Berätta något för oss! – En studie om hur ugandiska lärare använder muntligt berättande som didaktiskt verktyg

Abstract

Storytelling is among the oldest tools for teaching and passing on knowledge. By sharing stories, teachers and pupils come closer together as they explore the worlds outside the classroom in an exciting way. Further, as becoming a teacher, I am interested in methods that help pupils to learn better and earlier research shows that storytelling is a great tool for teaching. Despite this, storytelling can be a rare event in schools today. Scholars suggest that the lack of storytelling in schools today is due to the increasing measurements of results and prioritization of accountability. Furthermore, African countries have had a strong tradition of telling stories and during an earlier visit to Uganda, I was astonished by the amount of storytelling that was used and how much pupils enjoyed it. Therefore, I went back to Uganda to explore more about storytelling. This study aims to explore how Ugandan teachers use storytelling as a didactic tool and to study how, in what contexts and why middle school teachers use storytelling in English and Social Studies. It also aims to illuminate what stories teachers choose to use. To answer this, I ask following research questions: “What do the teachers say about storytelling as a teaching tool”? And: “What do the teachers want their pupils to learn from what is told”? Data was collected by using interviews and conversations with teachers, observation and sound recordings of lessons and field notes. The study is based on a hermeneutic interpretation using scaffolding and mediation as theoretical framework and data has later been processed by using content analysis. Findings show that teachers use storytelling as a tool for different kind of learning objectives, using different kind of stories, but it’s sometimes used purely to keep pupils attentive. This essay turns to active teachers and becoming teachers who are interested in using storytelling. Therefore, this essay can also be seen as an attempt to inspire teachers to use storytelling in all school subjects.