In 2015, it was my honour to be invited by the education advocacy campaign Alif Ailaan to teach storytelling to Pakistan’s parliamentarians.

Titled ‘Leading Through Teaching’, the workshops were part of the campaign to encourage our parliamentarians to visit schools in their constituencies to assess the resource needs in public schools, and have the opportunity to engage with their students through storytelling. The visit would help them learn about the students’ issues, witness the state of education delivery, and work on improving it.

This was a serious responsibility and, while I was a practitioner of storytelling, I had not taught storytelling, and had to prepare for it.

In 2013, I had newly arrived in Lahore and had started storytelling sessions in schools to promote the children’s books I had written or published. To start with, I offered free storytelling sessions at 10 branches of each of the two biggest school systems. The arrangement was that the schools would allow me to display and sell the books to children.

These storytelling sessions soon grew in number. As the children enjoyed them, the teachers would request another session for another grade. Every day, for the next month or so, I ended up doing three to five storytelling sessions at each branch.

While the books I was promoting were for grades three to eight, the schools did not stick too strictly to the age group. Some school branches sent me to the playgroup section, where the children needed entertainment, even if they could not read the books. If an A-level class was without a teacher, they would send me to narrate a story to them.

As I did these interactive storytelling sessions myself, never reading from the book, but narrating the memorised story orally to the children, improvising at times as needed through interaction with my audience, making animal sounds when the characters were animals — as in Sufi Tabassum’s poems — modulating my voice, making animated gestures and jumping around for theatrical effect, I got a good workout. And, by the end of the day, I would be totally hoarse.

In subsequent months and years, I was invited to scores of other schools and had many interesting experiences that taught me how children themselves experience the storytelling process and view the storyteller’s presence in the classroom.

Perhaps the most interesting experience was at a school where, as soon as I entered the Grade 4 classroom, a student handed me an extra-large-sized book to narrate from. I tried to explain that I had brought my own stories, but she kept insisting that the storytelling had to be done from the large book. Finally, I decided to ignore her and proceed with my storytelling. But she would have none of it.

The moment I started storytelling, she started talking to her classmates, and the large majority of the children turned towards her to listen with great interest to what she was telling them. In the end, I admitted defeat, and asked her to give me the extra large book to read from. I could not make much sense of the story, and looked at her for help. She triumphantly strode forward, took the big book from my hand, and started narrating a story of her own making, pretending it was from the book!

It turned out that she was the class storyteller and I had intruded into her sphere and had to be taught a lesson, and completely outwitted and humiliated, so that I never dared show my face there again. And I didn’t!

These funny and important lessons became the guiding principles of the storytelling programme I developed.

Children do not enjoy being read stories to them from books, as much as they enjoy stories narrated to them. If the story is engaging and competently told, and the children have the storyteller’s complete attention, it allows the children to enter the world of the story completely. If the storyteller narrates the story while reading from the book, looking up occasionally to address the children, the connection between the storyteller and the children is not continuous, and their attention wanders.

A storyteller would be very effective if the story were memorised, not word for word, because that often does not make for good narration, but in a way that its characters and plot become so familiar to the storyteller that she or he could easily improvise in the telling.

Storytelling sessions should be fun, which means that children should be able to laugh, make noises at the storyteller’s prompting and talk loudly. All these elements are a part of the raucous experience that is a storytelling session. Children do not need perfect silence in order to be attentive, and are able to disregard disruptions around them and focus on things that engage them. Most attempts by storytellers to impose any strict discipline in a classroom backfire.

The storytellers should nor remain static, but move and circulate among the children. Whether children are sitting on the floor or on chairs, the classroom can be easily organised to make room for the storyteller to move around.

There will always be some students who will not pay attention to the storytelling, and engage in gossip and other activities they enjoy more. The storyteller should not make claiming their attention an ego issue. As mentioned above, other children will be able to tune out the gossipers and the intriguers, and pay attention to the story. Why? Because it is not the first time this has happened, and the other children are used to them. When the disruption is more extreme, the storyteller, just moving close to the source of disruption while narrating the story, can put an end to it.

These and a number of other principles learned over time became a part of the ‘Memorise, Connect, Improvise’ method of storytelling, with which I conducted the workshops for parliamentarians under the auspices of Alif Ailaan. In the months following the workshops, many of the parliamentarians who had attended the workshops went to the schools in their constituencies to conduct storytelling sessions.

The programme was further developed by the contributions of the storytellers who later joined me to do the storytelling sessions in schools. Whenever a particular improvisation trick used by a storyteller worked, all the storytellers adopted it.

The columnist is a novelist, author and translator. He can be reached on X: @microMAF or via his website: micromaf.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 21st, 2024