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Storytellers of Ireland/ Aos Scйal Eireann Child Protection Policy *Storytellers of Ireland/Aos Scйal Йireann regret that there is not a statutory vetting system for all those who work with young people and vulnerable adults in the Republic of Ireland and will continue to lobby for this* Policy Statement Storytellers Of Ireland / Aos Scйal Йireann are committed to the promotion of Storytelling in a safe environment for all. Our Child Protection Policy is just one in a series of best practice policies we are currently working on. While SOI do not employ or hire out Storytellers we advise all story tellers to adhere to the Child Protection Policy. This Policy has been drawn up in line with ‘Children First’ The National Guidelines for the Protection and Welfare of Children. In addition to this policy in promotion of safe working environments with children, Storytellers of Ireland / Aos Scйal Йireann also undertake to make members aware of any Child Protection Courses available to them and organize such courses from time to time for members. Places where a Storyteller might find themselves working with children Schools Libraries Youth Clubs Summer Project Activities Birthday Parties Festivals Workshops Club Halls After School Projects Crиches Hospitals Detention Centers Cultural Centers Every Group Working with Children is required to have its own Child Protection Policies in Place. These should be available to anyone working with that group and you should feel free to ask to see them if you wish. If in doubt follow the policies of the hiring group. Other Policies to ask for include, Accident procedure, Discipline and Emergency Procedures (in case of Fire etc.) For the Hosting Group and Storyteller: Issues to be aware of In the present climate of child protection awareness more and more groups need to be able to stand over the choices the make for their activity programme. They will be required by Boards of Management and organizing committees to ask certain questions before they hire any artist. Be prepared therefore you may be asked; If you have attended a child protection course. If you have a Child Protection Policy For a references from places where you have recently worked. (It would be no harm to ask each school or youth group you work in if you can pass on their number as a reference should you be asked for one.) You may be asked to sign a declaration form to say you know of no reason why you should not work with children Likewise there may be questions you would like to ask the hosting group before undertaking a particular booking. The age of the children The number of children per session Ethnic mix / religious mix / special needs Taboo subjects (different religions or cultures have different topics the consider taboo for children) That there will be a responsible adult from the hosting group present for the duration of your session or workshop (This is very important by law you should never be left on your own) Any policies or procedures you would like to be aware of before beginning the session (Child Protection, Discipline, Accidents, Emergency et) Code of Behaviour for Storytellers Treat all young people as individuals, equally and with respect, regardless of gender, age, religion, ethnicity, Involve the children where appropriate in decision making. Offer constructive age appropriate criticism, encouragement and praise Use material appropriate to the age and wishes of the group. Have fun and encourage a positive atmosphere Respect a child’s or young person’s personal space Discuss discipline procedures with the hosting group before hand and be familiar with their policy Never spend time alone with children. If meeting with children individually do so as openly as possible, leave the door open inform another responsible adult of the meeting Do not use or allow the use of offensive or sexually suggestive physical or verbal language to go unchallenged Do not single out an individual child for unfair favoritism, criticism, ridicule or unwelcome focus of attention. Do not allow or engage in inappropriate touching of any form. However there may be unavoidable such as providing comfort or reassurance to a distressed child. Or in story drama situations. In all cases physical contact should only take place with the consent of the child. Do not physically chastise children or young people Do not socialize inappropriately with children or young people outside of structured organizational activities Do not take children to your home Do not take children alone on car journeys, if this is unavoidable do so only with the full consent and knowledge of the parents and someone in the hosting organization. Do not do things of a personal nature for children that they can do for themselves. Do not allow allegations a child makes go without being recorded and addressed Reporting incidents All Groups working with children should have a designated person to deal with any issues or concerns to a child’s welfare and safety. Should you have a concern for any child you are working with whether because of their response to a story or the content of a story they created, speak to the group leader and designated person In a school this would be the Classroom teacher first and then the designated person of each school In a library speak to the organizing librarian In a Youth Group the Group leader of the day and find out who the designated person of the club is. The Designated Person from Storytellers of Ireland / Aos Sceal Eireann is Tim Ditchburn Email: timditchburn@gmail.com. He is also available to guide you through the steps you need to make. If you have reasonable grounds for concern contact the duty social worker for the area in which the child lives (SOI designated person has a list of all these numbers) Be aware that a HSE social worker may want to talk to you to hear your direct observations or what the child said to you. Do’s and Don’ts of dealing with Disclosure It may happen that a child might make a disclosure to you, should this happen; Stay Calm Listen to the child rather than question them directly. Don’t ask leading questions Offer them reassurance and take them seriously NEVER PROMISE TO KEEP A SECRET Explain (age appropriately) that you will have to tell a designated person and who that is if you know In all cases record the concern in writing for yourself as soon as possible and in as much factual accuracy as you can. Leave out any assumptions or conclusions on your own part. Record what was said, or what happened, when and where it occurred, who was present and what action was taken Go directly to the host Group’s Child protection Officer who will initiate the group’s own procedure. Confidentiality Information will be passed on a need to know basis Giving such info to others for the protection of a child is not breach of confidentiality Confidentiality re a disclosure cannot be promised to a child Photos Never take photographs without permission, be aware that some children are not permitted to be photographed. Photos clearly identifying a child or children should not be used without the permission of the parents. Printed Photo’s should never appear with the full name of the children included. Where possible take pictures which do not leave a child identifiable form the picture. Recruitment / courses web info re courses attended All Storytellers appearing on SOI/ ASE Website are asked to sign a vetting cert to have their name cleared by Gardaн as soon as a procedure is in place by Gardaн to do same. It will be marked clearly on Web entries if a Storyteller has completed a Child Protection Course. SOI will advertise Child Protection Courses run by themselves and other organizations which members can attend. Allegations against Staff In the event of an formal allegation being made against a member of SOI, full co-corporation will be given to the authorities Two separate procedures will be followed The Designated Person within SOI will deal with any issues to do with the child or Hosting Group. The Chairperson of SOI will deal with any issues to do with the Storyteller If the allegation as against the Designated Person the deputy Designated person should be contacted. Following an emergency Committee meeting the member will be informed of the allegation and the nature of the allegation. They will be given an opportunity to respond Should a Garda investigation follow the The Committee will remove the member’s name and page from the SOI website for the duration of the investigation until the investigation is over. Should their name be cleared their web the member’s name and page will be reinstated. Should the person a conviction follow their name will be removed permanently from the Website. Health and Safety Never leave children unsupervised. Provide a Safe environment In case of an accident follow the policies and procedures of the hosting group. Let a responsible adult from the group take over. Make a written record of any incidents for yourself with the time date and nature of the incident and response and give a copy to the hosting group. Be aware of Fire Drill notices etc and should the fire alarm sound let the responsible adult from the hosting group take over, remember all such incidents require a calm response from all adults present. Designated Person The Designated Liaison Person for Storytellers Of Ireland / Aos Scйal Йireann is: Francis McCarron 087 206 8601. Deputy Designated Person Pat Speight 087 8679943.

