Gabrielle Dolan is the author of six books and a global expert on storytelling in business. I recently attended an online seminar to see how we can apply her narrative techniques in VE learning design to grab the students’ attention and help them remember information. VE teachers and trainers often use stories from their experience to provide context for learning material and to demonstrate real world applications, so it makes sense to examine the best storytelling methods and apply them in our education setting. What makes a story a story? It would seem a simple enough question to answer but in her extensive research into narratives, Gabrielle has found that many people call things stories, but they are not, instead they are timelines, case studies or simply a collection of facts. Stories need to describe a specific event which has happened, and they also must use the sequence or structure which Aristotle outlined over 2000 years ago, a beginning, middle and an end. So, if you think you are telling a story and it has no beginning, middle or end and no specific event, you are aren’t telling a story, you are probably just boring your audience. Stories in education […]
