It's hard to imagine a world without stories. When I was growing up, my grandmother could never imagine a world without books or without telling stories. As a child, she told me stories about little pigs and angry goats, about spiders and brave little chickens. We read the adventures of five famous kids from a mysterious place called Kirrin and of a brave and optimistic girl called Pollyanna who lived in America. It would've been hard for her to imagine that we might be able to read text on a small screen that you had downloaded from the 'cloud.' It would have been hard for me to imagine that her voice would be replaced by an actor's voice recording on an on-demand video with an accent and sound that was not ours. LET STORIES LIVE FOREVER By Del Costello "Step through the gateway now, to stories that are as relevant today as they ever were." - Witi Ihimaera Things change, and technological advancement serves us in so many ways. In medicine, in travel, in commerce, and in education. However, the typical paradigm for the introduction of new technology is that the old technology is made redundant and eventually ceases to exist. This is perplexing when we think about the technologies that have eaten away at the human-based contact we need to build and grow our prosocial and social emotional world. In order to do these things well, we simply need people, we need each other. The art of human-to-human storytelling is one such relationship. As educators, we understand the importance of stories. We understand how the stories of our whānau connect us to each other and to the world around us. The art and craft of storytelling sits firmly in the narrative pedagogical space, and it is imperative that we implement and leverage the power of the story to support many facets of the development of tamariki: prosocial, socialemotional, early literacy, oral language, creativity, imagination, mental health, connection to culture, and to shape our identity and sense of self. If it is that important, what's the challenge? Research tells us that the part of our brain that stores and recounts stories is as old as mankind itself. Learning, listening to, December 2023 { 22 }
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