, and an end. All things are substantial, even time and
space: “there is a continuity, a constant flow of substance from context to object
from non-self to self, in eating, breathing, sex, sensation, perception, thought,
art, or religious experience” (“Is There an Indian Way” 52).
The genres of oral stories that the storytellers from Kathalaya told in the
classes we visited were different kinds of saints’ tales, fables from Panchatantra,
fairy tales, folktales, and tales of wisdom and philosophy. The stories were told
in an ordinary and familiar way. Lee-Ellen Marvin states in her study of Indian
domestic storytelling that there is a quality to this kind of Indian storytelling that
avoids any sense of dramatic performance, thus making it an accessible form of
communication (104). The storytellers from Kathalaya told the stories plainly
but sometimes with character voice and a dramatic use of volume or pitch. The
slightest of shifts in pitch and pacing as the storyteller approached the climactic
scenes of the stories could be noted. The storyteller created an intimacy between
herself and the students, and that is similar to what Marvin describes, where
an Indian child watches an adult’s face and hands during the storytelling, and
the adult, likewise, watches the child (104). Public storytelling, which we also
experienced in our cultural exchange with Bangalore, was on the contrary much
more dramatic in its expression. Ramanujan writes about a situation where a pro-
fessional storyteller took an hour on the stage with music, poetry, and recitation
of names and environments, while a grandmother used just thirty seconds to give
the same background (Two Realms 43).

Theoretical Framework

Our central concern in this study is teachers’ experiences of telling stories, which,
in narrative research, are called event narratives—that is, the “spoken recounting
 Henricsson and Claesson n 251

of particular past events” (Andrews, Squire, and Tamboukou 8), with either the
storyteller or someone else as a character in the story. Since our interest is the
teachers’ lived experiences of telling stories in teaching, a phenomenological
perspective is appropriate for analyzing the teachers’ descriptions. Therefore, we
have chosen to view storytelling from a phenomenological perspective primarily
through Katharine Young’s inquiry on oral storytelling, using the concepts of
taleworld and storyrealm.
The concept of storyrealm describes experiences of a storytelling occasion,
an intersubjective world of sociality where participants are aware of themselves
as listeners and storytellers. The storyrealm is designed to orient the listener to
shift focus to another realm of experience, the taleworld. When experiencing the
taleworld, according to Young, where the actual events that the story recounts
unfold, the listener loses her sociality, her engagement with others, and even
the sense of felt-time (Taleworlds and Storyrealms 16–17). Inside the taleworld,
the listener can experience herself either as one or several of the characters or
someone who moves around as an observer—but it is still in the time and space of
the taleworld, a different experience from the storyrealm, where you experience
yourself as a social person in a storytelling occasion. Narratives and stories give us
the possibility of shifting focus from being a participant in events of our daily life to
being able to reflect on them by reliving them in a narrative structure. Young even
suggests that our ability to create narrative structures makes it possible to reflect
on life rather than just being involved in it (Taleworlds and Storyrealms 12). From
this perspective, we suggest that teachers’ storytelling becomes a pedagogical
tool to create social interaction as well as to encourage students’ self-reflection
in making meaning of a subject matter.
Although teachers’ storytelling can be seen as improvisational, it can at the
same time be described as a well-chosen answer to a pedagogical question. A
teacher’s choice of what story to tell, to whom, and why could be described as
pedagogical understanding (Van Manen, Pedagogical Tact 92). It seems to be
common for teachers to tell anecdotes from their own lives in order to connect
to the students and create interest in the subject of teaching (Henricsson and
Claesson 36). According to Ochs and Capps this type of everyday storytelling has
great significance for our meaning making. Ochs and Capps propose that retelling
of personal anecdotes illuminates modes of being, and that our representation
of the past is influenced by our “preoccupations with our present and future life
252 n Storytelling as Teaching

