Abstract
Storytelling as a cultural practice permeates all phases and areas of human life. From their earliest days, children grow into a culture of storytelling, acquire language and develop writing skills, are introduced to literature through stories and learn to communicate through storytelling in multimodal ways: orally and in writing, by playing, drawing, designing, singing, and more. In the process of narrating, experiences are structured, identities are formed, social contexts are shaped, and wishes and futures are imagined. Narrative connects different times in history and diverse linguistic-cultural spaces, but it also requires time and space itself. Against the background of an educational landscape that is currently competence-oriented, the question arises as to what role the art of storytelling plays in educational contexts and what possibilities it opens up for learning. This conference aims to address this question theoretically and empirically from pedagogical and linguistic perspectives.
Storytelling is not a mere account of events or experiences, but a constructive act in which thoughts are structured, meanings are produced, and experiences are made. In this way, events and experiences are shaped in perspective and acquire a subjective meaning. Narrating and listening, narrating and reading, and narrating and viewing are closely connected and mutually dependent, since both the interactions and the imagined others influence one's own narratives. The tellability of a story and the way it is told are produced interactively in social situations and can differ in different linguistic-cultural contexts at the level of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
Narrative research has recently gained much attention and can be located in different disciplines as well as in interdisciplinary contexts. Depending on the perspective taken, on the one hand more pedagogical, sociological, anthropological, or psychological questions can be pursued, focussing on the narrators themselves and the interactive communicative situations. On the other hand, there are more linguistic, literary, or text-oriented questions that focus on the linguistic or aesthetic object. Oral, written, or visual narratives, monologic or interactively produced narratives, individual acquisition trajectories or comparative situation representations will be considered.
The edited volume Storytelling as a cultural practice is dedicated to narrative in educational contexts and aims to make pedagogical and linguistic approaches fruitful for each other internationally. With this in mind, we invite theoretical, empirical, and didactic contributions that illuminate storytelling as a cultural practice from different perspectives and explore the interplay between narrative and learning.