Redefining teaching through Storytelling
When we think of storytellers, we often imagine photographers, writers, artists, and even the software developer, and a thousand others, before we consider including teachers on the list. Knowing relatively little about what it means to be a teacher today, we are still stuck with the image of the village headmaster imprinted by old Nollywood. This is hardly anyone’s fault. It will take teachers to take charge of their own narrative and redefine the image of the profession.
Stories are the foundation of every society. It picks out the values we hold, it decides the things we respect. He who controls the story controls everything, and teachers are great storytellers. You know them, you may have been taught by one. Their classes are filled with amazing stories; stories they use to instruct and roll out their lessons. In an age of information democratization caused by the internet, there are no gatekeepers. The medium to tell our stories are now in our pockets, and the audience is always there to listen. But teachers have not yet leveraged these tools effectively.
We live in a time when no one wants to become a teacher; no one wants to pay teachers well. Even the biggest private schools in the country will offer a teacher with a Master’s degree 40,000 naira as a monthly salary. Even worse, our youth studying education in universities are ridiculed and have to hide their courses from friends.
Here’s what a student wrote me on LinkedIn:
“Henry Anumudu, I’m a student of Education in the university, whenever we were offering a borrowed course with other students, there's a particular way we were being treated, because apparently, they saw education students as people that were only wasting their time and resources in school.
This attitude towards us made a whole lot of us remove the education part whenever we wanted to do any form of introduction. Some people had to transfer to other departments as a result of the lashing in 200 level. Some of us got used to it
Well, my guess is due to the poor image of the profession in Nigeria, like you stated up there. The foundation (tertiary institution) is where this whole "see finish" as it's being called starts from, and the government is not helping matters at all…”
To read other accounts of how students of Education in our universities are being treated, click here.
The status of the teaching profession lies at the root of the problems we have in the education sector. We have an image problem, and one way to improve it is for teachers to start telling better stories about their work. Teachers must take charge of the narrative and redefine what it means to be a teacher.
In a way, this has begun. In September 2017, I became a teacher. A classroom teacher in a public primary school in Abeokuta, Ogun State. I had moved from my job in media and communications to become a pioneer Fellow of Teach For Nigeria, so I brought a distinct set of skills into the classroom: telling powerful stories.
Within one year of consistently telling the stories of my students and their families, I began to see a change. People started to listen, and they began to take action too.
A lady walked up to me in Lagos once and, with a smile on her face, said, “you make teaching look so exciting!”
Well, yes! Teaching is exciting, but we do not know because no one is saying it.
The single most profound external result of the stories from my classroom came when a lady left her job to teach. At that moment, I realized the immense power of my stories.
The teacher today has a distinct advantage from every teacher in any other age. She has social media, one of the greatest communication tools ever created.
If you are an educator, and you are reading this, please share your experience. Make an impact, write the story, click post.