Imagine the scene: 27 first-class pupils come storming into the classroom, pushing each other, falling over each other, shouting, laughing, yelling – a right ruaille-buaille The teacher appears in the doorway. ‘Five minutes at the most,’ she says reassuringly to the storyteller at her side. ‘That’s the most they can manage. After that, there’ll have to be something else.’ The storyteller stands in front of the children. Under the eye of the teacher, they go to their places and sit down. There is still unrest. But now it’s in the children’s hands – their fingers are tapping, kneading, fiddling with pencils, rubbers, pencil-cases. The storyteller waits. She nods at the teacher, who greets her briefly, but she waits another moment. At last she begins to speak in a soft voice: ‘In a land far, far away …’ ‘Turkey,’ one boy calls out. ‘Ghana,’ shouts another. ‘… Grandpa lives,’ suggests a third. ‘Oh, I think it’s a lot further than Turkey. Further than Ghana. It’s a country that is so far away that the sun can hardly find it in the morning…’ ‘Zombie-land!’ ‘Star Wars land!’ ‘Shoot them dead!’ They are all shrieking out wildly. ‘… there lived two children. They were just about your age. Five or six years old?’ Affirmative nods from the children. They start to swing back on their chairs, they’re wriggling, slithering, there’s more noise. ‘And these two children were poor, very poor.’ Sudden silence. Not a sound. The children are spellbound. ‘And one morning, their mother was looking all over the house, to see if she could find a crust of bread. But there was nothing. No matter how hard she looked, not a crumb was to be found.’ The children are hooked. They’re following the storyteller’s every move with their eyes, mouthing her words after her. When the storm bursts in the door of the hut, they duck. When the leaves turn into cake at the end, so that the poor people are always going to have enough to eat, they lick their lips with satisfaction. And after twelve minutes, they clap and call for ‘More! More!’ Nine months later. The first year of school is almost over. The storyteller comes into the same class. Once a week, for nine months, she has told fairy tales to this class. The change is remarkable: the process has become ritualised. The children, obviously engaged, listen for forty minutes, and at the end, Milan, who comes from Bosnia, calls out: ‘The book. Give me the book with the story in it. I want to read it.’ These scenes are from a project whereby professional storytellers told international fairy tales in a Berlin primary school (Wardetzky/Weigel 2008). It could just as easily have happened in any European country. The school is typical of thousands of state primary schools in highly industrialised European countries. Here in a nutshell you have the growing problems that schools in the developed world have to deal with: disciplinary problems, limited concentration spans, the grip on the imagination of consumer media and computer games, the alarming reaction to the theme of poverty in the world’s richest countries. But it also shows what storytelling can do. After nine months of concentrated listening comes a request for a book, in order to read the story again. I want to investigate with you now how much the storytelling really contributed to the changes I have mentioned. We’re going to examine the power of storytelling in the context of the ordinary primary-school classroom. We’ll look at four central aspects: Storytelling as an incentive to read Storytelling in a media age Storytelling in the multicultural school Storytelling and the literary tradition Storytelling as an incentive to read Let’s begin with the idea of storytelling as a way of enticing children to read, and we’ll keep in mind the example of the Bosnian boy who wanted to read the book that had the story in it. On their first day at school, some children can already recognise and write a few letters; others are familiar with picturebooks; but there are others who know books only by hearsay. What’s waiting for them at school is the opening of a door into another world: the world of print, and with it, the world of books. Letters, as symbolic signs, are the key to expanding the horizon of experience and of knowledge in a whole new way. Can we adults really estimate what the mastery of this key means for the development of a person? By the time children come to school, they already have an enormous amount of experience and of learning behind them, a phase of learning that does not include writing or, in most cases, books. At no stage in their lives do people learn so quickly, such complex things, and with such good retention, as in that earliest stage before being able to read. It is the stage of elementary acquisition of highly differentiated knowledge, of unforgettable memories, of complex ways of thinking and feeling. During this pre-literate phase, a child acquires a fundamental appreciation of how people live together in a particular society, and of the values, ideals, prejudices and taboos that constitute the basis of that society, and this basic knowledge is usually decisive for how the child lives his or her life. The child constructs this knowledge and understanding of the world initially through sense impressions and through the spoken word. Hearing, sight, taste, smell and touch – that’s how a world is grasped and recognised in the short space of five or six years. For children, what they perceive through the senses and the spoken word is their memory store, with which they construct their understanding of the world. That settling into the world is achieved through the immediacy of sensory experience. But then, on going to school, the child is confronted with a radically different medium of understanding: writing. The immediacy of experiential learning meets something quite new: the mediated nature of symbolic signs. At first, this symbolic system of writing is for the children a strange, dead, cumbersome instrument, which reveals its significance as a key to the world only very gradually (and often with a great deal of difficulty). Even when children know their letters, and make their first attempts at writing, they have only achieved the most basic pre-requisite in order to use writing as a cultural technique and to inhabit the world of the symbolic sign. For a certain period of time, writing remains for them something impenetrable, something hermetic. We are talking here about writing, but the same thing applies to the book as medium. Picturebooks aside, a book is as foreign to a child at first as hieroglyphics on tablets of the Gilgamesh epoch are to us. In Germany, we use the metaphor of the ‘leaden desert’ to describe a written sentence in a book. Lead is heavy, a desert barren. Why should a child bother to give himself up to this leaden desert? Why should she set out to find the stony path into the world of print? In particular, children who have not been surrounded by books at home, and by parents who read, will ask this question. But even in the case of children who do not come from educationally deprived households, we must not underestimate the importance of this question, because learning to read is difficult, or, as Aristotle puts it: ‘Learning hurts.’ Why take on this pain? In the last 40 to 50 years, academic research, in partnership with teaching praxis, has gone to enormous lengths to develop methods that can make learning to read and write attractive to children. They use practical, playful learning methods that are intrinsically motivational, and many of these methods certainly achieve their aims. But what gets forgotten is the fact that children must realise why it is worth learning to read in the first place. They must get some sense that books are not just dry archives, but a treasure chest of adventure, journeys into unknown worlds and times – treasures in which enjoyment and special pleasures are to be found. They must be made curious about the treasures that lie dormant in books, waiting to be awakened. How better to get this idea across than by telling the stories into which the leaden desert of print can be transformed? Storytelling is the surest, most reliable bridge into the world of the book. It builds on the method of learning and understanding that children are already familiar with – the oral. As we have seen, children starting school are still learning largely through oral language and unmediated sensory perceptions. We can assume that learning to read is all the more difficult, the further this process is removed from the oral. The oral is the familiar, and therefore the bridge to the unfamiliar. Anyone who is not