Storytelling

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Storytelling Community-Driven Development

• How Communities Can Use the Power of Stories in
  Planning and Problem-solving
• January 25, 2005
• Madelyn Blair Pelerei, Inc.

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Purpose To show how story can be used to help a
community develop by learning what they already
know and are to apply it to the task at hand.
To speak to the type of story that will
energize the community rather than simply inform
it.
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We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of
the dark. The real tragedy of life is when we are
afraid of the light. - Plato
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Language Social Constructionism

• We are born into language before we are born into
  life.
• We must find the unsaid of our unique existence
  in the already said.
• Our identity exists within language and only
  comes alive in stories.

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• We cant be creative if we refuse to be
  confused.
• -Meg Wheatley

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Living Stories

• Think of a time when you saw a new way to do your
  work and it was so compelling that you tried it
  yourself.
• At your table, tell a 3 minute story about this
  time.
• Rules
• Listen to the other stories as they are told.
  Dont comment during or at the end of the story.
• After a moment, offer a name for the story that
  was just told.
• If you are the teller, select or create a title
  for your story.

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Tashkent, 2000 - Islam and the Foundations of
Civil Society

• Seminar for 30 scholars conducted by the Center
  for Narrative Studies
• Purpose
• Introduce them to a narrative method of searching
  their own collective memory.
• Discover where and how people had kept their
  voices alive in the face of oppression.

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Lessons Stories and the Individual

• The quest for personal identity is a story of
  stories.
• Our identities come alive through telling and
  retelling our stories.

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Lessons Stories of the Community

• Stories are told and retold in response to real
  community needs, desires, dreams, and nightmares.
  
• Stories are what the community needs to know it
  knows (and what it is trying to forget it knows.)
• Stories can die out, and they can be silenced.

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Lessons Stories and Culture

• Stories and their exchange create our
  relationship reality.
• The genre of the stories told generates culture
  and vice versa.

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Open or closed?

• Locked pattern of interpretation or reality?
• Tradition or another possibility?
• Self-fulfilling or self-energizing?

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Bourella and Finding Social Energy

• A vivid imagination compels the whole body to
  obey it. Aristotle

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Why Appreciative Inquiry works

• It builds relationships enabling people to be
  known in relationship, rather than role.
• It creates an opportunity for people to be heard.
  
• It generates opportunities for people to dream,
  and to share their dreams.
• It crates an environment in which people are able
  to choose how they contribute.
• It gives people both discretion and support to
  act.
• It encourages and enables people to be positive.

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• There is no power for change greater than a
  community discovering what it cares about. Meg
  Wheatley

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Story Narrative - More

• Exploring the Story Narrative Techniques to
  enhance Appreciative Inquiry
• Introduction to Organizational Storytelling
• Storytelling Outside Organizations
• Storytelling Inside Organizations
• The Washington Story how national story is
  constructed and deconstructed

• Feb 10-11, May 18-19, Washington March 22-23,
  London
• May 17 June 23, Washington
• April 22, Smithsonian Institute
• April 23, George Mason University
• April 24, Washington

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• Madelyn Blair
• 301-371-7100
• Mblair_at_pelerei.com
• Thank you