Lesson for the teacher

2017-02-28T17:50:01+00:00

Delia Lloyd describes how an unforeseen event during a storytelling workshop became the lesson itself.

‘This woman did so much more for our storytelling session than a thousand more examples could have done’

I’ve taught classes and run workshops for much of my adult life, so in some ways I shouldn’t have been surprised by what happened during a storytelling workshop with ��̳ Outreach recently. Still, it was a helpful reminder of that age-old adage - “the best laid schemes of mice and men” – that even the most carefully prepared plans can go wrong.

The workshop was for Migrant Voice, a London-based charity that works to strengthen the voice, participation and representation of migrants in the media. I was there with a colleague to deliver a day-long workshop entitled “Communication for Change,” which provided participants with a series of storytelling tools that can be used to create change.

We both work for ��̳ Media Action, the ��̳’s international development charity - which uses media and communication to foster good governance, health lives and resilient communities in the world’s most fragile settings. So this seemed like a fairly straightforward assignment.

We decided to begin the session with some examples of good storytelling in order to get the class thinking about the basic elements of a good story, things like emotion, concision, suspense, irony, and so on. We’d carefully selected four examples we were going to use in advance so that each one demonstrated a different technique or set of techniques.

One was a film about the use of technology by migrants in the most recent refugee crisis. A second was a very funny New York Times essay written by a woman explaining how she used animal training skills on her husband in order to make her marriage work better. But it was when we got to our third story –a Ted Talk done by a person suffering from Conversion Disorder (a debilitating illness that impairs normal activity) - that the whole training session got turned on its head.

Turns out, unbeknownst to us, a member of the group had been diagnosed with Conversion Disorder. Seeing the video upset her so much that she had to leave the room in order to gather her composure. For a few minutes, the entire training session came to a standstill. When she came back into the room, we weren’t sure quite what to expect. Would she yell at us? Tell us we’d been insensitive? Cry?

Instead, she did the most amazing thing. She told us her story: why she’d been diagnosed with this condition, what her daily suffering meant in terms of her complex medical care, how all of that linked to being a migrant here in the UK and - most importantly for her - the belief that this condition could be overcome. One workshop participant began to cry.

We never got to our fourth storytelling example. We didn’t need to. In opening up and speaking honestly about her illness, her journey and her identity as a migrant with this disease, this woman did so much more for our storytelling session than a thousand more examples could have done.

The moral of this story is that sometimes it pays to throw away the outline. As a trainer, you can plan all you like, but it’s often the unforeseen moment that completely upends your lesson plan that proves the most teachable and the most resonant. Equally, this was also a healthy reminder that the most powerful and resonant stories often come not from the teacher, but from the students.

��̳ Outreach & Corporate Responsibility brings the ��̳ closer to its audiences - particularly those audiences we have identified as harder to reach - with face-to-face activity, community support and staff volunteering.

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Lesson for the teacher

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