An interesting piece that came across in my daily digests this week was an article by Laura Hamilton from Scotland's National Newspaper, The Scotsman, entitled "Brands and Storytelling in the Digital Age." I was struck by the second sentence in this piece, which states, "In our hyper-connected society, we consume information more quickly and vociferously than ever before but also increasingly in a more cynical and critical manner." Now, I am sure we've all heard truisms about how we're all suffering from information overload before, but the opening sentence of Hamilton's piece got me thinking about just how much information is out there, which led me to this interesting nugget from a TechCrunch article: We now create more information in 2 days times as we did from the dawn of civilization until the year 2003. (https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/schmidt-data/) Now that's a lot of data!
According to Hamilton, the way to break though all this noise in the corporate world is by focusing your advertising on storytelling! The best advertisers are the best storytellers because their messages speak to the universal truths of our shared existence and thus we have a reason for watching beyond our desire to buy a given car or soda or paper towel. This got me thinking about two important considerations in the education world.
1) Do our lessons contain good stories? Stories that give students a reason to listen beyond the chance to learn calculus or a poetic verse or what cell type they're looking at. I'd argue that we're losing that sort of storytelling in the classroom as the art of teaching gets pushed to the side by the data-driven, test-focused, information-dense science of teaching. That loss has cost us the attention of our students every bit as much as has the mobile technologies that we bemoan as terrible distractions.
2) Does our curriculum contain enough storytelling focus? Are we still teaching students how to tell good stories in the traditional form let alone in digital form? As a high school English teacher, I know we spent next to no time with narrative writing as compared to other forms, and outside of humanities electives and the rare Social Studies teacher, I cannot think of any other subject that deals with storytelling in any capacity at all. Again, is our hyper-focus on STEM education really beneficial for our students moving forward into a diverse career field? I don't believe it is.
According to Hamilton, the way to break though all this noise in the corporate world is by focusing your advertising on storytelling! The best advertisers are the best storytellers because their messages speak to the universal truths of our shared existence and thus we have a reason for watching beyond our desire to buy a given car or soda or paper towel. This got me thinking about two important considerations in the education world.
1) Do our lessons contain good stories? Stories that give students a reason to listen beyond the chance to learn calculus or a poetic verse or what cell type they're looking at. I'd argue that we're losing that sort of storytelling in the classroom as the art of teaching gets pushed to the side by the data-driven, test-focused, information-dense science of teaching. That loss has cost us the attention of our students every bit as much as has the mobile technologies that we bemoan as terrible distractions.
2) Does our curriculum contain enough storytelling focus? Are we still teaching students how to tell good stories in the traditional form let alone in digital form? As a high school English teacher, I know we spent next to no time with narrative writing as compared to other forms, and outside of humanities electives and the rare Social Studies teacher, I cannot think of any other subject that deals with storytelling in any capacity at all. Again, is our hyper-focus on STEM education really beneficial for our students moving forward into a diverse career field? I don't believe it is.
Great post! I really enjoyed reading your blog this week!
ReplyDeleteIt is crazy to see how much data and information we put out there! I think you are correct in saying that some important information or even life lessons get pushed to the side because schools are so focused on data driving test scores. I really wish that schools would move away from that idea.
While I do think that STEM is important because those are the areas that seem to be of high importance in society, I do not think that it should be the sole focus and that other subjects or lessons are falling through the cracks because schools aren't expanding or letting teachers be as creative as they used to be - it's all about the test!
Again, great post!