Challenge & Selection

During my graduate studies, I was part of a team that investigated how interactivity affected  the cultural transmission of memories and skills for middle schoolers and their parents  when preparing food. Considering we know that interactive conversation drives the  transmission of cultural information in small groups and large networks, the challenge was  to investigate how interactivity affects performance, teaching, and social learning. This  particular cultural community felt that certain traditions and memories would be lost to the  children of this generation if the children were not exposed to more hands-on activities that  help to transmit the learning of their heritage and to build life skills within these cultural  contexts for these middle schoolers. Part of the challenge was to find a space where the  families could come together to partake in the cooking activities. An additional goal was for  the families of the community to have that space to interact with each other to grow their  connections with other families experiencing similar concerns.

Story telling is so important to the human experience. Humans seem hardwired to process  information in the form of stories and we gravitate to shared information, cementing  relationships. Effective story telling captures the hearts and minds of target audiences and  makes innovations stand out. That is why many people embrace it as a critical leadership  tool. Articulating ideas, refining them, drawing others into the vision and gaining their  support is key to this process. Storytelling can be a powerful tool for people to come up on  the journey with a different way of working. I also think it helps as a visualization tool to talk  about a challenge and potential solution around that challenge. During storytelling,  knowledge is co-constructed, as it is an expressive process that acknowledges the  potentially conflicting interests of different stakeholders and their differing points of view.  Yet, the ability to talk about how a different approach enables a different outcome that was  more beneficial or unlocks new opportunities to help people on a different journey, benefits  all involved. Considering stories are natural communication vehicles, I selected storytelling  for my challenge to bring about differing perspectives and to help the team escape  establishing roles and procedures to discover new approaches.

Application

To first solve the problem of kitchen space, we were able to secure a church kitchen to  conduct the cooking session for middle schoolers and their parents. I remember that as the  families were coming in, some of the middle schoolers looked less than thrilled. In fact,  after some conversation with them, they felt as though they were being dragged there by  their parents. I applied the tool of storytelling to share a personal story of my learning how  to cook with my Italian grandfather in efforts to get them to warm up to the idea of spending  time with family, to hopefully see the fun in cooking, and to ease any reservations that they  may have. I began by explaining to the children how sometimes families use cooking to  connect with each other and to share daily events over preparing a meal. I started sharing  memories that I had of preparing homemade Italian cuisine with my grandfather who  immigrated from Italy with he was seven years old. The children seemed to listen and  asked questions about the experience. The following week, they asked me to share  another story about my cooking with my grandfather! I was surprised to see that the interest  carried over for a week. This time, I told the story so that both the parents and children  could hear of my experiences cooking with my grandfather, in hopes to give parents ideas  of the types of memories that my grandfather shared with me. I would have to say that this  process was effective because for the first six weeks, the children came in each week

asking for another story. The proposed stories served as models. The listeners connected  to the stories and provided a means by which to funnel effort and maintain momentum,  encouraging innovation with the children. It was at week seven that a few middle schoolers  proposed the idea of wanting to develop a recipe to reflect their experience with their family  member. It was at this point that I could see just how storytelling inspired innovation within  the middle schoolers.

Insight

The findings demonstrated that storytelling is essential for cultivating innovative ideas and  getting interest and support from others. It is also played a key role in motivating children to  innovate through their own interests and feelings of connectedness and encouraged  constructive partnerships. I found that the stories I shared facilitated crossing boundaries  and sparked discussion that led to changes and the recombination of existing processes. I  also gained a larger appreciation for keeping it real. I learned that concrete ideas are more  memorable than abstract ones and were easy for both children and adults to relate to.

Approach

Perhaps next time I would conduct a Learning Launch, purely for gaining the experience in  doing so. I certainly see how that could be conducted in a situation such as the cultural  cooking described above. The process of doing a Learning Launch is also intriguing to me.

