Posted: 16th June 2021
Storytelling with young people
The Future Narratives partnership includes organisations with many years of combined experience in working with young people and those from backgrounds often marginalised in mainstream discourse. Our project allows us to share and develop this experience together, creating innovative and accessible pathways to engage, connect, and empower young people through the telling, hearing, and reimagining of the stories in which we live. When, as part of our first staff workshop, our partners discussed the ways in which we use storytelling in our work, key concepts and questions emerged to reflect both the diversity of our experience and the connections which bring us together.
Why is storytelling important? What can it achieve?
Stories exist across all cultures and periods, and repeated structures and patterns tell us much about the concerns and preoccupations of our society. We need to attend to the stories we tell and those told about us. We might see the modern world as preoccupied with self-expression, but it might be solipsistic, restricted by dominant narratives, and hindering us from genuine sharing. In this context, the ability to tell our story and listen to the stories of others can benefit us at a personal, communal and social level.
“We can become stuck in our stories. But we can also work to envisage change, to dream together, and to go on to take action.”
By constructing our own story, and connecting the dots between various aspects of our lives, whether positive or negative, we can better understand ourselves and feel truly alive. Sharing deep parts of ourself opens up our potentiality as a human, and by making the unconscious conscious we can make ourselves free. Narrative can in this way function as a kind of therapy, allowing us to make sense of and potentially heal from trauma in our pasts. Freedom and possibility can develop from the ability to tell our pasts in a different way.
Hakawati (“storyteller” in Arabic) are professional storytellers who understand the power of telling and retelling collective histories. Teenagers can have the idea of playing this role for their own communities, and so listening to young people, the stories they live, and the stories they tell, is crucial in our practice.
“Through creating a safe space for storytelling, and making people feel heard, we can understand stories as fuel for progress.”
How can we inspire young people to tell their stories?
Our work is based on giving people a space to think about the spaces they do not usually enter, and showing them stories they did not think were possible. Through this we can allow them to be free in their minds in a new way. We need to be sure that we are creating a real space to think, to create, and to be.
Young people create narratives through selection. We aim to give them a chance to create, and make this creation conscious. We have to be conscious about what narratives we share and what reality we want to create.
We need to ask, what is the focus for creating narrative? How do we enable balance between multiple narratives and multiple realities? Do we focus on a small or large scale? What histories do we want to record?
We can inspire young people by deconstructing academic knowledge into accessible parts that everyone can use and understand. A space can be created through offering rather than telling, and so creating a new system together in which inclusion is possible.