storytelling
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For too many people, history was taught with straight-up textbooks, primary sources, and maybe a documentary or two. I knew my students were already learning history—through movies, music, and even memes. The catch? They weren’t always learning it accurately. The problem was how to help my students realize history was far more interesting than reading
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I once hiked a mountain trail in Colorado and ran into a retired geologist who casually mentioned that the rocks beneath our feet were older than the Roman Empire. Naturally, I turned it into a lesson. Summer is full of these moments—unexpected facts, new places, chance conversations. Whether you’re traveling abroad or just camping an
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As we wrap up our discussion on the role and nuances of storytelling in cultures around the world, I hope you’ve enjoyed our journey. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of storytelling in oral cultures is their reliance on collective memory. In the Age of Information, the amount of text we’re confronted with is astounding. This
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Western society isn’t the only one to rely on chronological order and the written word to preserve stories. It would be naive to think a culture fits into any sort of predetermined format. Other societies that included a reliance on written records can be found throughout history. The Chinese bureaucratic tradition became a staple of
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We’ve been discussing the role storytelling plays in both learning and our understanding of the past. The reliance, in the west, of a chronological, list based history can be a challenge when looking at other ways of passing down knowledge from generation to generation. Let’s take a look at an example. The Polynesian legends about
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I hope you had a great week. We’ve been looking at how using storytelling in the classroom increases engagement and retention. So why does storytelling seem to decline as students move through school? By the time students are in high school, they are all too familiar with note-taking as the primary means of learning new
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History is more than just dates and facts—it’s a collection of stories that shape how we understand the past. But how we tell those stories matters just as much as the events themselves. Do we rely on detailed notes and written records, or do we embrace the power of oral storytelling? The way we present
Lyceum of History 