I have felt storytelling to be the most powerful means for my University instructors to convey their message to me. This is something I have especially felt with one of my professors, Jody Bain. It has been a few semesters since I have been able to take a class with her, but that does not mean that I cannot remember her stories and their lessons as if they were clear as ever.
Bain’s lectures engage me because they are so driven by stories, and because they have me piece together what is important about the story, and why that lesson is important. This is a form of experiential learning that encourages me to “learn myself,” in a way. Learning myself is done through associating and connecting the ideas for my own. Bain is trying to foster critical thinking. To think creatively about.
As with many of her stories, she once told the classroom about her own experience working as a practicing psychologist. She told us about a young man who had come to her because he wanted to “start dating.” The details of the story itself were told in confidence; however, she told us about the behaviors she observed from this young man and offered a few of the possible connections you could make about these behaviors to different aspects of his character or his psyche. What she wanted to, and eventually did tell us, is she believed this young man to be on the autism spectrum. How she wanted to tell us that is was done differently than I find to be the norm in education. She told us by showing us a real-world example of her experience with this topic, and allowed us the space to imagine what we might do or think. THAT is why I enjoy Jody Bain.
Storytelling in that way has a characteristic that I wish was emphasized more than it currently is: feeling trusted and respected. And that is what being taught like Bain does makes me feel. Her lectures make me feel as though the onus is truly on me to understand and discern what we are discussing in class. Also importantly, I was not “marooned” in the course content, I was simply given the space during the lecture to figure out the lesson on my own. I felt a connection to the professor through feeling respected as a learner, genuinely respected. That was the power that teaching through her structured stories had on me.