by | Mar 20, 2018
Clowns Without Borders South Africa had a most wonderful opportunity to take the Our Story Your Story programme to the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) campus in Wellington. Lisa Cohen and Simone Peters developed an intensive 3-day training workshop catered for the CPUT third year students, taking them on a journey of storytelling and how to make it applicable in a classroom setting.
The workshop created an inspiring, exciting, empowering and safe space that allowed the students to open up with one another. Through the power of autobiographical storytelling the students not only shared their own personal narratives, but learned highly valuable transferable skillsets that they could easily implement into their own classroom settings. Here are reflections from some of the participants in the workshop:
- “I learnt to listen, tell a 5-minute story which I never knew I could do. I learnt so much about myself and about everyone. I know something now about everyone and I learnt how the activities can be used in the classroom.”
- “I didn’t know the impact stories had on people. This weekend I realised what a powerful impact stories can have on people.”
- “I learnt today that we must not just assume that children understand what we are teaching, we need to ask and make sure they understand. In the exercise on describing, I saw that it is my weakness and now I can go and work on myself.”
- “This process helped me learn that we can use our own experiences and stories to help one another, we must just speak from the heart.”
From this 3-day workshop, the student teachers learned the power of empathy, listening, turn-taking and creating a safe environment for their own learners to feel confident and comfortable in. We are very grateful to their coordinator and teacher, Margot Wood, who approached us to lead this workshop; understanding the highly influential capacity that teachers can play in the classroom. By developing compassionate teaching methodologies in those wanting to become teachers . . . then we are looking at a future of teachers who inspire their classrooms through creativity, kindness and mutual respect. Clowns Without Borders South Africa loves any opportunity of being a part of that future, and that is why facilitating such workshops brings us such joy.
If you are interested in having the Our Story Your Story autobiographical storytelling workshop in your Institute of Higher Learning, please e-mail info@cwbsa.org