Teaching and Storytelling
Teaching is in my blood.
As a social worker, helping my clients to learn and grow was critical to enable them to improve the quality of their lives. As a nonprofit administrator, it gave me joy to teach my team everything I knew about management and leadership, and then watch as they achieved great things.
Storytelling is a powerful teaching device. It’s been my experience that it captures interest and sparks the imagination. It’s one reason why case studies are at the heart of management education. —”Here is a story of what happened to cause a problem and the attempt to fix it.”
And now, as an author, the drive to teach is still with me. I suppose in a way, conveying a theme in a story is a kind of teaching. However, it isn’t intentional; every reader is free to interpret a novel’s theme however they choose. It’s different working with my fellow authors. Every chance I get, I offer to teach a workshop or make a presentation to a writing group. My favorite topics are Catching the Wave: Writing Short Stories, You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know: A Primer about Point of View, and Potent Presentations. I enjoy talking about these topics so much I don’t usually charge for them.
In fact, I just gave a presentation yesterday. I think it went well! Maybe next time I’ll post the day/time so more of you can attend. Wouldn’t that be cool?
