Have you ever considered the power of storytelling in your pedagogy? Storytelling can be a powerful tool to engage students, enhance learning, and make difficult concepts more accessible. When we use stories to illustrate a point, students are more likely to remember the information and understand its relevance. Stories also help to create an emotional connection between the student and the subject matter, leading to a deeper engagement and lasting impact. This can be further enhanced by presenting the story in relatable and multimodal ways so that they remember it better.
Teaching Excellence Academy Fellow and co-chair A/P Goh Wang Ling (School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering) has found storytelling to work equally well to enhance the learning of her children and students. She shares two examples below.
I use storytelling to introduce important historical events to my children. For example, in the book ‘I am Martin Luther King Jr’ by Brad Meltzer, there are drawings of the actual scenes when people gathered to listen to Dr Martin Luther King Jr. While reading the book to my daughter, I showed her a YouTube video and it had exactly the same scenes shown in the book. We were both amazed and very interested/excited to read on.
As for my teaching, I discuss the scientists and researchers behind the amazing theorems they formulated. For example, I teach the year-1/year-2 course ‘Digital Electronics’. When covering the topic of Boolean algebra, a list of theorems will be discussed (which can be a very dull topic for most students), and DeMorgan’s theorem is the last to be described. While going through DeMorgan’s theorem, I will also introduce the man behind the theorem. This theorem states a pair of transformation rules that are both valid rules of inference and is named after Augustus De Morgan, a 19th-century British mathematician.
This theorem is incredibly fascinating as it can always be proven no matter how we change the functions/equations. Most students may not be curious about the mathematician behind it, but I am a great fan of Professor De Morgan and feel it is important to share a bit about him. I let my students know that he was born in Madras, became blind in one eye soon after he was born, studied in Cambridge, and taught at UCL in the 19th century. He formulated DeMorgan’s laws and introduced the term ‘mathematical induction’, making its idea rigorous. Knowing the person behind the theorem makes it more memorable and relatable to my students.
If you are interested in incorporating storytelling into your pedagogical toolbox, find out more in this article about the neuroscience of storytelling. You can also check out this study, which found storytelling to be a powerful way to develop interdisciplinary learning communities.
