Great stories happen to those who know how to tell them (Ira Glass).
In the context of the project StoryComp, we have developed a guide to motivate and encourage adult educators to practice their skills together. Our guide “How to organize a storytelling workshop with adult educators?” is a collection of practical storytelling exercises in different contexts, with direct applicability that allows adult educators to implement peer-to-peer workshops to strengthen and practice storytelling skills together in their own institution or with peers from the same field of education (basic education or civic education).
To facilitate the use of the activities, we have divided them into 7 main themes and for each theme we have developed 3 activities accompanied by an explanatory video in order to allow the adult educator to more easily imagine their implementation in his/her educational context.
Below you can find the 7 categories with a short description and find all the videos and activities on this webpage: https://storycomp.eu/workshop_en/
- Selection of stories and skills
How do I find a story that fits what I want to achieve with my students? How do I know what a particular story is about? To select stories and skills, there are countless possibilities. We will show you two examples in this section: one structured and guided and the other free and self-organized.
- Development of additional skills
This stage of storytelling begins once the story has been told. The challenge is to help students further develop and transfer their skills to other educational or everyday life situations.
- Identify narrative spaces
A story is more than just a plot. The space, the environment, the atmosphere, all of these influence the story and the audience. It’s about how we consciously choose and shape the setting of our story.
Why do we present stories? It’s important to know why you choose the way you want to present your story. So use everything you have, your voice, your body, your mind, your facial expressions, maybe props and tools to woo your audience, or engage the audience, as part of the whole story and storytelling .
- It supports the brain and memory
To tell a good story, you must first remember it. Here you can practice simple techniques to help you remember stories easily. And we guide you on how to use stories to remember everyday things.
- Develop storytelling skills
Here you will find activities that specifically develop storytelling skills. This includes biographical accounts and the retelling of existing traditional stories.
How can you engage your listeners, your students, in the story to capture their attention, make them actively participate in the story, and help them develop their senses, imagination, and skills?
In order to test all these activities, each partner had to organize workshops locally with a group of adult educators who wanted to implement the StoryComp method and tools with their own adult learners.
In France, for example, we have contacted several partners in the Pau region who are involved in the field of adult education, such as social centres, second chance schools or reception centers for asylum seekers who offer language courses to their residents. We managed to bring together about twenty people including adult educators, foreign language teachers, volunteers who work with migrants, European project managers and people curious to discover our project and our tools.
The goal was to bring them together for a day around our project, to present the results to them but above all to make them aware of the usefulness of storytelling in their professional or voluntary practice. And Bingo!!! Our tool was not only liked, but managed to trigger a whole reflection on a regular future implementation of our activities with the people who took part in the day and the possibility of spreading it to their peers.
The participants realized that there is a little storyteller hidden in each of them, but they really needed a little help to bring it out.
The Erasmus+ StoryComp project
StoryComp is the acronym of “Storytelling Skills for Trainers of Adults in Basic and Civic Education”. The project started in November 2020 and ended in October 2022. The partnership behind this project is made up of experts from seven European countries.
All project results are available online in 5 languages (Dutch, English, French, German and Slovenian) on the project website https://storycomp.eu.
