David Heathfield’s workshop on storytelling and mental imagery

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I couldn’t make IATEFL, so it’s really great that some of the sessions are recorded and uploaded. I particularly enjoyed David Heathfield’s workshop “Storytelling and Mental Imagery”. The flow of the lesson he proposes is great. He has learners

  • listening to the teacher tell the story
  • visualizing the highpoint of the story with a partner+
  • drawing 6 pictures on your own
  • retelling the story to a partner, then the listener becoming the teller
  • going from imitating to innovating (as differences emerge)
  • perhaps acting out, or at least working on the physical aspects of storytelling

He shows (in minute 24) that students build different kinds of mental images when they are retelling the story: still/rolling film, colors/black and white, life scenes/cartoons, remember the voice and cadences of the teacher/don’t remember the voice at all, imagine sounds/don’t hear sounds, feel physically involved/feel outside the story.

Thinking about the images we remember, I stumbled across Charles Simic in the New York Review of Books blog writing about “What’s left of my Books“, and highlighting how it is images that we remember when all else is forgotten:

I recall, for example, Flaubert saying that it is splendid to be a writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts; St. Augustine confessing that even he could not comprehend God’s purpose in creating flies; Beckett telling about a character in his early novel Murphy whom the cops took in for begging without singing, and who was jailed for ten days by the judge; Victor Shklovsky, recounting how he once heard the great Russian poet Mayakovski claim that black cats produce electricity while being stroked; Emily Dickinson saying in a letter, It is lonely without birds today, for it rains badly, and the little poets have no umbrellas; Flannery O’Connor describing a young woman as having a face as broad and as innocent as a cabbage and tied around with a green handkerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit ears; and many other such small and overlooked delights.

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