Passionate Fact: Storytelling Science Workshop
Workshop Coordinator, Susan Strauss, Storyteller
A biologist’s life experience holds a wealth of story material. Personal experience or anecdote is the most accessible story form and can be very effective when communicating with the public about restoration. In this workshop, participants will refine a personal anecdote and a restoration experience for use in public presentations; while at the same time, develop an understanding of the “storytelling way of giving information” or how to translate experience into story. Participants will leave the workshop confident with their working understanding of new found storytelling skills.
Focusing on personal anecdotes in the morning, participants engage in a series of fun activities that reveal specific attributes of story narrative and storytelling skill. These group and partnered activities provide participants with an experience of how the story does its work and provides knowledge of the essential elements for creating compelling communications. These include:
- Transforming information into imagery.
- Developing a sense of the “hook phrase” and ending.
- Exploring compelling story structures.
- Use of repetition.
- Building the element of mystery and climax.
- Development of sensory experience.
- Use of metaphoric language.
- Use of voice: Character dialogue, Sound effects and Picture-making capacity of language.
Through the progression of these activities, participants’ personal anecdotes are refined and prepared for effective public telling. The tools that are presented and practiced throughout the morning will be applied to the afternoon work on restoration stories.
Focusing on a particular restoration experience in the afternoon, participants will develop a story out of this. Activities for guiding this work will be collaborative and give practice telling shorter and longer versions of the same story — preparing participants for sharing their restoration story in multiple public settings, formal and informal.
Pre-workshop guidance will be sent to participants so they can give thought to stories for sharing in the workshop — both, personal childhood experiences in nature and an experience from their professional life in restoration work. Think and ruminate about these stories; don’t write them out as text.
The target audience for this workshop includes: permitting Natural Resource managers, students, tribal partners, agency personnel, consultants, scientists, technical experts, and NGO staff.