After teaching English for over forty years, I have come to appreciate that this wonderful subject’s centre is ‘story’: the teacher’s story, the students’ stories, and the endless array of the stories of others. In fact, all writing can be considered a type of story, regardless of its specific form. A news or feature article, a scientific report, a film review, or even an essay can be viewed as part of the process of human storytelling as much as a narrative, autobiography or play. The essence of each of these texts is the act of shaping and conveying ideas for a particular purpose and audience, whether the aim is to entertain, inform, reflect, persuade, or instruct. As Umberto Eco stated, ‘to survive you must tell stories’ and in the telling, the writer enters the ‘great enduring conversation about what it means to be human.’ 

Through using language to compose their own stories and respond to the stories of others, students find a unique space in the English classroom to think, to learn, to grow, to make meaning and to deepen their understanding of themselves, of others and their world. The act of storytelling engages their interests, curiosity, fear, expectation, and imagination. And it is the imagination which, above all, makes empathy possible. At the top of the scale of cognitive development is speculative thought – the capacity to think beyond the known to imagine what might be.

The storyteller deep inside each one of our students can potentially find expression through the opportunities English teachers offer and the strategies they implement in their classrooms. The goal is to imbue young people with empathic intelligence, intense curiosity, lively and constructive imagination, and the capacity to be comfortable with ambiguity and familiar with the joy of anticipating possibilities.

Mrs Clare Murphy

English Coordinator and Literacy Instructional coach