at home with print, who has not learned to understand the ‘magic’ of literary models of the world, who does not know what it is that a book promises, such a person will presumably find it difficult to overcome the strangeness of print, and to use it as a transparent medium, in which the mediated is transformed into the unmediated. If you observe children who are listening to well-told stories, then you don’t need any other proof that they are completely umbilically connected to the oral, and that for them, only the orally transmitted word has the force of truth. In storytelling, a particular form of apprehending the world is carried through, which has its roots in early childhood, and which is later always experienced as pleasurable, because it links into and affirms primary strategies of perception and processing. The much-quoted pedagogical maxim that ‘you have to meet children where they’re at’ means (among other things) that oral and narrative gateways into the world should take their place as methods of teaching and learning in the classroom. The orally based superstructure of the child’s view of the world and understanding of life finds its natural continuation in storytelling. Without meaning to question the importance of the didactic process of mediating reading and writing that goes on every day at school, there is nevertheless no more effective way of guiding children towards books and reading than storytelling. For this reason, storytelling must not be just an incidental in the junior classroom, a spoonful of sugar that is offered to the children now and again to sweeten the drudgery of school. Storytelling has as important a part to play in the classroom as mathematics, music and sport. The mediation of literacy cannot succeed without a strong connection to the oral. Therefore storytelling can’t be a marginal or coincidental surplus, a one-off-encounter. It must be a fundamental, daily experience for children. This means that teachers need to be good storytellers. And this in turn means that they must be taught storytelling by the best storytellers in the country, as part of their training. But this is not enough in itself. Professional storytellers need to be a part of the school staff, alongside teachers, that is to say, storytellers in residence. One-off encounters with storytellers make a nice break in the routine of school life, but this has limited effect. Only through long-term encounters can the storytelling profession really come into its own. Professional storytellers possess different talents from teachers. They have at their disposal a broad repertoire of stories, from which they can choose the most appropriate to the situation. And they are performers. They understand the dramatic structure of a story. They can create and maintain suspense. With their voice, their body language and their miming, they can create imaginary worlds. This is their profession, their craft. And to put this to work in the service of schools is one of the most pressing challenges of current educational politics in the developed world. ‘Current educational politics’ – this is the cue that points us towards another reason for the urgency of our need for storytelling at school. Storytelling in a Media Age After the dramatic cultural change that resulted from the displacement of the print age in favour of the age of digital media, we are facing today the challenges of a world in which essential functions of the storyteller are being taken over by technical media. Today, stories are increasingly mediated through the visual language of television, video, film and computer games. Children can easily satisfy their hunger for story through audiovisual media. But what gets lost here – and this is an alarming finding – is children’s ability to create their own images in their heads from the written or the spoken word. The experience of the school project mentioned at the beginning was that it took about eight weeks before a boy called out in surprise, ‘Oh, now I can see it all in my head!’ We can assume that the imaginative faculty is blocked in a large proportion of children. The map of their fantasy has been filled in with ready-made media images. This kind of colonisation of the imagination corresponds to the difficulty that children have in developing their own images from signs – that is to say, from spoken or written words. This kind of imaginative ability, however, is an essential pre-requisite for the understanding of the spoken and the written word. Literacy has to do not only with reading-readiness but especially with imaginative ability. And, unlike in the print age, this ability must now be taught. Imagination is a muscle, and, as Ben Haggarty says, it needs to be nourished and exercised. Excessive consumption of media allows this muscle to atrophy. But why is the storyteller the best kind of person to teach children how to develop their own images? The storyteller, after all, mediates a story, as does the television, through image and sound. He himself is a medium. He narrates using the language of his body and his mime and the modulation of his voice – it is an audiovisual experience, just like the TV. What is different, though, is that he is a living medium, and he does not mediate images in pure form. He does not mediate an image in its concrete form, in other words, not materially in colour, shape, movement, but through the ephemeral medium of the word and of body language. He mediates signs of the image. He is a medium of the symbolic. His words, miming, gestures are signs that stand for images and emotions. He transforms images that are in his head into words, gesture and mime. If he is talking about the green scales of a dragon, then he sees them in front of him, and when he describes how the sword falls from the hero’s hands in horror, then he transfers image and emotion to the listeners. He stimulates the fantasy muscle into activity. He feeds it with the energy of his own imagination. And this energy effects the transformation of the sign into concrete images and meanings. How this process is executed by the brain has not yet been discovered. It is a wonderful secret that we all know, without being able to explain it. The dominance of media-influenced images in the imaginations of children needs a living person, the flesh-and-blood storyteller, to act as a coach to the ‘imagination muscle’. Nobody can dispute the storyteller’s role as king-pin in this process. The significance of storytelling as a way of activating the imagination in the digital age cannot be highly enough estimated. Sometimes the objection is made that, with the dominant consumption of electronic media, children’s ability to listen to a story that is mediated purely in words has already been lost. This opinion is nonsense! The act of performance that produces the one-to-one relationship between child listeners and storytellers is incontrovertible proof of the fascination with the unmediated contact that is created by storytelling. The transformation of (hyperactive) children into willing listeners is a repeated experience among professional storytellers. If a storyteller is herself moved by what it is that she is unfolding in words and gestures, then this will usually also move the listeners, and open the channels to the fantasy, to the imagination, to sensitivity and to cognition. And this can transform a wild horde into a community of listeners. The Canadian storyteller Dan Yashinsky describes as follows a drastic experience with a group of youngsters who were outrageous in their behaviour: These boys […]sitting so rapt around, [...], playing pranks, bashing each other […], farting as noisily and often as possible […] Yet when the storytelling began they became utterly quiet and well behaved. […] By some mysterious power the storyteller was able to transform my wild pack of boys into a community of listeners. Homer himself would have been proud to play for. Every one of them had been labelled by teachers and social workers as having ‘severe attention deficits’ and ‘unmanageable behaviour’. Yet when the stories began, I watched them relax and breathe more deeply, their eyes shining with joyful – and sometimes fearful – anticipation. What was the secret of this astonishing art? (Yashinsky, 21). The secret seems to be that the over-saturation of children with media experiences engenders a kind of hunger that cannot be satisfied even by the most sophisticated consumption strategies of the media: the ‘hunger for the personal’, as H. v. Hentig has dubbed it. The longing for a living counterpart remains virulent and restless, even in the most perfect