Story Circles Research Opportunity
What’s a Story Circle?
Story circles are a simple approach to facilitating a collective storytelling framework that brings people together to share personal stories around a common theme.
It has been used by the Unesco as a method for developing intercultural competencies. Similarly, they have been used for community development and organizing, student leadership development, and civic engagement.
So…can story circles help volunteer informal educators?
That’s what we’re aiming to explore this fall through a series of pilot story circles with Volunteers at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo.
Zoo volunteers already have a lot of experience and training about how to engage the public in conversations about climate and conservation. We’ll be testing the story circle format to see how well it supports these volunteers in furthering their community of practice and development of best practices.
What Happens in A Story Circle?
Story Circles allow people to do what they do best — share stories!
The basic steps are straightforward:
We align around a theme
There’s a warm up activity around story telling
We experience a guided reflection
In a loosely structured session, participants take turns sharing stories on the topic at hand
We evaluate the themes, commonalities and insights together