The core story range of the knowyourself.me sessions have been developed over twenty one years of researching and sharing. Some of the vignette stories were told to me by my father. The core range of “Stories of the People Scotland” are from the four main cultural influences that created modern Scotland.
From this we start to explore local stories – Argyll is lucky enough to lay claim to great storytellers including Duncan Williamson. There are excellent resources that hold stories in their unadulterated form such as the School of Scottish Studies and Tobar an Dualchais.
Many of our traditional stories help us reconnect with our place in the natural world. Reoccurring tropes like shapeshifting from human to fish to bird are present in stories to help us understand our place in a wider ecological frame. As explained by Mairéad Nic Craith, Professor of Public Folklore at University of the Highlands and Islands (12)
The animation of trees and mountains help us reimagine the natural landscape around us and the ever present “magical” elements help us look again at the constants of time and space. This is very much the realm of quantum physics, literally the science of the future, in the present.
For younger pupils a carefully selected repertoire of classic fairy tales provides an excellent introduction to Knowyourself.me. The power with fairy tales is immense and best summed up by the esteemed child psychologist and writer Bruno Bettelheim “Each fairy tale is a magic mirror which reflects some aspects of our inner world, and the steps required by our evolution from immaturity to maturity. For those who immerse themselves in what the faory tale has to communicate, it becomes a deep, quiet pool which at first seems to reflect only our own image, but behind it we soon discover the inner turmoils of our soul – its depth, and ways to gain peace within our selves and with the world, which is the reward of our struggles.” (13)
For older pupils we explore the classic stories of Greek myths “for the ancient Greeks and Romans, myths were everywhere…Myths provided a shared cultural language, and a tentacular, ever branching network of routes towards understanding the nature of the world, of human and divine life.”(14).Through knowyourself.me we can also explore the stories from the world’s religions through time.
Through these foundation stories we can cover every element of the curriculum, and more.
Story TELLING in education
The stories we discover and share in knowyourself.me are powerful tools for learning. So, why not just give each pupil one of the numerous collections of folk tale compilations available in libraries and book shops? It is the act of animating that story by telling it in a safe storytelling space that allows the story to flourish and become an active agent in the learning process. We suggest that story compilations are indeed made available for those pupils who want to research the stories further; find one for sharing in a knowyourself.me session and maybe fuel their interest in storytelling. The listeners of today are the tradition bearers of the future.
The founding patron of the Scottish storytelling centre – George Mackay Brown was quite clear “without the story, in which everyone living, unborn and dead participates men are no more than “bits of paper blown in the wind” (15). He saw the story as something more important than entertainment.
Stories project an emotional fingerprint into the fabric of the world and when they are retold magic happens. The Traditional Arts Working Group 2010 report to the Scottish Government stated “The arts of tradition- songs, music, dance, story – live continuously. Every time they are re-animated they consolidate a link in a chain that snakes back centuries to the individuals and communities that made and shaped them”(16). The philosopher Karl Popper proposes there are three Worlds at work in our reality – physically we are in World One , our minds are in World Two but the products of the mind including myths and legends exist in World Three (17). As such they are things and exist in our reality.
Carl Jung was one of the prominent ambassadors of stories as holders of something special – he specifically identified them as carriers of the building blocks that make us – “archetypes express themselves through myth and fairytale” (18). It is these story elements that make up our lives and this important work has been followed and elaborated on by Marie-Louise von Franz and Joseph Campbell.
When we start to look at stories with a respectful eye we can start to understand why they behave in such incredible ways. In the 1970’s Idris Shah wrote and published “World Tales” a collection of stories that have striking similarities in plot and message but told at very different times and places in the world. These tales were being told before global travel or even knowledge of other continents existed. Their cultural duplication remains unexplainable.
One example is “The Brahmins wife and the mongoose”, a story that exists in 5th century China but also appears in 13th century Wales as “Llewellyns Dog.” A very powerful story about how we interact with the nature that surrounds us. It is one of the first stories that John Muir recalls from his childhood – clearly it had a lasting impression on the father of the modern conservation movement.
