Storytelling: a way to foster cultural awareness in the classroom

• Autor(a) principal: Estêvão, Ana Catarina Parola
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/152683
• topic: Cultura; Consciência cultural; Ensino do Inglês no 1o ciclo; Conto de Histórias; Culture; Cultural Awareness; English teaching in primary schools; Storytelling; Domínio/Área Científica::Humanidades::Línguas e Literaturas; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Ciências da Educação

This research project’s main goal was to investigate whether storytelling could be a useful tool when developing cultural awareness in the classroom. Children learn best when motivated, so using storytelling in the classroom provided them with opportunities to not only develop vocabulary but also social skills and cultural awareness. The first story, Can You Say Peace by Karen Katz (2016) aimed at fostering cultural awareness. Pointing out how the characters lived, played and dressed, the main focus was to help students notice and reflect upon the similarities between them and the characters and the diversity in the story. The second story, T’Was The Night Before Christmas And Santa Got Lost is an original story created with the intention of helping students realize that through a wider cultural awareness, they could better understand the existence of diverse cultures in the world and that people from different cultures can actually interact with one another. Students’ perception on the existence of diverse cultures and traditions was assessed by performing group interviews, two questionnaires (given before and after the second story was told in class) and by asking students for a pictorial representation of the story. Both stories enhanced students’ perception on how people from different cultures live and how they can interact with them, which proves that in a multicultural class, using storytelling to develop cultural awareness is possible. The results also showed that children are capable of acquiring cultural awareness when identifying themselves with the story’s characters. And, by reflecting upon the similarities and differences between the characters, the students participating in this project showed an interesting response when asked whether they would be able to interact with children from other cultures and why. Imagining themselves in such a hypothetic situation, they formulated solutions for establishing contact (by playing together or exploring ways to make their conversations clear and understandable for example), they also recognized the importance of being creative in the process: using a common language is (in their own view) key to understanding what the other is saying.