Storytelling as a curriculum

Storytelling has been a part of everyone’s childhood ever since one started to understand words. The imaginations and the ability to understand good and bad comes from these stories that either our mothers or grandparents have narrated to us.

However, with certain developments, this crucial chapter of our lives seems to have taken a back seat. Now, no more do we see a story book in the hands of a child, instead its a tablet or a phone for sure. With Kamal Pruthi, also famously known as Kabuli Wala, lets understand how important story-telling is for children and why it should be a part of curriculum in schools.

Commenting on how story-telling can help children, Pruthi said, “Storytelling is like having a pen-drive that you renew every time you want something new on it. The stories that family members tells to their children works the same way, they update your knowledge and excites you, making you re-tell them to people around you.

You like something, you want others to like it too and get benefitted, get entertained. This is the power of an engaging story. There is always, at least somebody in the family or friends circle to refresh your database by providing you entertaining, useful and meaningful content in the form of stories.

Further he spoke about how one can introduce storytelling and till which class it should be implemented, he said, “Dealing with children is a tough business and there is no easy way. One has to take a step at a time. Before you introduce the storytelling in your classes, a good amount of homework will have to go behind it.

Every time you narrate a story to students or children, you leave them with something new to learn and spread.”

Right from the selection and bundling of themes of relevant stories, for different age groups and classes of children to identifying the aptitude and selecting the teachers to take up the part role of a storyteller. These two steps can also take a long time in case, there is a lack of right approach, right content, time and a professional storytelling consultant in place.”

Kamal Pruthi also conducts storytelling workshops for primary teachers, parents and all those, who closely work with children or wish to become storytellers. “In primary classes, teaching through Storytelling is becoming basic need of the hour. In few schools, the experiments with storytelling are already happening. Some succeed, some fail. The majority of storytelling experiments which are failing in schools are mainly because of the lack of right skills.”

According to him, a professional storyteller is like a consultant, who should be approached to understand the dynamics of storytelling, to understand what stories are to be told, to which age group and to understand the distraction and the ways to deal with it during storytelling. Apart from it one has to also look at how to follow a non-preachy method, what traditional and cultural vocabulary and what concepts to transfer in what language, what is a taboo and what is not in children storytelling and so on. Are you already feeling overwhelmed? Well, these are excerpts from the workshop he conducts for teachers.

He further says that we have to understand and work on using stories as one of the main subjects from 1st to 6th standard as Stories provide intellectual nutrition to the child’s brain. They increase the proverbial vocabulary in their mind without following any rot learning, and one doesn’t really need to memorize a good story. He believes that there’s a long way to go to make storytelling an integral part of the primary classes regime. It has to start from somewhere and having stories told twice or thrice in a week to begin with, can be a good idea.

Talking about how has been teacher’s and school’s reaction to this idea, he expressed, “A lot of individual teachers have shown interest and do come to our storytelling workshop organized at our venue. Many schools want to adopt it but are indecisive and end up stating funds reasons for having such workshops organized in their schools. Mind you, they count among the richest schools of Delhi/NCR. Small NGOs and schools with brighter vision and ideology are quicker to invite us and adopt the methodologies.”

Concluding the conversation with us, Kamal said, “One and a half or two years ago CBSE introduced theatre in 10th 11th classes and also took a year’s time to create the curriculum, but there hasn’t been any substantial implementation of the move yet. It was a milestone decision but looks like it has gone to cold storage.”

So yes, Education system in India is changing for good. The books these days look much fancier than ever and have more relevant content than before. One can say the rusted engine of the education system has started functioning again, but with the speed of a tortoise. As they say, slow and steady wins the race, this ongoing revolution in the education sector will surely have theatre and storytelling as main subjects, at least one can hope for this in future.

Photo Credits: Manish Ojha and Akash Kumar