Storytelling to Inspire Positive Action

Learning opportunities that turn in on themselves have always appealed to me. I jump at the chance, for example, to facilitate webinars about how to facilitate webinars. Or presentations on how to effectively, engagingly deliver transformative presentations. So the opportunity to tell stories during a workshop on “Inspiring Positive Action through Storytelling” was one I grabbed, courtesy of colleagues at the Sacramento Chapter of ATD (the Association for Talent Development), late last week.

The results were magnificent.

It started with high levels of interactivity among a small group of co-conspirators in learning during that 90-minute “Inspiring Positive Action Through Storytelling” session online; this was a group of peers bringing years of experience to the table and willingly, concisely, engaging, and playfully sharing that experience in ways that made all of us better storytellers by the end of the time we had together. It continued with a combination of sharing information about incorporating storytelling into the work we do with discussions designed to find ways to apply what we were exploring into the work the learners would resume doing as soon as the session ended. And it included time to actually workshop a sample story that participants could adapt into the learning opportunities they design for their own learners.

We took a somewhat unusual approach to the idea of incorporating storytelling into learning: we focused as much on the stories we tell—or should be telling—to attract learners to our onsite and online learning opportunities as we spend on effectively incorporating storytelling into the onsite and online workshops and courses we provide. To set a context for the session, I opened with the story of how I had designed and facilitated a one-hour session at the request of a staff member in an organization where I was in charge of training. How she and I had discussed what she thought should be included in that session. How I put the word out about what the workshop offered interested staff members. And my surprise, on the day of the workshop, how I found myself facing only four people, from an organization with hundreds of employees, in the room where the workshop was taking place. And she—the person who had requested the course—was not among them. Because, as she told me later, she hadn’t needed the session; she just thought it was something others needed and would attend.

So, I suggested to my ATD Sacramento co-conspirators last week, there were a couple of lessons we could learn together—the first being that when someone tells us the story of what they need in a training-teaching-learning session, we need to ask how many people they are going to bring with them when they attend the session. And the second being that we need to be sure, in inviting people to the sessions we design and facilitate, that we are telling a story compelling enough to make them come to what we are providing.

The headline to your announcement should be like a six-word story, I suggested. It should be compelling, be complete in and of itself, and show readers/prospective learners why that session is something they absolutely do not want to avoid.

I suggested that the story should have elements that are universal to the experience of those we are trying to reach: “She lived and then she died” is a six-word story that describes the human condition because we all live and (expect to) die, but it leaves room for a reader’s curiosity to kick into play, I noted—we want to know who she was, we want to know more about her life, we want to know how and why she died, and, if we trust the storyteller, we want to hear more because we know that storyteller is not going to let us down any more than a trainer-teacher-learner we trust is going to let us down if we sign up for that person’s workshop, course, or webinar. I quickly pivoted from that “universal” story to a few six-word stories more applicable to our learning offerings: “They learned, so their company prospered,” or “He studied and was then promoted,” or “We’ll make you better at work.” With those as templates, we can certainly craft variations that apply to and entice our learners as they decide where they are going to spend the limited amount of time they have for workplace learning.

We talked about how stories have to be meaningful to the learners. How they have to help learners fill their unmet (learning/workplace) needs. How they need to be personal. Brief. And inspirational. And then we came back to that all-important learning-space requirement: the opportunity, as a group, to craft a story specific enough to the work we are doing, yet universal enough to appeal to the learners we want to draw into our learning space.

But none of this, for me (and my co-conspirators—it’s always about the learners and rarely about me), is meaningful unless it produces results that benefit the learners and those they ultimately serve. It has to give us a concrete, documentable result demonstrating that the time we spend together produces something worth producing. And that’s exactly what I realized we had done when, less than three hours after the session had ended, I received a note from one of the workshop participants: “Thank you for the wonderfully inspirational time together today. I will be incorporating your ideas into my stories as I build a class on team building this afternoon.”

