Developing Empathy Through Storytelling
After interviewing a community member who has endured hardship, high school students practice their ELA skills—and their empathy—to turn it into a public performance.
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Go to My Saved Content.As part of the EL Education network, the staff at Casco Bay High School in Portland, Maine, strive to make work meaningful and relevant to students. In longtime teacher Susan McCray’s 11th-grade English Language Arts classroom, students strengthen their writing skills, tap into creativity, and develop a deep sense of empathy through a storytelling expedition. In this multistep project, groups of four students interview people in the community who have shown strength in the face of hardship or injustice. Each group meets with its interviewee twice, homing in on stories of courage and resilience. They record both interview sessions, transcribe them, and then get to work to bring them to life onstage.
Back in the classroom, students work together to capture the essence of the community member’s story: They identify key moments, storyboard, create a script, and memorize it—a skill that has fallen by the wayside in many classrooms. Each team then works with a guest theater teacher, adding movement for emphasis and blocking the three-minute piece onstage. The project culminates with a powerful and moving live storytelling performance for the community, with the original interviewees in attendance.
McCray has been doing this project with her students for years, and it has evolved over time. At the heart of it, she wants the work to matter to students. “There’s an opportunity for real growth in so many ways—just from the interview itself and then from having to get up on that stage and have it all memorized and project out into an audience.” The performance is important, but McCray emphasizes the process even more. “My hope is by the end you feel really good about yourself, and you realize you can do things you didn’t think you could do.”
To find more tools and strategies to support projects that use storytelling to develop empathy and perspective-taking, read Jessica Fagen’s article for Edutopia, “Teaching Oral History in Ethnic Studies Classes,” or Abeer Shinnawi’s piece, “Harnessing the Power of Storytelling to Support Migrant and Immigrant Students.”