media-world. This is the basis of the supposition that as storytellers we are irreplaceable: nothing compares to the auratic space that exists between storyteller and listener. In storytelling, the circle of childhood and with it, the circle of the oral, is closed again. Children, and indeed adults, enjoy the regressive pleasure of taking part in an orally mediated world. Storytelling in the multicultural school Another challenge facing schools in the industrially developed world is that in some of them, a large proportion of the children come from a variety of countries, and that their grasp of whatever the national language happens to be, is poor. Immigrant children acquire the language of their new country as a formal language at school, and as an everyday sociolect, which is superimposed on the interaction with the formal language. In addition, a not inconsiderable proportion of them learn classical Arabic in Koran-school. In other words, at least some of the children are shifting in and out of four different languages. This Babel renders them literally ‘speechless’ – in other words, helpless – in many situations, and this hinders them from responding verbally in a way that is appropriate to the situation. This often leads to compensatory physical activities to make up for this helplessness. A large part of the problems that schools experience, especially the escalation in violence, has, among other things, to do with pupils’ inability to express themselves verbally and thus to resolve conflict verbally. Work on the national language of the country is essential to successful integration. The children have to suss out an emotional path that can lead them safely through this linguistic Babel. This is the only way it is possible to put them in a position where they can later take an active and self-determined part in commercial, cultural and political life. Even from this point of view, storytelling can play a key role in the life of the multicultural school. It differs from other pedagogical methods that are used to teach national languages to pupils in that it does not mediate language in the abstract, conceptually, grammatically or orthographically, but through suspenseful, exciting stories. In this way, the children experience language primarily in its emotional qualities, and it is exactly this that turns out to be the most effective means of persuading the children to listen and to actively use the language. The acquisition of language is achieved through a process that is high in emotional participation. This may be the decisive factor in the effectiveness of storytelling as a method of mediating language. Furthermore, the effectiveness of storytelling in the mediation of linguistic competence may be explained through a parallel with mother-tongue acquisition. What happens when a mother-tongue is acquired? Every child finds its own way, and certainly at its own pace. No child learning his or her mother-tongue acquires vocabulary and grammatical rules consciously and systematically. The child finds his own way in the ocean of words and independently builds up the lexical and grammatical system that constitutes the mother-tongue. He learns the language implicitly, not through regular lessons. A child experiences much the same thing through listening to stories. Here too he or she is confronted with an ocean of words. Here too she or he acquires an implicit understanding of the lexis and grammar of the foreign language. The child acquires the foreign language through a self-directed, autodidactic learning process, through which she determines her own way, at her own pace. This method of language acquisition is based on the principles of self-optimisation and self-correction. Through repeated encounters with linguistic patterns and turns of phrase, lexis and rules are internalised, without explicit mediation. And it is the child herself, and not some ready-made, one-size-fits-all curriculum, that determines how fast and how much she learns. We have to expect that there will at times be some resistance to all of this, but in my experience, negative attitudes are limited, and in most cases can be attributed to a kind of contagion brought about by the group dynamics of the classroom. The refuseniks soon come to realise that their schoolmates are curious and delighted listeners. They don’t want to lose out on this, and they gradually let go of their resentment. And the story reveals its seductive nature: anyone who has become engaged by the conflict in the story wants to know how it is resolved. Carrot rather than stick: the long-recognised pedagogical recipe for success succeeds once again. The scene I described at the beginning also reveals another, socially relevant element that is of burning concern in the multicultural school. The children who took part in the school project described earlier were electrified by the theme of poverty. Wherever and whenever this theme is touched upon, there are spontaneous reactions. Scarcely any other theme creates such an unreservedly obvious effect. A few examples … In one story, a merchant is mentioned at the beginning. The question comes unbidden: Is he rich? A girl has golden hair: Golden? I’d cut it and sell it. Bones are buried in the earth: Money will come out! The fisherman has one wish left. What will he wish for? Wealth! The protagonists find a chest in the castle: It’s full of gold, and they use it to buy food! The children have found a golden bird. They took a photo of it. It was 569 gold, and they got lots of money for the photo. One child made up a story of his own: A man and woman were very poor. The man fished and the woman cleaned. When the woman went out to get some air, a man came riding by on horseback. He gave her a bag and said, ‘You can wish something for yourselves, and it will be granted. But softly, and always into the bag.’ They wished for everything they needed and they got very rich and lived in a castle. And they gave some of their money to the poor, and then everyone was rich. In stories like this, the children identify so much with the hero that they switch into the first person: A boy finds a hen. I had a hen, and it could spit out money. Then I bought an enormous house, twenty rooms. Every room has a cupboard. I sleep in one of the rooms. There are three toilets and a room in which the hen sleeps. It is called Gold-hen. These examples make it quite clear where it is that the desires of these children are ignited – in that area of their lives where they experience the most basic deficits: in material neediness. Overcrowded accommodation, the search for work, hunger, lack of money – this is where the fairy tale becomes a mirror where they see their own social reality reflected. Here they find articulated things that otherwise are not spoken of. They experience poverty and unemployment as existential themes that at the same time are taboo. Poverty is often an extreme burden in their everyday lives. At school it is seldom communicated, or not at all, or only superficially. And then suddenly the children encounter characters who are in the same social and material predicament as they are themselves. The majority of fairy tales rock the shaky ground under their feet, and in fact many fairy tales thematise that very shakiness. Wide awake and with obvious concentration, they follow how the fairy tale heroes manage to change their destiny and gain wealth and prestige. In the promises of happiness that characterise the folk tale, these children trace their original, inscribed meaning. The elemental longings of the folk are located in the material: in conquering all-consuming poverty and the vain search for gainful employment. For these children, poverty is not a metaphor, not a symbolic representation of deprivation or lovelessness. For them, it is what it was for those with whom the folk tale originated: actual lived experience. We need to keep constantly in mind the close relationship that exists between social and linguistic problems. It is not that social problems can be solved through language-learning, but that language problems can spring from and can reinforce social problems. But that’s another issue. Storytelling and the literary tradition Finally, I want to look briefly at the significance of storytelling for the teaching of literature. We must not forget that the extent of literary education today and of our relationship with the treasures of world literature is very largely determined by, restricted by and possibly even suppressed by the media. This is an indication of the loss of part of our cultural memory. I have extensive experience of telling old