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Showing posts from July, 2012

Society for Storytelling

Great news, The Society for Storytelling is interested in my research and my research aims. Which is to see storytelling in schools throughout the UK. "I'm pleased to confirm that the trustees agreed at last week's meeting that supporting your research would be a worthwhile cause." (Chip Colquhoun, Chair). They are going to sign a letter of support to help me fund raise. At present I am seeking funding from 2013 to cover my 2nd and 3rd PhD years. With funding being so competitive this year I am thinking of new ways to raise funds. For example I am looking into a collaborative project with others. Being involved in research with more experienced persons is very exciting. I have already learnt a great deal and look forward to what is ahead--despite it being challenging. More information will follow once something is confirmed.
A study in advertisements found that people turned off their critical mindset and were more likely to accept ideas when their brain was engaged in a story (Info from Jeremy Hsu, Scientific American , "The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn"). This week I have my first set of data. A local school, and parents, kindly allowed me and a volunteer storyteller to do a test run. Cornish storyteller, Mike O’Connor, wowed kids and adults alike with his fiddle playing and acting techniques. Teachers were sneaking in at the back, out of curiosity in the first week. After each tale the students discussed what they thought of the stories, and how they could relate them to their life. I have now finished transcribing their conversation. This took a lot longer than anticipated. Unfortunately now I’m waiting for IT to fix access problems with NVivo. This computer analysis software will allow me to search for patterns in the student’s word usage over the five week period...

Questions

‘some methods are more useful for the questions they offer’(Arthur W. Frank, LettingStories Breathe , p72) My question is how can traditional storytelling be used to support emotional health? It’s a tough one. The term narrative therapy was coined as a result of the work of two men, Michael White and David Epston (see Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends ). Though they didn’t want to be associated with any formal definitions. What exactly they did, I don’t know yet, because I am waiting for their book to come into the library. However in my search, of what felt like every periodic journal in an electronic maze, I found Pennebaker. In the United States, Pennebaker took the idea of narrative and health further by attempting to test it empirically. He and his colleagues did experiments on writing therapy and discovered that writing had a positive effect on not just mental but also physical health! Which brings me to another question, how do we test this? Pennebaker used qualitative dat...