world” (254). These personal anecdotes, or representations of the past, allow for
new possibilities and provide a new understanding of ourselves; the past, present
and future are intertwined and sensed holistically (157).
Furthermore, from a phenomenological perspective, in line with the philoso-
phy of Merleau-Ponty, language cannot be separated from the body, which means
that oral storytelling in the classroom is experienced and perceived bodily, in a
word: lived. Despite that, many narrative scientific perspectives have in common
that they focus on the story—the written story or the recorded story. According to
Hydén, the body is mostly missing in narrative studies, and he points out that if the
body is mentioned, it is as representations in the stories, for example, that body
parts are used as metaphors for something else (126). On the contrary, gestures
are closely connected to the spoken narrative but express their own meaning
parallel to the utterance (McNeill 13). This implies a perspective that sees story-
telling as embodied. Young has used the notion of intercorporeity, developed by
Merleau-Ponty, to describe how the gesturer´s intentionality colonizes the listener
in a storytelling occasion (“Gestures, Intercorporeity” 55). Intercorporeity is not
a matter of understanding—a conscious, thoughtful awareness about ourselves
of the sort we might get by reflecting on what our bodies do. Intercorporeity is
prior to the turning of our attention to our own body—as subject toward object.
A good deal of what people do when narrating, especially and most obviously in
gestures and expressions, are intentional but still outside of awareness (“Gestures,
Intercorporeity” 61). This means that stories do not emerge from the brain to the
tongue and then come out as verbiage. The story inhabits the whole body and
the body inhabits the story. Intercorporeity shows that we participate in making
meaning bodily (“Gestures, Intercorporeity” 73), and likewise the storytelling is
made emotional and visible in and through the storyteller’s body (“Gestures and
the Phenomenology” 81).

Method

As mentioned, our collaboration with an Indian storytelling organization, Kath-

alaya, gave us the opportunity to examine how this tradition is reflected in the
teaching profession. The interviews were conducted in Bangalore in December
2014. We interviewed twenty teachers, of whom two were men. The teachers were
between twenty-three and sixty-five years old and had been working from two
 Henricsson and Claesson n 253

years to over forty years as teachers. Three were preschool teachers, fourteen were
primary school teachers, and three of the teachers worked in secondary school
(appendix 1). This study also includes teachers from poor as well as rich schools,
and both private and governmental schools. We visited some of the classes, and
most of the interviews were conducted in the classroom after lessons or in adjacent
rooms. The language spoken was English, and it is neither our first language as
interviewers nor most likely the first language of all the participants. This can, of
course, result in limitations and shortcomings during the interviews. However,
as we transcribed all the interviews, we paid attention to the issue of language
but could not find any major problems.
The interviews are focused on the teachers’ experiences of telling stories in
teaching but also on their experiences of storytelling in their childhood (appendix
2). The interviews should not be regarded as a questioning, rather as a conversa-
tion, or as Mishler puts it (136–143), a hermeneutical critical research that, when
it comes to interpretation, involves critical reflection on our own assumptions.
To understand how the storytelling sessions studied here are experienced by the
participating teachers, we asked them to tell anecdotes about their storytelling
in teaching. A personal anecdote, a narrative from a lived experience, has the
ability to bring about an understanding that goes beyond a predescribed social
and cultural understanding and helps the reader or listener to see something and
to acknowledge something in the ambiguity of a personal lived experience (Van
Manen, Phenomenology of Practise 253).
In our interpretation of this study, we did not separate teachers in relation to
sex or age or the subjects they teach, and that has to do with our research interest,
which focused only on storytelling itself in classroom contexts. This means that
although many different teachers have been interviewed in this study and although
their way of answering differs a lot in time and way of speaking, as researchers, we
treated the transcript as one whole. At first, we read the whole text individually
and then we talked about the text together in order to make an interpretation.
First, we must mention that we did not stay in Bangalore for a long time
and we took every opportunity to talk to those teachers we met, which means
that the interviews were sometimes conducted in loud places, and sometimes
with too little time. As a result, when all the interviews were transcribed and
ready for interpretation, we found that there were some questions we did not
have full answers to, and we would have liked the teachers to expand on certain
statements. Second, the interpretation was carried out in many steps, where we
254 n Storytelling as Teaching

