Having skills-tagged our academic programs using tools like EMSI Burning Glass, accreditation bodies, and our programs’ industry advisory boards, the next task was to help our faculty pivot quickly and support students in this ever-evolving environment. Could a faculty development opportunity in Storytelling help?
Storytelling is re-emerging as an important skill for educators, a tool to foster empathetic environments for diverse learner populations. In higher education there is particular urgency around this skillset, with increased calls for faculty who are competent storytellers and who can connect stories to course content, real life, and career relevance. (Alderman, Perez, Eaves, Klein, & Munoz, 2021; Astiz, 2020; Kromka, Goodboy & Banks, 2019; Berger, 2019).
Our university has always focused on career-relevant curriculum. Now, the University is “doubling down” on its mission once again in response to the widening Skills Gap. Having skills-tagged our academic programs using tools like EMSI Burning Glass, accreditation bodies, and our programs’ industry advisory boards, the next task was to help our faculty pivot quickly and support students in this ever-evolving environment. We asked:
Is there a better way for faculty to connect with students and show empathy?
Is there a better way for faculty to illustrate the career relevance of our curriculum?
To answer these questions and more, we developed and piloted a new faculty development workshop dedicated to storytelling and its application to career-relevant curriculum. The workshop consisted of five asynchronous weekly modules focused on the theory and practice of storytelling, the use of storytelling as a teaching tool, and storytelling as a way to highlight the career relevance of our curriculum for students. The experience culminated in a series of synchronous Storytelling Festivals where participants told their stories live and received real-time feedback from other course participants as well as facilitators. As an incentive to participate in our storytelling pilot, we awarded a Storyteller badge (through Credly’s digital credentialing platform) to faculty who successfully completed the workshop and presented their story live in one of our festivals. The pilot included full-time and adjunct faculty who taught undergraduate and graduate courses across various disciplines including information technology, psychology, education, math, accounting, history, health administration, writing, and nursing.
As the workshop began, faculty reported excitement and a little apprehension:
I’ve always thought the connections that faculty make with students are so important, and with all that’s happened over the last two years especially, I think it’s important now more than ever to make connections with students. Though I feel like I incorporate some aspects of storytelling in my discussions with students when I share my experiences with certain topics, I don’t feel like I fully understand how to incorporate this teaching strategy.
I am excited about this workshop to learn ways to include storytelling in the classroom. I feel I already do this to some degree; however, I would like to learn about this teaching strategy more formally. I love learning from stories and have found this to be a helpful tool in my own learning experiences; when I learn from stories others share, these stories stick with me in terms of what I learned.
In this workshop I hope to improve my storytelling skills so that I can better relay the practical application of the financial accounting concepts covered in the three Intermediate accounting courses. Having concrete examples presented often helps students to better comprehend the concepts being studied and tie them into their personal and professional life.
At the beginning of the workshop, participants were not sure how storytelling could be a powerful tool to create an empathetic classroom or to establish the relevance of our curriculum to the real world of different disciplines’ industry sectors. However, by the workshop’s end, all participants reported that storytelling was key to increased empathy and “connecting the dots” for students regarding career relevant curriculum.
Student survey data collection is ongoing and is overwhelmingly positive.
Throughout the presentation, presenters will use polls and word clouds, share story examples, and ask participants to construct and share their own 10 sentence story. Participants will walk away with an awareness of storytelling as: 1) a credible and relevant pedagogical strategy to increase faculty-student connection through increased empathy; 2) a way to underscore the career relevance of course concepts and topics; and 3) a powerful addition to their own professional development catalog.
References
Alderman, D., Perez, R.N., Eaves, L.E., Klein, P., & Munoz, S. (2021). Reflections on operationalizing an anti-racism pedagogy: teaching as regional storytelling. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 45(2): 186-200. DOI: 10.1080/03098265.2019.1661367
Astiz, M.F. (2020). Storytelling in the Higher Education Classroom: Why It Matters. College Teaching 68(4): 187-188. DOI: 10.1080/87567555.2020.1785382
Berger, R. (2019, October 4). Developing Student Storytelling to Develop Future Career Success. Forbes Magazine.
Kromka, S.M., Goodboy, A.K., & Banks, J. (2020) Teaching with relevant (and irrelevant) storytelling in the college classroom. Communication Education 69(2): 224-249. DOI: 10.1080/03634523.2019.1657156