EXAMPLE REFLECTION- STORY TELLING

CHALLENGE AND SELECTION :

Storytelling is an “essential human activity” for sharing experiences, explaining values, and deciding on  solutions through vivid verbal and visual accounts. I work with low-Income students and This example is  of my journey finding out if story telling and design thinking can help in finding out the deeper problems  faced by these students. I believe so they can and the reasons are stated below

Storytelling helps explain the interconnections among people in situations and settings, teaching broad  lessons that engage real human beings. Listening engages people; and  empathy is an essential and  fundamental component in the process.

Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is. –Tim  O’Brien, (writer)

Stories generate questions and questions expand the breadth and depth of stories, leading to lots of  innovative thoughts and ideas. Storytelling becomes an important tool for feedback, which is the basis  of the iterative process of prototyping that lead to solutions. Stories and prototypes are intertwined,  explaining and repositioning experiences through a multitude of potential interpretations, which allow  researchers to test new solutions before committing exclusively to a particular policy, program, or  service.

Stories take on a variety of forms: digital storytelling, visual storytelling, storyboards, scenario  generation, storytelling through videos, skits or plays, animation, talk and image, text or image. These  forms open up possibilities for many analytical approaches including, thematic, content, discourse (use  of language), and structural. The trends and patterns derived from these analyses, in turn, form the  bases of additional qualitative and quantitative data collection that value human needs as the authentic  foundation of research-based challenges, opportunities and solutions.

APPLICATION :

On a weekly basis , I narrated real life stories of kids from the similar background and stated their  problems to find out the relatability attribute of the similar problems with the kids I currently work with  so that It is better easier to get a deeper understanding.  For Example, A story I narrated to kids one day  was about this girl called sheela, hails from a small village , who was beaten up by her parents everyday  and was not aware that she can fight against it. That’s when one of my students questioned can we  actually fight against this? So I could understand that this student was facing similar problems. Story  telling helps in creating a much more comfortable  environment and also helps in better understanding.

INSIGHT AND APPROACH :

I was taken aback by how much story telling made us learn more about the kids. As we continued to do  the same activity by providing the kids individual attention and also made the visualization technique

and told them to do posters of what is the one thing they would like to change in their life, In this way  the sketches also helped them a lot. Once they could relate to  what we told they did not feel alone.

This course has broadened my mind with the kind of oppurtunities design thinking opens to and how  story telling would help me in implementing ideas.