tried out different ways of interpreting before we came up with headings that best
captured what the teachers said. Finally, we looked for anecdotes, retelling of
everyday events, in the stream of talk about storytelling in teaching, and focused
on them. From the interpretation of the transcribed anecdotes using Young’s
way of describing storytelling as different realms of experience, we interpret the
anecdotes as experiences of taleworlds and storyrealms. By doing this, we were
able to say something not only about the stories (taleworld) but also about the
teachers’ lived experiences of telling stories (storyrealm). Some of the anecdotes
are shown in the findings as a short extract from the interview, and they helped us
in our interpretation of the teachers’ experiences of telling stories in the classroom
(Barkhuizen, Benson, and Chick 74). To conclude, this study can in one way be
looked on as a first draft of a description of lived experience of storytelling in
teaching in India, because now that we have finished the study, we have found
that there are questions still to be answered. For example, it would be a good
complement to this study to follow some teachers in their everyday teaching to
explore the aspect of situatedness of storytelling.

Findings

The interpretation of the interviews has resulted in a focus on two aspects of

storytelling in teaching. The first is named Taleworlds and storyrealms of traditional
myths and fables in teaching, the second, Transforming taleworlds and storyrealms
as teaching. The first aspect concerns what teachers say about their retelling of
stories from their oral storytelling tradition of fables and myths in their teaching.
The second aspect is about how Indian teachers use their storytelling ability to
explore different ways to apply storytelling in teaching. These aspects are not to
be viewed as two separate and distinct aspects but instead as two aspects that are
intertwined with each other in an everyday teaching situation.

Taleworlds and Storyrealms of Traditional Myths and Fables in Teaching

The most striking finding of our interviews is the emphasis on teachers’ own lived
experiences of storytelling in their childhood as they talk about their own story-
telling as teachers. They remember how their grandparents, parents, sisters, or
brothers retold folktales and myths. They could recall the time and place of many
 Henricsson and Claesson n 255

different stories being told to them. Bedtime stories were common according to
the findings of the interviews, but the storytelling also seemed to occur in a variety
of contexts, for example, when they traveled, had dinner, or when parents came
home from work. They usually mention how their grandmothers and mothers told
them stories from the rich oral tradition, but sometimes it was also their fathers
or older brothers and sisters who told those stories.

I think my love for storytelling came from my grandmother. Even when I was
in school, my cousins, my nieces, my nephews would love to come and listen to
me telling stories. I loved being with children and telling them stories. —Lalita

The teachers’ retelling of anecdotes about their lived experiences of story-

telling in their childhood reveals that storytelling is integrated and interwoven
with everyday life. Manda tells how her sister used to tell folk tales in the backyard
while they were washing clothes.

My elder sister used to tell me a story, a Maharashtrian folktale. She was ten years
older than I and there was a time when she was washing her clothes. We used to
have a well at the backyard and whenever she was washing I used to drag in the
water for her from the well because in that moment she would tell me stories. It
was a very nice time. I carried water in small buckets at the age of five and she told
me stories. And at night time also. Whenever parents were not there we used to
sit together and we kept on talking about stories—“Please, please more stories!”

An issue that is relevant to this study has to do with how the teachers’ ex-
periences of storytelling in their own childhood have affected their storytelling
in teaching. Ganesh is a teacher who for thirty years has been teaching science
at a centrally located high school in Bangalore. Over the years, he has created
links between science and the ancient myths of Mahabharata and Ramayana. He
teaches concepts like heat, boiling, and electricity, and he correlates scientific
phenomena with Indian myths. He regards the stories as a gift, a cultural heritage,
that he has received from his parents and grandparents that can bring emotion
and expression to teaching.

This gift was given by my parents. They narrated me all these things, the stories
of Mahabharata and Ramayana, the culture heritage of India. Because every
256 n Storytelling as Teaching

grandmother is the embodiment of stories. That itself is the culture heritage

of India and I got that. So, in teaching I motivate through the story. I want to
correlate that story to the scientific concept so that is two in one—scientific
concept and the heritage of India.