stories (ancient Greek myths and epics and fairy tales and sagas from different cultures); and a constant of all this experience is that storytelling is a reliable bridge over which ancient materials can be conveyed right into our time. These centuries-old stories were certainly orally narrated and came to be written down only relatively lately. And they have, through a process of ‘communicative imprinting’ (Blumenberg), retained for centuries, an ability to touch and engage the listener and, more recently, the reader. Something is addressed or articulated in these stories that relates to the fundamentals of our experience of being in the world: they tell of birth and death, love and jealousy, loyalty and betrayal, mercy and greed, wealth and poverty, desire and disappointment, covetousness and renunciation, things that are always and everywhere significant. Told in the most intimate or the most sociable of narrative spaces, and later transmuted into literature, these stories have created a substrate that is ‘so pithy, so valid, so authoritative, so affecting, that they are constantly offering themselves as the most useful substance in any search for the elemental behaviours of human existence’ (Blumenberg, 166). In my work telling traditional stories, I am constantly reminded that in spite of the inertia of stories trapped between the covers of a book, the germ of orality that is immanent in the text can be brought to life in the telling of the story. Ovid considered his texts principally as something to be read out loud, and so did Basil. The Grimms’ and Perrault’s sources are mainly oral. This germination only expresses itself with full validity when it is restored to its most appropriate medium – the oral. Their inscription in print has congealed these stories; their sensuousness is released only in living narration. And that is the reason for my appeal to all of you here in this room: tell the old stories that can only be rejuvenated through us. The violence and the pithiness of their imagery, the hardness and the ruthlessness of their existential conflicts, the tension and the explosiveness of their action – these cannot be exaggerated. They are like the ocean, whose fathomless depths are inexhaustible. You will see how, when they are told, these stories lose their age, their fustiness and their strangeness, and acquire brilliance and abundance, and the listeners – children as well as adults – will thank you for it: the shiver you have made run down their spine, the laughter that they share with you, the suspense that makes time stand still – these are magic moments, and for the sake of such moments it is worth while always and everywhere to tell stories. Bibliography Hans Blumenberg: Arbeit am Mythos. Frankfurt/Main 1984. Kristin Wardetzky/Christiane Weigel: Sprachlos? Erzдhlen im interkulturellen Kontext. Erfahrungen aus einer Grundschule. Hohengehren 2008 (im Erscheinen). Dan Yashinsky: Suddenly I heard footsteps. Storytelling for the twenty-first century. Toronto 2004.

A language-support project for children from immigrant families Kristin Wardetzky (Project leader) Christiane Weigel (Support) 1. Socio-cultural environment In Berlin, especially in areas with high proportions of foreigners, both primary and second-level schools are having to combat worryingly low levels of linguistic competence. Yet, linguistic ability is one of the key competencies for self-determination and active participation in economic, cultural and political life. For this reason, we have established an apparently unspectacular but in the long term tremendously effective project in an area of the city where language problems are threatening to escalate, an area known as Berlin-Wedding. The African quarter, home to our project school, the Anna Lindh School, is one of the poorest areas of Berlin. Every fifth inhabitant (of which 40% are children under seven) lives on social welfare, and many of these are the third generation of their families to do so. Confined living spaces (a two-roomed flat for a family of five) are the norm, uneducated homes dominate, parents may be illiterate and many cannot buy schoolbooks for their children. Poverty is an everyday experience here. S.- one of the 176 children taking part in our project – is a thin, 6 years-old, pale girl, who is late every morning, because her mother does not wake her up and she has to get her own breakfast. Even on her birthday, nobody gets up with her and gives her presents. S. has no paintbox and no gym things, although her teacher has written several times to her mother. Nobody pays for her school milk and lunch, but S. has worked out strategies that allow her to get what she needs in semi-legitimate ways. She prefers that to the shame she experiences when a teacher notices that she is missing something. At home, there are, at best, stories from the television. She has been to the cinema twice in her life, with a woman from the youth welfare office who sometimes visits her. ‘She is also a German,’ says S. ‘But I am not Germany. I am Bosnia.’ In the Anna Lindh School up to 90% of the children who take part in the project are non-native German speakers, some of whom need major support. 80% of them were noted as having a poor or inadequate command of the German language when they started school. Their mother tongue – Turkish, Arabic, Serbo-Croat, Russian, Polish, Georgian, Czech, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, Hindi – remains the everyday familiar medium of communication, but no more than that. The connection between the language and the cultural heritage of their parents or grandparents has largely been severed. As a rule, the children have a clear sense of their non-German identity, but their relationship to their country of origin remains vague. The children of immigrant background taking part in the project learn German in two forms: as a formal language in class, and as an everyday sociolect, which overlies or possibly displaces their use of Hochdeutsch or formal German. A not inconsiderable proportion of these children learn another language – classical Arabic, in the Koran schools, in which there is an extremely strict regime. 2. Concept In this environment, in which even primary schools have to combat serious social, cultural, religious and ethnic problems, we set up our project. Its central purpose is the mediation of the German language through the art of the spoken word – the art of storytelling. This is realised by three professional storytellers who are graduates of the Berlin University of the Arts, Sabine Kolbe, Kerstin Otto and Marietta Rohrer-Ipekkaya. The project is run by the Institute for Pedagogical Theatre of the University of the Arts. The three storytellers told fairy tales to first- and second-class pupils twice or once a week over a period of two years. International fairy tales were told, primarily tales from the cultures from which the children’s families come. The stories were told, not read. The tales were neither abridged nor simplified. The project insisted on an oral literary language that is clearly differentiated from everyday speech. The stories were deliberately not reduced to a supposedly child-friendly version, and only occasionally were pictures used to support the storytelling. Even the playful sequences were limited. Objects were often used, which afford the children sensory-aesthetic experiences. In this way, the vocabulary in which the children re-told the stories they have heard, and in which they could make up their own stories, is extended. Over the course of the project, the tables have turned, and the children have increasingly developed as storytellers themselves. 3. Process The practice of storytelling was at first largely unknown to the children, even those without an immigrant background. Television as omnipresent family entertainer for the most part determines family life. Books of fairy tales or children’s books are hardly ever present in the home. M. answered the question whether they had books of fairy tales at home in this way: ‘No. But I was sick, and I got a book from the doctor. I often read in it. It has stuff about your throat. That you must always drink and your hand over your mouth.’ In answer to the question whether stories are told at home, J. answered: ‘My mother doesn’t do that. Because she’s always on the phone, sits at the computer, and then it’s dark, we’re in bed. sometimes she promises, but then she forgets again.’ N. says: ‘My mum and dad doesn’t do that. My mum goes to the computer and plays. She goes to the telephone: 660060. Then it’s Carsten’s turn, my dad, and tells about the game. People can fight in it. I find it boring. My mum never tells stories.’ Questions about what the children do in their free time made it clear that they and their parents spend most of their free time watching TV or on the computer. Often, on a Monday morning, the six- to eight-year-olds could tell you all about the crime scene of the previous evening. And if the storytellers asked about the nicest thing they did at the weekend, TV, Gameboy and Playstation usually have pride of place. Also at school they have no experience in storytelling. Some teachers sometimes read children’s books aloud in the classroom. Most of the teachers hesitate to tell fairy tales. They believe that they are too cruel for children and have an obsolate concept of female behavior. A big amount of prejudices make it difficult to convince them that tariy tales – especially wondertales – are helpful for children zu develop their imagination, their language and to come in touch with their (inner psychological) conflicts. So what the three storyteller did was very unfamiliar. That must be emphasized to understand the meaning of the project. When the children started school, their ability to follow an orally transmitted story was only rudimentary. So how did the storytellers make themselves comprehensible to these children? They used, either spontaneously or quite deliberately, the full range of their expressive repertoire, and hoped in this way to bring the children into the world of the story, even if they did not understand particular words. Their narration took on the nature of a performance: they explained unfamiliar concepts or objects not so much with words as with gestures and actions; the trajectory of the story was not only created out of words but hinted at by playing a character or an actions. In this way, understanding was achieved through multiple channels of communication that accompany speech interactively. When a story is told playfully, performed with body and mime, then its words are embedded in a rich network of sense impressions, which is essential in order to experience the story fully. What is ‘hell’ exactly? what does ‘suspicion’ mean? Where does the prince go when he goes into a ‘chamber’? What kind of ‘lore’ is ‘propagated’? What is Grandma doing when she ‘berates’ Maschenka? For them, a ‘miller’ is a man who takes away the rubbish (since the German word for rubbish is Mьll, the same syllable as in Mьller, meaning a miller). They associate ‘Donau’ (the word for Danube) with Dцner (as in kebabs), the river ‘Spree’ with the word ‘spray’, the word ‘Kohle’ (meaning coal or charcoal) with cola (as in Coca-Cola). Those are just some of the innumerable irritations that come up during storytime, but which are only very rarely directly explained as they would be during German class. At the end of the story, however, the children had usually acquired an understanding of the meaning of the word, and of how to use it, without any explicit explanation. They made up their own translation and own imagies. In the best case, they used the new words or phrases themselves when they retold the story. In its first few weeks, the project did not look as if it was going to be successful, and we felt dubious rather than triumphant about it. Only the very first storytimes gave any indication that our high expectations might be met – that the storytellers would really be able to win over mostly hyperactive children and children with glaring language problems. At first, the children listened, fascinated, and ended the class with loud clapping and calls for ‘More, more.’ But the magic soon wore off. The humdrum life of the school worked its brutal way into storytime. Storytime was like a weathervane: one minute the children were concentrating on listening and enjoying themselves, and the next minute there would be uproar and not a chance of finishing the story. It was difficult to make out the reasons for the change. None of the recipes for success that had worked before could be relied upon: the difference between success and failure was balanced on a knife-edge. The struggle that the storytellers had with this phenomenon of unpredictable disruption took up more time than the storytelling itself. After storytimes like this, there were serious arguments about the value and even the possibility of telling stories in this environment. Was the concept too demanding? Should the narratives be reduced in favour of playful or other creative interests? Should more visuals be used to aid comprehension? Should the language used be adapted to the everyday language of the children? 4. Results After about six weeks our attempts began to meet with the first glimmerings of success. After six month the children were listening for up to 40 minutes(!) with visible emotional engagement. They were enjoying the quiet in which you can hear that famous pin drop. They joined in with verses and certain turns of phrases. The interruptions and questions of the children were increasingly attributable to genuine curiosity and surprise. They no longer expressed their displeasure or their joy at events inarticulately, but verbally, and were more and more driven by the desire to give their feedback in words that imitate the poetic vocabulary of the storytellers. When a new story started, they made more and more frequent references to ones they had already heard. Their witty comments testifed to their observation and their understanding of stories that are sometimes complexly structured. Especially in comparison with the classes that have come to this only in recent months, the development in understanding of the structures of fairy tales is clear. In one story, the bad king throws a baby into the water. ‘What’s going to happen to the child now?’ the storyteller asked. ‘Maybe it will fall into a a waterfall.’ ‘It’ll die,’ the ‘newbies’ guessed. The same question elicited the following utterances from a class who had been involved in the project since the beginning: ‘But that must have been a lucky child!’ ‘Maybe someone will rescue him.’ ‘Maybe he will grow wings!’ More and more often, the children predict the principles of how the story works. Storyteller: ‘He slept at an old woman’s. But what he didn’t know was …’ ‘J: ‘A witch!’ Storyteller: ‘Having reached the king, he seeks the hand of the lovely princess. M.: ‘Oh, now there will be three tests.’ In retelling the story (which took up more and more of the time after about half a year) it was always surprising what details the children remembered. Children who, when tested at the beginning of the project, could not understand basic words in the German language were now using the most unusual expressions. Often, in making the effort to re-tell the story, the children were aware of the difference between the language of the storyteller and their own linguistic range. Whereas they got by in everyday life with minimal constructions and without declining nouns or conjugating verbs, dispensing with the future and the past tense (preterite), their linguistic ability let them down when they wanted to express the often complex time structures of the fairy tale, and they wanted to emulate the plasticity of the descriptions used by the storyteller. I. is one of the boys who clearly suffers from his linguistic limitations when he tells a story. He speaks very slowly, thinks a lot in between, and searches his memory for the right words. He comes across as almost apologetic when he stumbles in his speech. He is afraid of not being able to express things that he obviously has in his head: ‘I understood more. It’s just that I can’t speak the language so well.’ He makes the effort to find solutions within his limitations. In the story he is telling, there is a betrothal at the birth of a boy that is to be fulfilled when he reaches the age of 14. I. tries to use the subjunctive: ‘He will, when he would be 14, then he would marry the princess.’ In other places, he tries to use the preterite (past tense), and uses repetition to reproduce the very long duration of a journey that was particularly emphasised by the storyteller: ‘And he goed and goed and goed to a tree.’ W. speaks only Polish at home and has only been a short while in Germany. She uses the auxiliary verb ‘has’ to create all her sentences; moreover, she uses only the feminine article. Nevertheless, in retelling the stories, she shows a growing feeling for the importance of choosing the right word, and looks hard for words that echo the utterances chosen by the storyteller. The storyteller said, ‘Full of anger, the robber crumpled the piece of paper.’ savouring this ‘crumpling’ (the German word is ‘zerknьllte’), so that one could almost hear the rustling of the paper. But W. can’t quite remember this lovely word, and in trying to find the right sound, she creates a similar sounding ‘word’: ‘He “geknicht” the piece of paper’ – which is meaningless, but echoes the KN sound in ‘zerknьllte’ and also echoes the word ‘geknickt’, meaning bent or folded. An English equivalent might be something like ‘He “crimped” the piece of paper.’ Later in her telling of the story, she took on board some of the storyteller’s original expressions and achieved an unusually high standard of expression for her: ‘He calls these boy and says: I have never before seen these little house! Where are your parents? With whom do you live here?’ As already mentioned, in the course of the project, the children also began to make up their own fairy tales, which they told to their classmates. They evinced a secure command of fairy-tale structures, motifs and images, which they often combined adventurously, in their own stories, with everyday life and with media experiences. Children who, at the beginning of the project, were constantly interrupting each other now listen patiently and respectfully to each other, and they are capable, in second class, of telling little stories, which may be fragmentary but are sometimes coherent. Although the children found it difficult, at the beginning of the project, to create short, one-sentence stories, they gradually came to know the fun of creating and telling stories. Over many months of listening and experimenting, the ability to create exciting stories developed, stories that differ from everyday life. This development may be illustrated by the four stories of M.: (1) 08.09.06: Once upon a time in Austria. I drove a car. To the supermarket. (2) 09.11.06: Once upon a time there was a lovely day. They went out by boat. They were pirates and they were happy. There was a waterfall, they fell down. There were elves and other nice things. The pirates didn’t believe it. That’s the end. (3) 18.12.06: Once upon a time there was a house, and there was a haunting in it, and when I came in, there was a tree trunk, there was an owl in it. It wanted to eat me. I hit it with the tree trunk, then I buried it. Then a handsome prince came out and I married him. (4) 11.01.07 Once upon a time there were a man and a woman, they were very poor and wanted to have a little money. The man was always fishing, and the woman cleaned. When the woman went to snatch fresh air, there came a man on horseback. He gave her a bag and said: ‘You can wish something for yourselves, and it will be granted to you. But softly and always into the bag.’ They wished everything for themselves and got rich and lived in a castle. And they gave from their money to all the poor, and then everyone was rich. Some of the initial problems – and we were not aware of this at first – were not only in the area of language deficiency, the lack of vocabulary, but in the area of the imagination, and this was independent of the ethnic background of the children. For a considerable proportion of the children, their imagination was blocked. Other things occupied their fantasies – often, shockingly, even in the case of first-class pupils, sex and crime. That is to say, the map of these children’s imagination has been drawn, but it shows only readymade images. At the beginning of the project, the stories that the children made up themselves were marked by violence. The children of one second class were given the task, in one session, of telling tall tales. The children’s stories concerned fights, killings, exploding bombs. Children who were present were often killed off in their classmates’ narratives. S.: ‘He threw a grenade. Exploded. Valentino is died, and his legs were salami. To God they are, and he gave him one last chance. In the house they went. In the house was a bomb. The house explodes.’ The children laughed themselves to death at every explosion, and seemed almost high, which fired up whoever was telling the story even more. Afterwards, the storyteller asked the children if they played at bomb explosions at home. ‘Yes,’ M. answered, ‘on the computer there’s Torpedo. There you can destroy a whole Titanic.’ Storyteller: ‘And you enjoy that?’ A euphoric chorus of ‘Yessss!’ as answer. This colonisation of the imagination was paralleled by the difficulty the children had in creating images in their heads from hearing the spoken word, in other words, the difficulty they had in translating the heard into the visual, using images they have constructed themselves, not previously ‘given’ images. When one boy called out, ‘Now I can see it all in my head!’ it was like a breakthrough. This ability to see what was told is an indispensable prerequisite for understanding not only what is heard, but especially what is read. Literary education has to do not only with reading-readiness, but in the same way with imaginative ability. And obviously that must be cultivated today – in the digital age – much more diligently than in the ‘Gutenberg age’ (or the age of print). Only then can literature really ‘arrive’ or can a literary text be transformed into individual fantasies, in order to broaden horizons. The access to the world that is mediated by literature is only possible by means of a closely woven network of such individually formed, subjective imaginations. One of the storytellers began to ask each of the children, after a story, what picture they had in their heads. Though the children were at first completely incapable of creating their own pictures, or at least of describing them, the desire to imagine what had been told developed by degrees, and this was observable also in the re-tellings of the children. M. narrated: ‘Then the grandfather (Daddy Frost from the Russian fairy tale of the same name) come by coach. The coach is gorgeous. Bright white and has a red door and it has a white horse. A feather on top. Put her down, and then came this man. He has a white beard and this light colour. Then he came closer, and then he said, Are you warm? I’m warm. He comes closer: Are you warm? I’m warm. Then third time. And then he put cuddly things for her in it, and she got in.’ Neither the way Daddy Frost looked, nor the fact that he spread out ‘cuddly things’ for the girl had been mentioned by the storyteller. 5. The long term The long-term nature of this ‘infusion’ with the ‘vitamins’ of language and imagination is effective: after about one year, the children spontaneously act out fairy tales in their plaid after school, and they also plaid at storytelling: one child is the storyteller, and the others listen. In class, the teachers were amazed at the improvements in the areas of vocabulary, grammatical inflection, fluency and especially at the way the children were more and more able really to listen properly, instead of just half-hearing. “Half-hearing”, said one first-class teacher participating in the project, “they know how to do that from home. ‘Do this … leave that, stop the other’. In one ear and out the other, that’s how it is in their families. But now you can really see that they are starting to listen and to think!” Listening is a basic prerequisite of human communication and indispensable for learning at school. This is also taught through storytelling. All the teachers who took part, with their children, in the project, described an improvement in concentration, creativity and verbal expressive ability in their pupils. “If we have pieces of reading now, and I say, ‘We’ll just read as far as here, and then you tell me what might happen next?’, then they have so many ideas. And I have the feeling that some children who didn’t talk nearly as much before, they can join in the conversation too.” Another teacher: “And then of course it’s fantastic to observe the children, how they sit there with their mouths open and their eyes shining, and go along with it. That’s really, really lovely. When some children are really in bad form, and they are completely wound up, the way the storytellers are just able, with their art, to calm even these children down, so that they find a kind of inner peace.” Especially children who, in the ordinary classtime, always came across as finding it difficult to concentrate and to learn, benefit from the new situation and the creative, unpressurised access to language and literature. “F., for example, even though he is sometimes so completely undisciplined, the storytellers manage to get him to listen. And now he can formulate proper, coherent sentences, and can express himself well, he has sophisticated ideas, which you wouldn’t expect of him. He has a