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Elementary school teachers are in the business of getting and keeping attention — the most valuable currency in the classroom. Storytelling is a timeless way to do that, but most schools of education don’t teach it as a distinct subject.

at East Tennessee State University is a noteworthy exception. “Teachers are storytellers every day,” says. “Storytelling strengthens teachers’ ability to build oral language, facilitate discussion, connect learning across disciplines and help students organize their ideas for reading and writing. And those are instructional practices that ultimately benefit students.”

Wood, whose job entails preparing nearly 100 pre-service teachers to go out into the field, says that storytelling serves as an antidote to standards, testing and licensure requirements from the state. 

Becoming a storyteller also boosts confidence — a crucial asset when you’re up in front of 20 or 30 little critics.That might be one of the reasons that it’s catching on beyond schools of education. recently began a collaboration with inviting teachers to reimagine their classrooms as sites where stories are told and listened to. The international nonprofit also trains educators in storytelling in order to build student engagement, empathy, and sense of belonging. 

Wood describes the storytelling culture of east Tennessee, how storytelling fits into her pedagogical approach and how technology does and doesn’t support this skill. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Would you say storytelling is a part of Appalachian culture?

In our Appalachian communities, storytelling was a way that news traveled. It was a way to convey knowledge from one generation to another. I grew up in the area of . I’m thinking of one about a young couple who got married and built their cabin on this beautiful natural rock, and it even had a hole in the middle for the mop water … and it turns out they were on a rattlesnake den. 

I see you’re wearing a Dolly Parton t-shirt. 

We played her music all day yesterday in class. She is definitely a giant.

Beyond her music and her philanthropy and her style, she was a storyteller. She came from that tradition and brought in humor as well as all the qualities of a good storyteller. 

Absolutely. It hit me that I’m one generation away from where she grew up [in eastern Tennessee]. My mother often spoke about waking up in the morning and an inch of snow being on her quilt from the snow blowing in through the logs of the little log cabin that she grew up in. And then many of my students said, “Yeah, my grandma grew up like that.” 

These are future teachers. How do they apply storytelling techniques?

Storytelling is the invisible pedagogy. We talk a lot about, ‘Are you telling, or are you teaching? Are you interacting with your audience?’ And storytelling as performance and storytelling as a pedagogy are very different. 

Could you elaborate on the difference?

You’re not storytelling as a performance; you’re storytelling as a pedagogical move. You engage the other person. You engage your students. You teach them how to engage with each other in a similar manner, because doing so not only helps you with those cognitive brain functions, boosting oral language, being able to ask pertinent questions, listening to someone else, having an awareness of your audience, who are you speaking to, being able to facilitate a discussion and just being responsive to your students. But it also gives you and them an access point to the difficult stuff, the curriculum, the content. It helps teachers organize information so that their students can understand.

Where have you seen storytelling work where conventional methods fail?

I see teachers using the art of storytelling to break down complex notions. I observed one teacher trying to talk about the Big Dipper with her first graders. She immediately started telling a story about how in her grandmother’s house there was a big dipper in a pot of water, and they would all come from working in the garden and drink from this dipper of water. And she was using that actively to negotiate the meaning with students or connect the shape of the constellations. Some teachers use familiar cultural markers like farming, quilting and canning that have survived across generations. 

Schools of education don’t explicitly teach the art of storytelling, but would you say it’s always present?

As a university, we don’t necessarily say, “You need to learn how to tell stories in order to keep your class engaged.” But I find that I often model those things and talk about the human aspect, connecting to the humans in your classroom to make it relational, to see a connection. Anytime we’re involving emotion, we’re tapping into something deeper rather than just delivering the curriculum. 

Is it a way of opening up and sharing who they are?

I do think teachers need to hear narratives about themselves. I just co-hosted our annual , and we had Andy Hare, principal at Sullivan High School in Bluff City, Tennessee. His message dealt with blocking out the noise to hear the ‘call for education.’ He told a story about his dad, who had been a longtime basketball coach for the high school girls basketball team. He grew up listening to his father advocate for students and then connected it to everything that’s going on in the media that’s negative, but how even through all the mess and the muck to focus on the call. 

Do the stories make lessons more personal and authentic?

Storytelling is a mechanism to say, “Hey, this is who I am. This is how I’ve taken this journey. Maybe my grandparents were educators and therefore I’m going to be an educator. Or maybe I’m a first-generation college graduate who has just strived to claw my way out of poverty, and education is my livelihood. It is truly my calling.” 

And that’s sort of your own story, right? You’re the first in your generation to go to college.

That is correct. I wanted to go into psychiatry counseling, but the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator told me I would be a good teacher and I could graduate early and get a job early. In my family growing up, I was always the one who gathered the kids and worked with kids and helped with homework and such. 

Who do you consider to be a trailblazer in education and storytelling? 

[storyteller, author, and recording artist] comes to mind. Some of what he does is fictional; some of it is not. He talks about weaving together the story, blurring the details between reality and fantasy. I think he has a gig where you try to pinpoint the lie. Is he lying or is he telling the truth? He’s fascinating. 

In what ways does technology aid or interfere with storytelling?

I do take issue with a child just wasting away and doing nothing but sitting in front of the tablet or the device nonstop. I’ve been reading the research about how we’re losing our ability to connect with other humans. Storytelling gives us something that technology can’t. You have to imagine. You have to visualize what the other person is describing without this illustration on the screen. And so some of that brain work is just given to us. We’re not having to grow those dendrites. However, I do think that technology, if looked at from a certain angle, can make it a little easier to preserve our stories in a way for future generations to access.

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