Discovery Tools for Topics & Subjects in Youth Literature

There's not one right way to teach storytelling in the classroom. While some educators may prefer to have entire lessons or units on The Art of Storytelling, others may wish to integrate elements of storytelling into minilessons or other subjects. In fact, storytelling can be incorporated into any subject area. In the graph below, observe how one single folktale about a gecko has applications in virtually every subject taught in school:

Source: Margaret Read MacDonald, The Storyteller's Start-Up Book 

So rather than trying to prescribe a particular storytelling program, the ideas and resources below are meant to get educators to start thinking about what role storytelling can play in their classroom.

Writing, Telling, & Performing Folktales

Elementary school children are beginning to develop empathy for others and a sense of humor, gain more independence and curiosity about the world around them, and expand their understanding of language and fantasy (Huck 44-50). Young children tend to love stories, but that love needs to be carefully cultivated if they are to become proficient storytellers in their own right.

Folktales can be used to help children understand the building blocks of stories. Students can break down elements of a story using a story pyramid or story map. 

Writing, Telling, & Performing Folktales

These days, storytelling in the secondary classroom is often limited to speech or creative writing electives, if it's even taught at all. But storytelling skills are interdisciplinary with all subjects. Cause-and-effect is storytelling. In his groundbreaking book Minds Made for Stories: How We Really Read and Write Informational and Persuasive Texts, educator Thomas Newkirk explains, "Narrative is a form or mode of discourse that can be used for multiple purposes... we use it to inform, to persuade, to entertain, to express." Having students practice storytelling with folktales can help them develop skills such as:

• use narrative techniques to develop experiences, events, and characters
• apply the writing process, such as idea development and editing, to their written work
• present information in a logical and interesting way

Telling folktales can take a variety of forms in a secondary classroom. For instance, students can retell a folktale in an original children's book they create, using the combination of words and images for maximum impact. Students can dramatize myths in contemporary settings, demonstrating how many themes are universal and timeless. Students can relate the messages of classic fables to current news stories, illustrating how the tales we hear as children can serve as warnings or descriptions of human behavior. Students can use allusions and symbols of folktales in debates. They can dramatize scientific processes such as meiosis and mitosis using fairytale archetypes. Even though many of these stories have existed for hundreds of years, the ways in which we can apply them are endless.

As most students are already familiar with many folktales, they can be deployed effectively for practicing for a more difficult assignment. Here are two examples of using folktales for practice:

1. In preparing for a major speech, students can practice elements of delivery (poise, eye contact, volume, etc.) using Aesop's fables. Each student picks a fable and tells it in front of the class in 30 seconds, being sure to include the moral at the end. Telling a simple story can help reduce stage fright and allow students to focus on their delivery. Afterwards, the teacher can ask audience members to provide feedback (ex. "Raise your hand if the speaker made eye contact with you.").
2. In learning how to use video editing tools for a multimedia project, students can create a 10-20 second practice video using a nursery rhyme. This practice video allows for them to experiment with visuals, audio, voiceover, titles, etc. in a low-stakes environment before beginning a high-stakes project.

As one can see with the examples above, folktales can be used in service of other forms of storytelling or they can be they a focus of storytelling themselves. Even if two students happen to select the same folktale to present, the teacher can guide the audience through understanding how each retelling included different choices for different purposes. One final point: While you won't find anything in the teaching standards about having fun, students love stories. They love hearing stories and telling stories and playing with stories. An entire curriculum doesn't need to be tossed out in order to build storytelling units from the ground up. Instead, try to find ways to bring storytelling into things you're already doing. It's a surefire way to bring joy into your classroom!

Analyzing Folktales

At this age, students are capable of and willing to explore and question the explicit and implicit meanings of the tales they learned as younger children. Using folktales can help students sharpen their literary analysis skills, such as the ability to:

• Cite evidence within a text to determine the author's intent
• Compare and contrast themes between two or more texts 
• Evaluate the effectiveness of a creator's stylistic choices

Comparing and contrasting different adaptations of well-known stories, like "The Three Little Pigs" or "Cinderella", can raise important questions about the values of the time that are reflected. For example, the famous 1933 Walt Disney Silly Symphonies cartoon "Three Little Pigs" has a strong moral about the importance of hard work, as demonstrated by the working class Practical Pig heroically saving the foppish and lazy Fifer Pig and Fiddler Pig from the Big Bad Wolf. In this version, the Big Bad Wolf is wearing raggedy and patchy pants, visually casting him as a "hobo" type threat (below left). At one point in the cartoon, the Big Bad Wolf dresses as a Jewish peddler in order to trick the pigs into letting him inside their house. That scene clearly reflected casual antisemitism in America in the same year when Nazi Germany created numerous antisemitic policies.  

Pairing different adaptations allow students to analyze the art style, characterization, tone, morality, and author's intent of each text. For example, the Big Bad Wolf is portrayed as a child bully in James Marshall's 1984 The Three Little Pigs (above center) and as an intellectual in John Scieszka's 1989 The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! (above right). The variety of depictions of the Big Bad Wolf character alone can provide students with an opportunity for text-based analysis in which text complexity is not a barrier.

Your public library likely has several different children's book adaptations of the same popular folktale, which allows you to have many copies on hand for a lesson. For example, if you have 24 students in your class, you can have 8 groups of 3 students each read a different version of "The Three Little Pigs" and share their analysis with the class.

For deeper analysis, you can teach more complicated tales with an even wider diversity of world variations. A great deal of scholarship has been dedicated to stories like "Cinderella" and "Hansel and Gretel", allowing for exploration of everything from gender roles discourse to film studies to archetype analysis. Literary fairy tales also provide material for high-level analysis. Authors like Angela Carter have beautifully-written and thought-provoking short stories that offer different perspectives on classic tales like "Bluebeard" and "Little Red Riding Hood". The graphic novel series Fables has fairy tale characters living in modern New York, grappling with assimilating into our contemporary society. Secondary students can participate in Socratic Discussions or write Literary Analysis essays about these texts.

Researching Folktales & Folklore

Students need a lot of guidance when developing mastery of the research methods necessary to succeed in school. Such skills include the ability to:

• Gather authoritative and relevant primary and/or secondary sources
• Assess the reliability and effectiveness of their sources
• Present their findings in an organized manner using a variety of formats

Teens and preteens are often questioning their place in the world. Paradoxically, they tend to take for granted the rich cultural heritage they already belong to. A research project centered around folktales and folklore can take instruction outside of the classroom and provide students a chance to learn about the community around them. Every community has folklore, and many people are happy to pass along what they know, especially community elders and local historians. In his book Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk & Fairy Tales, folktale scholar Jack Zipes writes, "Folklore thrives on the collective, active participation of the people who control their own expressions." In other words, by researching local folklore, students are not only practicing their research skills, they are also taking an active role passing on their own cultural beliefs and practices.

Follow the link below to see an example research assignment centered around local folklore.