Thanks for visiting my website!
I have been telling stories, singing songs, listening,
and animating activities with adults and children
(since the last century) in the following settings:
Schools - Libraries - Festivals
Refugee Communities
Interfaith Projects
Language Learning Programmes
Cross Cultural Dialogue
Peace & Reconciliation Action
Schools
The main words I use in working with Schools are:
Words for Children:
- Tell - Listen - Share - Sing - Move - Make
Words for Educationists:
- National Curriculum Topics
- Literacy - Oracy - Numeracy
- Coordination Skills - Musicality - Engaged Minds
- Skill in Communication and Self Expression
Refugee Communities
I tell stories in refugee communities, and emphasise the use of traditional material from the participants' original backgrounds, always promoting work that enables other cultures to be seen as an invaluable resource contributing to a shared diversity in the wider community.
Drawing on personal experience in Africa, Asia and the Caucasus I feel we can celebrate our differences, as much as share our common humanity in telling each other our stories.
Interfaith Projects
One of my favourite activities in Interfaith storytelling is to get people to say which faith a particular story is from. Usually they can't tell a Jewish story from a Muslim from a Christian from a Buddhist from an Animist story and they all tend to think the story comes from their own faith. It helps in breaking down prejudices!
Language Learners
Working with child learners of English was my entry into the world of storytelling. I found that whenever I told a story (often with vocabulary and language structure 'unknown' to them) they were immediately engrossed, and language acquisition was much more rapid with those children who had stories than with those who didn't.
Now I work mainly with adult Language Learners who show the same delight in the stories and contribute key words in their own languages to the telling of the stories.
Peace& Reconciliation
I am moving more into this area, after initial work in London, Northern Ireland and Armenia-Azerbaijan, I worked in Israel and Palestine on the 2009 Healing Words Project led by Roi Gal-Or from The School of Storytelling, Emerson College, England. Through storytelling and story sharing we attempted to 'address the conflicts between race and religion in the middle east through creativity and through the striving to find that which is truly equal and human in each of us.'
I shall be doing a follow up tour in November 2009 to reconnect with some of the participants of this year's earlier project.