real fantasy world. But in class, it’s always such hard going” - so said the class teacher. H. is a boy who, at the age of just eight, has been up before the police, for the second time, because of serious physical attacks in the school yard, and for whom it is impossible to sit still for more than a few minutes at a time in class and concentrate on something. ‘But he is so enchanted with this storytelling project, it is as if he has found an island of relaxation,’ the teacher claims. H. is very calm at storytime, verbal utterances are rare from him. But, especially when the hero is fighting a dragon or some other monster, he is nevertheless visibly involved, physically and mentally, and sometimes it seems as if he finds an outlet for some of his aggressive energy when he turns himself into the hero or the dragon. In interview H. says, he would be embarrassed to tell stories in front of the whole class, but in the more intimate situation of the interview, he starts to tell one story after another. In doing so, he uses recognisable elements from past storytimes. His stories are harrowingly concerned with abandonment, betrayal, persecution and death. An extract: ‘Once upon a time there was a wood. There was only one wild boar. Just one, otherwise, none. It ran, home. No one was there.”Where is Mum?” that’s what he said, though there was no one there. Just said that, called “Mum!”, as loud as he could. Mother came. “Where were you? I was looking for you.” Said the mum: “I was near you all the time.” “But I looked left and right. You weren’t there.” ”‘Then I was above you” “I looked there too.” ”‘Then I was at home.” She lied. And it wasn’t his mother anyway. She had a mask and a suit. She was all dead. The wild boar didn’t know it.’ W. likes telling stories and often does so. Admittedly, it takes time and is difficult to follow what she says in her strong Polish accent. She often leaves out words here and there, and she stumbles. Because of this, the teacher often cuts her off in class, and her classmates avoid contact with her. In interview W. enjoys unhurried attention and re-tells the complex fairy tale from storytime the previous week, with impressive accuracy and with faithful detail. At the end, I have to read out to her what she has narrated, and she is completely surprised and impressed that she has told this whole story by herself. She wouldn’t have believed it of herself, and neither would anyone in her German class. D. has enormous language problems. He stutters and needs lots of time to re-tell a story. He constantly wants to give up, when the words won’t come out, and he criticises himself. He enjoys it very much that there is enough time for him in the interview and is very proud when I show him how many pages I have filled with my transcription of his storytelling. He can tell the stories well and coherently, uses a lot of images in his narration, and is happy about this: ‘Then came the beautiful princess. What is she called? The princess? Princess Beautiful she could be called.’ When I ask him if he wouldn’t like to tell a story to the other children, he answers, ‘No. I stutter.’ The distance the children had come is striking. We demanded a huge amount of them: listening (almost) without physical/motor activity, to stories of considerable length told in a poetic language unfamiliar to most of the children; images and motifs, which have hardly any analogues in the immediate sensory and intellectual experience of the children. The reasons for the success of the project laid primarily in its long-term nature and the richness of experience that the children were afforded, trusting that, over a long incubation period, the imaginations of these children could be enriched by poetic stories. The results are – and let’s be absolutely clear about this – related to the professionalism of the storytellers and to the intensity, the regularity and the long-term nature of the undertaking. What the storytellers invested in time, effort and specialism exceeds what a teacher could be expected to provide. Storytelling is a specific art form, which a school can benefit from, if an appropriate space is made for it. In some of our neighbouring European countries, in France, England and Norway, for example, this has already happened. Professional storytellers operate there in schools and introduce the children to the oral and literary tradition of the country – an example of the successful integration of artistic professionalism into the life and learning of school. 6. Sustainability This project stands alone in the cultural landscape. In order to ensure sustainability, we have applied for funds from various foundations in order to further integrate professional storytellers with their artistic skills as mediators of language and literature into the everyday life of the school. It is planned to extend the project to other local schools in different areas of the city. More storytellers have been preparing for this task since October 06, likewise graduates of the University of the Arts. In regular meetings, they are acquiring a broad repertoire of international fairy tales and myths, as well as the skills to encourage the language competence, the literary sensibility and the creativity of the children. In addition, eight teachers from the project school took part in a storytelling workshop. At the University of the Arts in Berlin there are regulary courses in storytelling especially for teachers to encourage them tellin stories and fairy tales in the regular classroom. Heartfelt thanks to Marie-Agnes von Stechow for her help with our application for third-party funds for the financing of the project and for various kinds of support with regard to content. Translation by Siobhбn Parkinson, Ireland The project will be comprehensively documented and published in Septmeber 2008 by Schneider Verlag Hohengehren: Kristin Wardetzky/Christiane Weigel: Sprachlos? Erzдhlen im interkulturellen Kontext. Erfahrungen aus einer Grundschule.

< Back Gerry Burke Adults Availability: Full time and is prepared to travel. Repertoire: Folk tales, own stories/material, poetry, mixed with songs. Preferred audience: Adult. Background experience: Gerry has performed his own one-man show for the past 8 years and can tailor it to most occasions/venues. He has performed in Australia, New Zealand, South Pacific Islands and the US – in folk clubs, pubs, theatres and at Irish festivals. In Ireland he has performed in many different venues and also does corporate entertainment. skerrygerry@yahoo.com http://www.coastwalkstoriescork.com (+353) 087 980 1086

< Back Dr. Senem Donatan Mohan Adults, Children, Festivals Availability: Full time resident on the Island of Ireland, available all year round and i s prepared to travel nationally and internationally. Repertoire: Senem is a myth tracker, passionate about tracing myths back to their origins in indigenous cultures. She shares personal stories interwoven with creation myths and wisdom tales, primarily from Middle Eastern folklore, reflecting the region where she grew up and her ancestors lived. For children, Senem tells stories from around the world that cultivate their curiosity about natural phenomena. She encourages children to ask creative questions and imagine possibilities beyond definitive answers. Background experience: Senem is a storyteller, story practitioner, and author originally from Turkey, now living in Dublin. She blends creative arts with science, focusing on cultural and individual vitality. Over the past two decades, Senem has touched the lives of thousands of children and adults through her performances and books. Senem has also trained a diverse range of people, including teachers, scientists, academics, performing artists, social workers, public speakers, sales professionals, engineers, CEOs, HR professionals, accountants, refugees, recovering addicts, neurodivergent individuals, and homeless people to develop their storytelling skills across Asia and Europe. In her performances and workshops, Senem engages her audience in an expressive and fun way, emphasizing interactivity and spontaneity. Contacts: IG / In: @senemdonatanmohan info@senemdonatanmohan.com http://www.senemdonatanmohan.com (+353) 083 133 3789

< Back Barry Feely Adults Availability: Part time and is prepared to travel locally and nationally. Repertoire: Folk tales and original material based on local characters. Preferred audience: Adults Background experience: Barry has performed at the Boyle Arts Festival, Mohill Storytelling Festival, Portnoo Donegal Festival and San Francisco Folk Concert. (+353) 071 96 62220 (+353) 086 258 4822