Reaching students through stories.

"Stories differ from advice in that, once you get them, they become a fabric of your whole soul. That is why they heal you."

-Alice Walker

For thousands of years, around the world, stories have been a teaching tool to pass wisdom from one generation to the next. Native American legends, the parables of Jesus, Aesop's fables and Zen, Sufi and Hasidic folktales are only a few of the teaching stories passed down in families and cultures.

Grandparents, valued more in traditional cultures than our own, used to play a key role in passing on the old stories and the experience of their own lives. College faculty and counselors have inherited the grandparents' role as educators.

Higher education misses an important teaching tool by relegating stories to departments of literature, anthropology or folklore. Whether in the classroom or the counseling office, students may hear the oblique lesson in a story that they block when it's presented more bluntly.

Storyteller Lorraine Lum Calbow reaches students through narrative in her counseling and teaching at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix AZ, part of the Maricopa Community College District. A founder of the South Mountain Storytelling Institute and author of This Little Light of Mine: Remembering the Light Within, she spoke at National Institute for Leadership Development (NILD) conference with the AAWCC in Phoenix in June.

Breaking defenses