Art of Storytelling: Critical Consciousness and Intentionality in the Classroom

by Scott E. Culver
June 1st, 1997
Dungeness Community Church in Sequim, Washington, is a young church with a proportionately large and growing children’s Sunday school ministry. Several years ago the Sunday school committee began a series of teacher training sessions focusing on many important aspects of Christian education: curriculum review and development, teacher-student ratios, approaches to team teaching, classroom discipline, age level characteristics, crafts, music, etc. The leadership encouraged the teachers to be creative in their use of the selected curriculum and gave them freedom to supplement and adjust at their discretion. However, no real training was being provided in the area of communicating Bible stories. The writer was interested in equipping these teachers to be confident and artful storytellers, since telling (or reading) Bible stories was a task involving every teacher. Like many churches, Dungeness Community was using curriculum from a Christian publishing company, but when the writer began to search for teacher training resources that gave significant attention to the actual Bible teaching task, he was less than satisfied (see Appendix I for survey results).
Because the teachers already had a high appreciation for the Scriptures and the importance of teaching the Word of God, the writer was looking for a training resource aimed at improving their skills as communicators, or more particularly, as storytellers. Nearly all curriculum geared for primary age children is centered around narrative portions of the Bible, stories which are concrete and easy for young children to understand and remember. It is reasonable, therefore, to conclude that a successful teacher of children must be an effective storyteller. A well told story is a delight, but a good story can be poorly told and ruined in the process. Most of us are perhaps good storytellers to begin with. Ethel Barrett claims that few people are without the ability to tell a story well. Yet she admits that it takes training and hard work to become an excellent one.