So, we started with a story about telling stories to draw learners to our sessions. And we worked as a short-term community of learning to explore how we might better incorporate stories into the work we do to produce positive results. And we produced another story—the brief story of how that participant was going to immediately apply what she had learned so she could better serve her own learners. Which, in turn, will produce additional inspiring stories when you apply these same ideas and approaches to the work you do with your own learners.

N.B. — To schedule onsite or online workshops on storytelling in learning, contact Paul at paul@paulsignorelli.com.

Coming Full Circle with Digital Storytelling in #etmooc

After dabbling with digital storytelling last week as part of the work I’m doing as a learner in #etmooc, the Education Technology and Media MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) organized by University of Regina professor of educational and media Alec Couros and several “co-conspirators,” I circled back on the theme in a more focused and serious way. And found myself in far deeper emotional waters than expected—as is often the case with any completely engaging learning experience.

Couros and his colleagues have offered us choices among eight different digital storytelling challenges ranging from simple acts (writing a six-word story and combining it with an emotionally engaging image) to an “ultimate challenge”: “Write a story, and then tell that same story digitally using any number of digital tools and freely available media! For inspiration and story creation guidance, see Alan Levine’s 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story.”

Starting simply, I tackled the six-word stories; saw the emotional depth others were achieving; and went back to the drawing board until I found one that promised to carry me into the level of exploration others had achieved: “Through stories, our departed remain alive.”

One of the departed who remain alive for me is David Moebs, who died from AIDS-related complications in June 1998, yet remains amazingly present. He was a person whose understated generosity made a substantial difference to his friends during his lifetime: at least three different times, he gave substantial amounts of money to friends in need, knowing that the money, if used wisely, would make life-changing differences for them. He had no expectation of receiving anything in return; he simply wanted to take action at the right moment, with people he perceived to be the right people.

It was not a complete surprise to me, therefore, that when I wrote about his spirit of volunteerism and generosity and posted the article online (more than a decade after he left us, in a rudimentary form of digital storytelling long before I ever heard the term), it touched a few people who still carried strong, positive memories that were rooted in his actions.

David Moebs

I was, in preparation for the #etmooc digital storytelling assignment, already going back to unpublished writing I had completed about David. I was also trying to find the appropriate way and tools to give new life to an old story. Video still felt a little beyond me; blogging felt as if it wouldn’t force me to stretch in ways the assignment was designed to make all of us as learners stretch. So I started looking for tools I hadn’t yet explored—Prezi and Vuvox among them—to see if I could revisit David’s story in my ongoing role as a learner. My starting point was to storyboard the effort using PowerPoint: I actually completed a draft that placed the script into the notes field of each slide; incorporated images licensed through Creative Commons and posted on flickr; began moving the images into Prezi and Vuvox; and recorded the script using Audacity.

That’s when I hit the sort of glitch we expect to find while learning: Vuvox wasn’t cooperating, and Prezi didn’t want to take the audio files in the format that Audacity produced and stored them. I did find an online service that would, for a fee, have transformed the recordings into a format compatible with what I had developed visually in Prezi, but I held myself back with a challenge to either locate a free online tool or find a new way to use existing tools that I already had acquired.

The solution proved simple once I returned to PowerPoint. Using the “sound” function that is under the “insert” tab within the program, I was able to easily re-record the individual elements of the script and insert them into each slide—and even pull in an audio clip from YouTube to pull the story together at a multi-media level.

And while I don’t expect to win any awards for innovations in digital storytelling, the entire exercise not only offered a wonderful opportunity to revisit an old friend, but to benefit further from the learning opportunities that #etmooc is producing at a time when so many of us are exploring what MOOCs are and will continue to offer as part of our overall learning environment. 

N.B.: This is the sixth in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc. The digital story described in this posting can be viewed online in “Slide Show” mode; to produce the audio, please click on the audio icons on each slide.