In this article, the author takes a multidimensional and personal look at creative writing work in an assisted living facility. The people she works with at the facility have memory loss. She shares her experience working with these people and describes a storytelling workshop that was modeled after Timeslips, a program started by Anne Basting at…

Vivian Gussin Paley is a teacher, writer, lecturer, and advocate for the importance of play for young children. Author of a dozen books about children learning through play, she has received numerous honors and awards including an Erickson Institute Award for Service to Children, a MacArthur Foundation Fellows award, and a John Dewey Society's…

Theatre is a dangerous witness, challenged with multiple responsibilities of integrity, imagination, inspiration and craft. I explore the relationship between failure, witnessing, and displacement in a class grappling with their own backgrounds, migrations and interrogations of the idea of place and home. We approach performing testimony as an…

A famous author, scholar, and folklorist recounts his experience with stories and storytellers. Encourages educators to cultivate for children the world of imagination, thought, and intuition. (AEA)

The power of language gives children (and the rest of us) that "magic" talent of bringing to life that which is otherwise hidden from conscious awareness. From the viewpoint of one attempting to listen to children's languaging within experience so that the listening becomes a dialogic experience, the child storyteller seems to experience…

Describes the stories told by two three-year-olds and suggests that the storytelling process is a healthy expression of children's imaginations. (DD)

Discusses censorship in libraries, particularly relating to children's books, from the perspective of an editor. The power of words, the diversity of stories and characters, story and imagination, and the responsibility of librarians are discussed. (LRW)

This paper discusses reasons why oral storytelling is a useful technique and presents step-by-step instructions for how to tell a story. Among the advantages discussed are: immediacy, relevancy, versatility, lack of visual stimuli to limit conceptualization, and eye contact. Techniques are presented for three components of the storytelling…

Evoking storytelling as a human tendency, suggests that stories involve sight, sound, rhythm, voice, and spontaneous imagination. Claims that because stories appeal to children's inner lives, they are optimal for communicating "life and human relationships and the totality of the natural world." Also claims that stories encourage…

Presents an essay by renowned author of young adult literature Robert Cormier, musing on the autobiographical aspects of his own writings as well as writing in the guise of people or about situations to which he is a complete stranger. (SR)

Encourages the integration of storytelling into environmental and outdoor education to help urban children regain their lost connections to nature. The environmental educational story can be seen as a symbolic perception of the natural world that complements a child's experience and observation of nature and promotes imagination and an…

Literacy must be grounded in creation: imagination, vision, revision, metaphor, and image. Literacy entails imaginative interpretation of texts in private and social contexts. Literacy education that ignores storytelling in favor of "practical" skills prevents construction of perspectives that make experience comprehensible. (SK)

The problem of exclusivity figures large in education. How can we educate to deconstruct exclusivity and invent inclusivity? This article asserts that an unexamined veneration for the "objective" academic voice is at least partly responsible for the strong tendency to exclusivity, while suggesting that the subjective voice of storytelling can…

Explores the profound connection between human memory and imagination. Educational ideas that find only incompatibility between memorizing and developing imagination and procedural skills are inadequate. Viewing teaching as story telling transforms the curriculum from a huge mass of predigested material to a collection of great stories reflecting…

Examines the role of metaphor and narrative in the interpretive organization of feelings and knowledge, especially in children. Looks at a particular case of figurative speech--a child's storytelling--to show how imaginative narrative may carry important clues about the child's inner world of experience. (MG)