There are also examples in the interviews of the desire to share stories for the
sake of the story sharing itself. A preschool teacher, Rani, remembers an occasion
where she told her six-year-old students the traditional folktale of the trustworthy
cow, Punyakoti. She talks about the storytelling as a very emotional occasion. She
starts by retelling a part of the story, thus invites us into the taleworld of Punyakoti:

The cow says to her calf: “You know I have made a promise to a tiger and he is
going to eat me up and I’ll have to go.” All the other cows say: “Oh no no no,
you don’t have to go. We will protect you! It is ok you don’t have to keep your
word!” But she says: “No, I have to keep my word. I must go. I come back to ask
you to take care of my child when I’m gone.”

Then suddenly Rani shifts focus from the taleworld to describe the experience
of the storyrealm and weaves in a remembrance of what happened while telling the
story for the students. She describes it as an emotional and relational experience:

When I was telling them the story and the sad moment came every child in the
class had tears and they sat still and they were looking at me and you know it is
like just stuck there in my eyes. They were frozen and waiting to see what the
end is going to be like. That was a heavy moment for me and I cried. I cry every
time I narrate the story.

She then continues to tell the story and shifts focus to the time and space of
the taleworld again:

And then Punyakoti comes back to the tiger and tiger is flabbergasted. He can’t
believe that somebody is coming back to be killed and left a new-born baby
just to be eaten up. So, he just can’t take it, and he says: “I salute your honesty.
I admire your honesty,” and he just goes away and says: “Go back to your family
and be happy with your child.”
 Henricsson and Claesson n 257

Finally, she comments on the experience of the storytelling occasion, with

a concluding remark about how she experienced the students’ reactions: “They
were all relieved, you know, they relaxed and they smiled.”
In conclusion, all the teachers in our study have rich memories of listening to
storytelling in their childhood from relatives, mostly grandmothers, but also from
fathers, sisters, and brothers. This retelling from the rich oral traditions of fables
and myths seemed to be an important part of their everyday being when growing
up. They express these experiences with deep enjoyment and, later on, also express
the joy of carrying on the tradition of telling stories as teachers. They describe
how they retell traditional fables to nurture children or retell myths connected to
different festivals. The love of retelling stories for children and sharing their joy and
true emotions when experiencing these traditional taleworlds is also noticeable.

Transforming Taleworlds and Storyrealms as Teaching

The next aspect concerns the teachers’ descriptions of how they use their story-
telling experience in transforming storyrealms in the teaching processes. They
say that stories are being told to make students interested and motivated to learn
within different subjects and that stories change depending on the students and
the content of teaching.

Whatever story you are telling the children the link is important. The unconscious
in their mind will be working on the links to create meaningfulness. —Manda

They also talk about the stories as a way to, in a pedagogical sense, make
changes. They reason that their storytelling will help students change their way of
thinking, make the students connect to and re-view their own lives. We interpret
it as a way of transforming traditional stories into contemporary conditions and
situational settings. Madhur is a teacher but has also worked as a teacher trainer,
and she describes how she retells a folktale she heard from her grandmother but
does so from a critical perspective when she teaches about gender theory:

My grandmother loved to tell me stories about kings and queens. One was about
a king that had three queens and they did not get along very well. When talking
about gender theory, I tell the story and I see a pattern there and sometimes
258 n Storytelling as Teaching

stories will have their elements where the women better get along. So, I make
connection to those old folktales. I don’t know if I have been very clear about
what I am trying to say but I also learnt to look at stories from a critical per-
spective.