Idres shah also comments “Many traditional tales have a surface meaning (perhaps just a socially uplifting one) and a secondary, inner significance, which is rarely glimpsed consciously, but it nevertheless acts powerfully on our minds. Perhaps, above all, the tale fulfils the function not of escape but of hope. The suspending of ordinary constraints helps people to reclaim optimism and to fuel imagination with energy for the attainment of goals: whether moral or material”(19)
Various academics have reported the positive effects of storytelling. In their book, Human Givens, Griffen and Tyrell write “In our technological civilisation we are flooded with factual information from a myriad of sources. But facts, on their own, don’t make us wise. And an excess of facts just raises our stress levels. What makes us wise is fitting facts into meaningful context, and that is the job of the right neocortex. We, therefore, firmly believe that the children need an education that involves history and stories – the patterns that give context and make learning a real experience. It has long been known that children and adults exposed to “classical” stories brimming with rich psychological templates) become more flexible in their thought processes, more creative and more intelligent as adults” (20)
The idea that the right neocortex is being utilised is important and was proposed decades ago by Dr Robert Ornstein – “Down the ages all good teachers have always been great storytellers, but only now do we have a physiological understanding of why it is necessary for them to be so. Research by Dr Robert Ornstein and others shows that, when people are listening to stories, their right hemisphere is very actively engaged in the process. Our left neocortex processes facts and factual information, whereas the right neocortex seems to be involved in creating and revising the “context” – the bigger picture-through which facts make sense.” (21).
During a radio interview to promote his book, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. 2009 Dr Iain McGilchrist summed up the importance of stimulating and working our “right” side of the brain “The difference is one of attention. The left hemisphere has its own agenda which is to help us to manipulate and use the world. The right hemisphere has no preconceptions and simply looks out to the world for whatever there might be. It doesn’t have an allegiance to any particular set of values.
Over the course of time there has been a shift more and more, in the West, towards the view of the left hemisphere. Which is one of a mechanism. It affects our view of our relationship with the world and what the world is like. It results in a rather virtualising and self-referring world.
What it means in the end is that we have substituted a rather lifeless, mechanical, fragmented picture of the world which has robbed it of its complex changing interconnected quality. That has a huge impact on our view of ourselves as human beings and what we are doing on the planet and our relationship with it.”(22)
I find it difficult to express this information in a better way than the experts quoted above. In short, stories and storytelling can start manipulating and medicating the parts of our brains that will make us happier people and better global citizens. Maybe it was sharing stories that got us this far in the first place.
The simplest statement of the importance of stories comes from Albert Einstein “if you want your children to be intelligent read then fairy tales. If you want then to be more intelligent read then more fairy tales”(23)
Young people are in a process of transition. Traditional tales exist to assist them in the process “In most societies, including African tribes and the travelling people of Scotland, all stories were believed to have an educational function as well as being entertaining, so they were directed particularly at adolescents, who might pick up hints from them, at least on how to face the wider world with confidence and optimism: but they would also be appreciated by older people who had heard them before”(24) –
Lon fhìrinn na sgeòil . The truth is in the story
12.https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2023/08/23/gaelic-folklore-for-a-multi-species-future/
13. Bruno Bettelheim The Uses of Enchantment
14. Charlotte Higgins. Greek Myths – A New Retelling
15. George Mackay Brown – Winter Tales (introduction)
16. https://www.academia.edu/7331869/Traditional_Arts_Working_Group_Report_2010
17. Popper, Karl (1972). Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (2003 ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-875024-6.
18. CG Jung Four Archetypes.
19. Idris Shah World Tales
20. Griffin, J. And Tyrell, I. 2003 Human Givens
21. Ornstein, R – The Roots of Self. 1993
22.https://staged.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/master-and-his-emissary-divided-brain-and-making-western-world-10-feb-2011
23. https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2013/12/einsteins-folklore/
24. A.J. Burford and D.A. Macdonald. Scottish Traditional Tales
