Smith and Guillain, Storytelling Schools Series, Vols 1 & 2

storylines volume V issue 3 storytelling records and teaches it. In our planet’s uncertain future, this kind of expertise sounds like it might repay closer emulation.

Simon Heywood

Chris Smith Phd and Adam Guillain

The Storytelling School: Handbook for Teachers

2nd edition. Hawthorn Press. Storytelling Schools Series, Vol. 1.2014. ISBN 9781907359385 £45.00 Chris Smith Phd

147 Traditional Stories for Primary School Children to Retell

Hawthorn Press. Storytelling Schools Series, Vol. 2. 2014 ISBN 97819073592 £45.00 Years ago, when I was first venturing into schools to tell stories, with great idealism, zero contact with living tradition-bearers, no repertoire, and scant insight into which stories would speak to which listeners, I could really have done with a big fat book, clearly and engagingly rewritten, with about 140-odd folktales in it, arranged by age group, with useful hints towards further research, ring-bound, with a coffee-proof laminated cover, and a slim companion volume with a programme of developmental exercises which assume no prior knowledge. Come to think of it, I probably still could do with a couple of books like that. So I say good for Chris Smith and Adam Guillain for finally having written them. Here they are. The authors are foundermembers of the Storytelling Schools group, which provides training and resources for teachers wishing to implement the Storytelling Schools model developed ultimately from Pie Corbett’s work for the National Literacy Strategy around 2003. A6er a decade of development, the model, which forms the

storylines volume V issue 3 basis for these books, consists of learning and teaching a systematic programme of storytelling skills across a whole school, designed to promote confidence, fluency in spoken language, and reading and writing skills, and to impact positively on teaching across the curriculum. I have one quibble, and it’s big bigger than these two books, in fact. The stories retold here are generally cited as ‘from West Africa’ or ‘from Scotland’ or ‘from First Nation America,’ until, of course, modern writers and performance artists get hold of them, at which point, it suddenly, magically becomes appropriate to bestow a named - and o6en flattering - author credit. On the relatively few occasions when an actual tradition-bearer gets something approaching equal billing, the credit is not always even accurate: the Lakota/Kiowa Apache storyteller Dovie Thomason is twice credited as ‘Dovie Thompson.’ This is not merely unfair. It’s self-limiting for us to fail to appreciate how much we change a story by changing the context of its telling. Traditional versions of ‘Bird in Hand,’ for example (Vol. 2., p. 361), are more than gentle tales of a family spat between a ‘village chief’ and his sulky son, which is how they appear here. The story was already old when it was told during the Holocaust, as between a Jew and a German soldier, and it concerns a lifeand-death battle of wits between deadly enemies. Primary school kids could certainly relate to that. In these books, they don’t get the chance. It’s fine to dilute or otherwise adapt a story, from choice or necessity. But readers will come away with a strange idea of storytelling if you don’t tell them when you’re doing the diluting - especially if busy teachers are tempted to treat your resource as a one-stop shop, and not seek other sources of information. Still, rant over. Twenty years ago, I’d have killed for these books. Today, on balance, I may be handling them with caution. But I’m certainly keeping them on the desk.

Simon Heywood