A story, written by the Indian author Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), is

about a king who misinterprets teaching as just discipline. When at the end of
the story, the parrot finally behaves properly, it is dead. In this case, the teacher,
Madhur, uses this story about a parrot to introduce a lesson about the concept
of discipline. Discipline for learning is something that comes from within—from
interest and motivation, and not from the outside, from rules, regulations, and
preconceptions, she says:

I would often take up a concept in education, say, discipline; when I was pre-
paring for the class I would find some stories and in fact I often use stories.
So, I would walk into the class and coming back to a story about a parrot. The
education of the parrot, where you know there is a king who wants his parrot
to learn, to be educated. But he doesn’t want any noise from the parrot who
has been stuffed with pages and pages of text. The king is very happy in the end
because now the parrot is silent. So automatically of course the parrot dies. He
is educated! So, I used that story to begin my class on discipline.

Another aspect of transforming taleworld and storyrealm as a way of teaching

is about how the teachers spontaneously make use of their storytelling ability in
certain teaching situations and transform it into storytelling. Natesa confirms that
the storytelling depends on the context and that planning is not possible from
this point of view:

It depends on the situation. We don’t actually plan for this but . . . sometimes
it just happens.

The phrase “sometimes it just happens” does not mean, in our interpretation,
that this is a careless unplanned way of teaching. On the contrary, it means a
profound pedagogical understanding of when to tell a story and to whom. Rani,
a preschool teacher, says that once in a class where the light went off she had an
impulse to tell a story about darkness. She could comfort the students when it
 Henricsson and Claesson n 259

was all dark in the classroom and the spontaneous narration opened the way for
a more playful approach to teaching.

And another time during a class we had a power cut. The lights went off. So, then
I said: “It was dark and we had to be silent.” Because the moment it was dark the
children “Oh ma’am, where are you? I can’t see you? They panicked and I just
made up a story about the darkness and how we just have to stay in our places
until the light will turn back. That’s how I just changed the situation and told
them a story about a light in a tunnel.

In one of the schools we visited, there were outdoor learning environments,

spots and spaces for learning outside. In one sense, it could be linked to an ancient
way of teaching, sitting under a tree to shelter from the sun or the rain. In that
school, Vadin is a teacher with many years of experience, and he stresses the
aspect of socializing with students when telling stories. Vadin describes a walk
in the forest outside the school building and how the young students told him
one story after another. During the walk he was overwhelmed by the storytelling
ability of the young students.

You socialize with kids by telling them things that will interest them! And what
interests them? Stories! This morning I went for a walk with the youngest ones,
who are six years old. I had learned a story to tell them, but there was no space,
they were full of stories! Which was a lot more interesting. You went for a short
walk, 45, 50 minutes and each one blasting with good stories.

On the other hand, Vadin is very critical of the use of oral tradition as only
transmission of values and ethics. He looks for another use for the tradition of
storytelling, to use the storytelling ability as a dynamic tool, with the possibility
of changing things and not just preserving them. He thinks teachers misuse the
wealth they are in possession of with the rich repertoire of stories in the history
and the culture of India.

See what happens when you use stories to condition children. I think we are
misusing the wealth that we have. It happens in India, especially because it is
deeply soaked into religion. So, you could have a very adverse effect if you go in
to narrate stories to condition the child towards believing that: “I must be like
260 n Storytelling as Teaching

that.” But if you use the stories as “that is a way of life” because history is the
story of man. You have to give a very appropriate definition of history. This is a
story of man, and it is a dynamic thing.

There is always time to tell a story and there is always a desire to listen to a
good story, according to the teachers. Padama teaches older students nowadays,
and she does not tell them stories the same way as she did for those younger chil-
dren she taught in the past. However, one day, she had some of her older students
in a class and they were tired toward the end of the day, and then she began to
tell a story, which was the same as she had told them when they were younger.
Padama noticed how the students’ attention was captured by just mentioning
the story and additionally how it created an expectation among those who had
not heard the story.

They were all sitting and it was almost two o’clock and they were all slightly
sleepy and they had “game” next period so they wanted to go. But then I asked
if they remembered this story of Bundi—the drop of water that evaporates and
goes into the clouds and that is condensing and then comes evaporation and
rain. I just reminded them of that story and immediately they all sat up and said:
“We remember!” “Oh no, you didn’t tell us the story” complained students that
weren’t in my class at that time. So, I had to tell the story once again.

