Student Blogs

How Storytelling Helps Us Understand Others

When you were a baby or a preschooler, you might have learned about the story Little Red Riding Hood, the story about the little girl who is going to her grandma’s house to give her treats. On the way, the wolf asks her where she is going and she tells the wolf that she is going to her grandma.The wolf takes a shortcut to the house, eats grandma, and after a confrontation with Little Red, he eats her. The end is usually different but more often than not, red tickles the wolf and she and grandma are safe as the wolf pukes them out before running away.

The moral of the story is to never trust strangers, and though the story is disgusting it gets the job done. But remember what I said about the end being different, in some versions, the wolf explodes, and in the first version written by The Brothers Grimm, a lumberjack finds out about this and then hunts the wolf down to save Little Red and her grandma. 

Now, this begs the question, what caused such changes in the story? Was there a mistake in translation?  (This was possible as both of the Grimms only spoke German.) Did someone change it on purpose? Well it was caused by something else, Storytelling. This simple action done by all kindergarten teachers is the foundation for differences. 

We can think about story telling as two things which later on intertwine, a game of telephone and memory loss. In a game of telephone one person tells another person something until it goes back to person to the start, by the end the sentence is different, for example It could go from Micheal Jackson is a singer to Micheal Jordan is a Basketball Player. For memory loss however, when we forget things, two things can happen, one, you forget it forever such as you cried when you fell off your bicycle, gone. Number two is it changes such as instead of going to Frank's party, you remember Freb’s.

When these two come together, stories that are told from generation to generation, some things are changed and forgotten, leading to a new result at the end. But what does this tell us about others? When we forget things, we replace them with others. For example, in the telephone game, if you are thinking about basketball, then instead of hearing Micheal Jaskson the Singer, you  might hear Micheal Jordan, the Basketball player. And what we think or like, or hate is what fills those gaps, so when we look at the example of Bob having a log they might think, Bob has a wand if you like wizards and magic.

But how does this show what story telling tells us about others? By seeing what they interpret, we can find out their interest, such as seeing that they like basketball as seen in the earlier example. Now next time you hear a story, think, is this the real deal, or what changes has the storyteller made.