Linking problem solving through storytelling for Indian school students

Have you ever thought how to do problem solving through storytelling for Indian school students? For any individual the most common problem in everyday life is problem solving against the challenges faced. Storytelling is an art that helps the individuals to solve problems in a creative way in their daily lives. So you might ask what is storytelling?

Wiki explains that, ‘’ Storytelling describes the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics or embellishment.’’ The literature states storytelling as ‘’ Storytelling is the conveying of events in words, images, and sounds often by improvisation or embellishment.’’ History states that, ‘Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture and in every land as a means of entertainment, education, preservation of culture and in order to instill moral values.’ Since the earliest civilisation, ‘’the earliest forms of storytelling are thought to have been primarily oral combined with gestures and expressions.’’ The stories in our history have been carved, scratched, painted, printed, or inked onto wood or bamboo, ivory and other bones, pottery, clay tablets, stone, palm-leaf books, skins (parchment), bark cloth, paper, silk, canvas and other textiles, recorded on film and stored electronically in digital form.

Problems are inevitable in school life and remember that problems in student life are solvable. Facing the solving problems is a pretty good description of student life in school. So when you understand the problem-solving nature of stories, it becomes obvious that we love storytelling but not able to master storytelling skills. And when you see how to use stories for problem-solving, you will have a secret method, to solve any student life problem . Problem-solving with story is an all-purpose, money-making, timesaving, status-building, enjoyment tool. Storytelling is a meta-skill! There are four types of storytelling – linear Narrative, a linear narrative presents the events of the story in the order in which they actually happened, Non-linear Narrative,Quest Narrative, viewpoint Narrative.

You might be thinking, ‘It’s not that simple…’; and your question that storytelling is not really about problem-solving, it is about entertainment, human connection and emotions, or something else. Let us teach you the basics of storytelling. The Five Cs of storytelling are – characters, conversations, circumstance, curiosity,  and conflict.

So how to inculcate the storytelling and problem solving for school children? As a student, the problem-solving abilities in school children can be evaluated in three methods:

1. by asking for examples of times when you previously solved a problem;
2. by presenting you with certain hypothetical situations and asking how you would respond to them;
3. and by seeing how you apply your problem-solving skills to different tests and exercises.

Some of the golden rules for the school children for problem solving-

Step 1: Identify the Problem. …

Step 2: Analyze the Problem. …

Step 3: Describe the Problem. …

Step 4: Look for Root Causes. …

Step 5: Develop Alternate Solutions. …

Step 6: Implement the Solution. …

Step 7: Measure the Results.

The above approach is a testimony that storytelling is for sharing and storytelling interpreting the school life problems and school life experiences. This in turn, leads to learning in social environment, like storytelling in classroom. Teaching school students storytelling is an excellent strategy before they become adolescents. However, remember that storytelling for school students is adaptive for all ages of school students. So if you leave out the notion of age of the child and storytelling, or segregation, then storytelling is an art for all ages. However the type of story changes as per age, plot and ability to comprehend. Storytelling is a method to teach school children ethics, teach values to school children and teach cultural norms to children.  and differences. As the school students grow up, they enter college or university which have a different form of life. Human knowledge is built on the basis of stories heard or learnt. So when school students grow up passing out of school, colleges, universities towards job or entrepreneurship, they start to tell their personal stories. The human brain contains the cognitive machinery necessary to understand, remember and tell stories. And using their past experiences in school, students are able to solve their life problems better. Problem solving through storytelling for Indian school students is therefore a technique that enables school children to create lasting personal connections, promote innovative problem solving. Storytelling foster a shared understanding with fellow school classmates regarding their future career ambitions.

– @UniversityofSt3