In the Indian teachers’ descriptions, telling stories in teaching is a way of

listening to the students. Madhurima, who is a preschool teacher with forty years
of experience, says that it is the “particular child that teaches you how to teach that
child.” In the anecdote below, she describes a child who does not want to learn and
who has parents who are unhappy with their son’s progress. Madhurima teaches
the child by storytelling. She creates a storyrealm and invites the child into that
space to learn how to write the letter H. The story unfolds as a pedagogical concern
and a pedagogical knowing what is best for this child on this particular occasion.
She starts to tell her anecdote with a question she got from a student teacher:

The other day a student teacher asked me: “How does it come that you are you
so inventive?” I don’t know. I interpret the child. The child teaches me in that
moment what I should think. So, the next day I said (to the child): “Come to
me! Come, I will teach you. Today we will learn how to write H.” And I came up
 Henricsson and Claesson n 261

with a story. I don’t know, I got into the child and what he likes. It is intuitive.
I think the more you have experienced the more you think, “I should have an
open mind today”—to change, you know.

In conclusion, this aspect shows how the Indian teachers all have vivid
experiences of listening to stories in their childhood, and they use their lived
experiences of storytelling in teaching. It is used as a way to transform taleworlds
and storyrealms spontaneously into a teaching practice where pedagogical un-
derstanding and concern are the starting point for a story.

Discussion

The findings show that the Indian teachers’ descriptions of their lived experiences
of an oral tradition as well as an everyday use of telling stories appears to affect
their way of telling stories in teaching. Their storytelling appears to be generally
context-bound and furthermore, in our interpretation, seems to unfold from a
concern aroused by being-with teaching and not as a method of being-for teaching.

Storytelling as Context-Bound

In the interviews, we found that the teachers describe their storytelling as it was
developed in their practice. The relation between the teacher and the subject of
teaching, as well as between the teacher and the students, will already be present
and, due to a situation, a certain story will unfold. With reference to how the
stories start in southern India: “In a special place” (Blackburn 20), we could say
that the teachers’ anecdotes and their storytelling in teaching begin somewhere,
in this case, in a pedagogical situation. There is an ambiguous relation to time
and space when we as humans experience a storytelling occasion because, on
the one hand, we distance ourselves from participation in the everyday world
when shifting focus to the taleworld: we can reflect on events independently as
from a distance (Young, Taleworlds and Storyrealms 12). On the other hand, we
also experience the storytelling occasion as emotional (Young, “Gestures and the
Phenomenology” 81). In this way, teachers’ storytelling creates certain spatial as
well as temporal experiences.
The story could be a way to calm and comfort and it could be a place to
262 n Storytelling as Teaching

dwell, as with Rani’s storytelling during the power cut. With her storytelling,
she creates a presence and community in the dark room, while at the same time
creating a distance from the experience of loneliness and fear. There is no lack of
space for storytelling in our interpretation of the Indian teachers’ descriptions of
their experience of their everyday storytelling. Their storytelling is not a spon-
taneous narration from some other place than the situated practice; they are not
professional entertainers who perform a certain well-rehearsed story. Instead, the
pedagogical understanding opens up for context-bound, everyday storytelling as
teaching. Vadin confirms this as he teaches and tells stories outside the classroom
and listens to students telling stories as well. It is a way of making room, both
temporally and spatially, for the storytelling.
Stories unfold from a perspective of concern and care, according to Ochs
and Capps (183). As teachers, the pedagogical situation is of concern, and ac-
cording to the Indian teachers, their storytelling develops from that concern.
Van Manen considers that tact of teaching or pedagogical tact is highlighted as a
tacit knowledge about what to do when you don’t know what to do (Pedagogical
Tact 187). Madhurima’s intuitive pedagogical actions draw on her concern for the
child who is in not in the mood for learning, with parents who scold him for not
being good enough. Her way of telling stories comes from an open mind as well
as her many years of experience as a teacher, learning how to teach from listening
to the child. The teachers express their concern for the students’ learning and it
becomes explicit in how the teachers talk about their storytelling. For example,
Vadin talks about the concern about making the students’ experience a part of
the future and sharing the process of storytelling, not only as a tool to distribute
the wealth of tradition, but also as a thinking tool for change. Can this be what
van Manen calls tact of teaching?

