Stories in motion: Opening minds through storytelling

200 students attend storytelling session at OUP

KARACHI: The world is not made of atoms. It is made of stories.

The quote by American poet and political activist Muriel Ruykeser highlights the necessity of stories and storytelling in our daily lives.

On Thursday, as many as 200 eager students attended the storytelling session held at the auditorium of Oxford University Press, Korangi. The event was organised by Charter for Compassion in partnership with Jubilee Life insurance.

Besides the storytelling session, the young participants were also shown educational videos. The participants belonged to four different schools — Iqra Grammar School, Muslim Public School, Urooj Public School and Touheed Public School.

Talking to The Express Tribune, organiser Ravina Anthony of the Charter for Compassion said that storytelling helps children learn things quicker as it is a different way of learning. She added that in collaboration with the OUP, they had organised this session under their collaborative libraries project.

Bringing stories to life

Woahhhh, I hope we won’t fall from it, screamed Kipper. It flew over the mountains while Biff and Kipper were fascinated by the beautiful sights when suddenly their flying carpet was stopped by a window…

The passage from The Flying Carpet by Roderick Hunt was narrated to the students by Razia Khan of the OUP while she read out the story to them. Khan managed to capture the attention of the children with her narrative skills and made the characters from story, Biff, Kipper and Chip, come to life.

Reading out another story about a clever fox and a slow-witted goat, Khan narrated the tale where a fox while hunting for prey falls down in a well. Soon, a goat comes to drink water and the fox convinces it to come down the well. When the goat comes down, the fox climbs onto the goat and manages to get out, leaving the goat alone in the well.

After the story was finished, Khan asked the students the lesson they learned from the tale. The students responded together that they should be careful and not trust strangers.

After the end of the session, a teacher from Muslim Public School, Bushra, remarked that the event was not just a learning experience for the students but also for the teachers. It taught us how to incorporate storytelling in our method of teaching so as to improve the learning of children, she added.

“We have never learned things like this,” said a class four student of Touheed Public School, Usman Khan. “This method should also be adopted [by] our school.”

Published in The Express Tribune, November 18^th, 2016.