Stories as Teaching Tools

It's been a while since my last post. I've been busy with writing and teaching. In the first case, I've gotten caught up in the revise and resubmit cycle as I submit articles for publication. Same with teaching: prepping, grading, etc. In both of these cases, it's easy to lose track of the stories I'm trying to tell. All of which prompts me to consider the role of stories in my teaching.

For my morning classes, I come into the lecture hall at the tail end of a History professor's basic course. And I listen, caught up in the stories he tells to teach the class about English expansion and Napoleon's conquest, about the development of raw materials like gold and salt as precious commodities, about ethnic strife. And I think about what I teach: theories and concepts broken down into bits and pieces, partly because of who I'm teaching (first-year students), but also, I think, because of the subject matter.

I know that many communication scholars, especially qualitative communication scholars (like H.L. Goodall and others), claim that scholarly articles and theories are themselves narratives, stories. So, what are the stories in a basic communication course?

I'm sure they're there. But because the basic communication course (which often focuses on public speaking) is chunked up into discrete skills (language use, gestures, researching, using citations, supporting arguments, volume, rate, pitch, etc.) for the purpose of teaching students both "life skills" and skills that will be useful to them for the rest of their college careers, the format resists stories and a "big picture" approach. And believe me, I've tried time and again to stress the latter. But without much life experience, it's difficult, I think, for students to appreciate the big picture.

So, the question for me becomes not only what stories do I tell, but how do I tell them? It's a shame that many of the basic studies-general education classes we ask students to take resist the story form, as that's what students are most used to (in songs, movies, television shows). My task, then, is to figure out the stories embedded in common communication experiences and attempt to tell them. But whose stories? Mine? Some students could surely relate, but there's a generation gap that may be difficult to cross. Theirs? I can't speak for them. I continue to look for the stories to tell.