Storytelling as Being-With

In this study, teachers’ storytelling is described as context-bound and as unfolding

from an emotional and relational concern that we here describe as being-with. We
use being-with in a broader pedagogical sense: not just being-with the students but
being-with the educational reality in the time and space of teaching. In research
on narratives and learning, researchers commonly describe the benefits of sto-
rytelling by saying that it is a good way of bonding with students (Kuyvenhoven
208; Dougherty 221). Our interpretation of the Indian teachers’ descriptions is
 Henricsson and Claesson n 263

that these teachers do not use storytelling as way or method to contact and bond
with the students. The way of being-with the students is already in place for the
storytelling to unfold, in fact, it could be seen the other way around. Being-with
is the condition that makes it possible for storytelling to occur. The teachers’
spontaneous storytelling is due to their involvement in their students’ learning
and not a method to get the students involved and bound to them.
As mentioned, the Indian teachers seldom talk in the interviews about learn-
ing outcomes and assessments in relation to their storytelling but rather talk
about it as a way of being-with the students for the sake of teaching and learning.
Vadin argues for using storytelling and stories in teaching as a dynamic thing, a
way of life, in socialization with students and not as a way to nurture or teach
with stories. They express it as striving to reach the students’ level: as Vadin says,
he: “socialize[s] with kids by telling them things that will interest them!” and he
concludes that stories interest them. It is in the interaction with the students that
the storytelling occurs, and it could also be the other way around: storytelling
seems to open the way for the listeners’ stories. Vadin concludes that the children
are “blasting with stories.”
“Every grandmother is the embodiment of stories,” Ganesh says, and we draw
on that when we present the findings from the interviews concerning the teachers’
storytelling in relation to the content of teaching—as the embodiment of a subject.
When teaching a subject, the stories will emerge from being-with the students in
a pedagogical situation. The content is visualized with well-known stories from
myths and fables, as in the teacher Ganesh’s description of using stories from
Ramayana and Mahabharata in teaching to correlate with scientific concepts and
the heritage of India, or in Rani’s anecdote about using the folktale of the trust-
worthy cow, Punyakoti. The teachers also describe teaching itself as storytelling,
as in Madhurima’s way of teaching the student to write or how Padama uses the
story of Bundi to teach the concept of evaporating. In our interpretation, their
storytelling is a way to open up the subject of teaching as meaning making and to
connect the content to something that the students already know or understand.
Listening to a story is not just about expectations of experiencing the story
in your own imagination but also about experiencing the story emotionally in the
storyteller’s bodily postures, gestures, and facial expressions (Hydén 130; Young,
“Gestures and the Phenomenology” 81). Rani describes how the students are
“stuck there in her eyes,” and she even cried herself and noticed their bodily relief
at the end of the story. When we are telling stories, we engage bodily and there is
264 n Storytelling as Teaching

involvement, especially with iconic gestures when unfolding the taleworld where
the events in the story take place (Young, “Gestures and the Phenomenology”
87). Iconic gestures imitate concrete actions and events (McNeill 105), giving
a complementary understanding to the meaning of a story and often making
emotions visible. On the basis of this, we can interpret the Indian teachers’
descriptions of their storytelling as suggesting that they become more bodily
engaged in their teaching by storytelling. Their personal involvement becomes
explicit in their embodied storytelling about the teaching content. Furthermore,
we interpret their experiences of storytelling as interwoven with their natural way
of teaching and not as a performance. It also seems to be in line with what Marvin
describes as Indian domestic storytelling without the use of dramatic performance
(104), but nevertheless, from a phenomenological perspective we argue that the
teachers’ experiences of embodied storytelling highlight a personal, emotional,
and relational way of teaching.

Conclusion

The findings from the analysis of the Indian teachers’ description of their story-
telling as context-bound and being-with enable further development of the concept
of tact to include tact of telling. The Indian teachers’ storytelling practice is not
described here as a teaching method but instead as an everyday-ness of being a
teacher. This means that the description of their storytelling is not to be inter-
preted as an answer to a pedagogical question about how to conduct teaching more
efficiently, based on students’ learning outcomes, but an answer to a pedagogical
question about how to make teaching more relational, emotional, and meaning-
ful. Being-with, as we interpret these Indian teachers’ descriptions, signifies a
recognition of the ambiguity of the experience of storytelling where distance—in
the imaginary time and space of the taleworld, creates a closeness through self-re-
flection and emotion. Following from Young’s argument that storytelling creates
a reflective distance to events being retold as well as enabling emotional closeness
to the same events in the storytelling occasion, we suggest that this ambiguity
of distance and closeness in storytelling, from a phenomenological perspective,
enables and encourages the student’s individual reflection and emancipation. The
teacher Madhur, for example, uses the parrot story as a way to encourage students
to have a creative attitude, in contrast to just silently consuming performance,
 Henricsson and Claesson n 265

knowledge, and stories. This is in line with what McManimon stresses about
transformative storytelling as a thinking tool that asks teachers and students to
involve emotions and “imagine different ways of being human” (229). So, from the
Indian teachers’ way of being storytelling teachers, we can learn that storytelling
can be lived and experienced as a situated teaching practice from being-with and
not as a method or theory of being-for teaching. A question that remains is whether
storytelling as being-with is feasible in other countries—bearing in mind that most
of the teachers in western countries nowadays are neither familiar with nor make
much use of their oral storytelling tradition.

Appendix 1: Information about the participating teachers

approximate number
name gender level taught
of years as a teacher
Aditi F 2 Primary school
Chandi F 12 High school
Chitra F 8 Primary school
Ganesh M 30 High school
Garuda F 7 Primary school
Kumuda F 45 Primary school
Lalesa F 28 High school
Madhur F 5 Lower secondary school
Madhurima F 38 Preschool
Mahesa F 35 Lower secondary school
Manda F 6 Primary school
Matrika F 30 Lower secondary school
Nandini F 5 Primary school
Natesa F 17 Primary school
Neeja F - Secondary school
Padma F 15 Primary school
Rani F 5 Preschool
Siti F - Preschool
Uma F 10 Primary school
Vadin M 19 Primary school
266 n Storytelling as Teaching

Appendix 2: Interview questions

Introduction:

■ Why did you become a teacher?

■ For how long have you been a teacher?
■ What age group do you teach?

Bridge:

■ Describe a memory when someone told you a story.

Storytelling in school:

■ If you use storytelling in teaching, what stories do you usually tell?

■ Describe your way of telling stories, your technique.
■ Why do you tell stories?
■ Do you tell the stories spontaneously or are they usually planned in
advanced?

An anecdote:

■ Can you give us an example, as an anecdote, about an event that occurred

while telling a story in teaching?

Ola Henricsson is a PhD student in pedagogical work in the Department of Pedagogical,

Curricular, and Professional Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His research
focuses on storytelling and teaching, more specifically, teachers’ lived experience of telling
stories. He is also a teacher educator and a seminar leader at the annual conference of
ETEN—European Teacher Education Network, where teacher educators from Europe
and the United States meet in the Creative Storytelling group.

Silwa Claesson is professor at the Department of Pedagogical, Curricular, and Professional

Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research interest has most of all
to do with the relation between theories of learning and everyday classroom teaching.
 Henricsson and Claesson n 267

Her empirical studies are based on phenomenological assumptions of lived experience

and have a special focus on the lived body. The research focus has also to do with PhD
supervision and the concept of Bildung in relation to the concept of NPM in relation to
teaching and learning.

NOTE

1. This was a part of a larger cultural exchange between the Västra Götaland region in
Sweden and a corresponding region in South India, Karnataka, where the largest
city is Bangalore.

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