Test: STORYLINE

 

 

Introduction

 

Storyline is a concept which started in Scotland and has been taken up by teachers across Northern Europe. We at the BBS VII in Braunschweig were introduced to it through the Leonardo programme via our partners from the Teacher Training College in den Haag.

 

Originally a teaching idea for general use (language teaching, maths, and so on) it has elements which make it very suitable for early technical education, in particular its emphasis on problem-solving in the context of a story.

 

In essence Storyline involves the teacher/Erzieherin developing a story which must be pitched at an age-appropriate level. This story should not be too long, but must be long enough to engage the interest of the children, who should for maximum effectiveness identify with the characters. The story needs to be developed in a direction which faces the children with a “real world” problem. The story then finishes in mid-air, and the children are asked for their ideas about how they can help their characters solve the problem. These problems are chosen precisely because a technical solution (based on scientific principles) is both possible and reflects some technical reality in the children´s real life.

 

The task of the teacher/Erzieherin at this point is to guess the direction the children might want to go in and have appropriate materials available to “test out” the children´s solutions. It is critical to recognise at this point that it is not the solutions themselves which are important, but the mental processes which the children must use to solve the problems. There is in this sense no “right or wrong “answer, but there are of course solutions which help the characters overcome their problem, and ineffective solutions.

 

 

What we did at BBS VII

 

I teach in Michael Geginat´s class, EU I (Erzieherin Unterstufe –Profil I “Technische Früherziehung”) who are in their first year of the second part of their training to be kindergarten teachers or youth workers. One day a week all the four EU classes concentrate their attention on their special profile, in this case in this class alone, early technical education. I and Marlies Lindemann teach this, I taking on Storyline and Marlies taking on Light, Shadow and Colour, based in part on the work of our partners from the University of Barcelona.

 

After an introduction to the concept of Early Technical Education in general and Storyline in particular, the 24 students in the class chose who to work with on what subjects. In all nine groups worked on and presented in class nine different Storylines for different age groups from 3 to 10 years old. This they completed before Christmas. The whole class is now currently on a block placement until the end of March 2004, and one or two of the students have said they will use their Storyline planning with real children to see if it works.

 

Of the nine Storylines I rated two very good, one good, five satisfactory and one not satisfactory. Almost all the students enjoyed working on them and put in a lot of effort. They had no difficulty at all in seeing the value of the concept, no difficulty at all in developing stories (although some were too long, too complicated or not clear enough) or choosing appropriate themes. All nine themes were good, and most of the stories were age-appropriate.

 

The problems were all in the area of “how do I get the children to do what I want them to?” It was precisely the area of control and freedom which caused all of them the most headaches. Up until now the students have learnt to formulate “Angebote”, that is well-thought through units with a beginning, middle and end, clear aims and a clear view of what constitutes success. Throughout this process the student is in 100% control and the children follow. Although most of the students could understand intellectually that freedom for the children to decide how to solve problems was “a good thing” they found it extremely difficult to give up the control. Their solutions were often very clever attempts to keep control without appearing to do so! How far this is legitimate should I think be something for us to consider in Barcelona in February.

 

 

One example

 

One example was the story (designed for 4-5 year olds, very well told and well illustrated) of two bears who lived on opposite sides of a fast flowing and cold river. They could communicate across the river, and got to know each other well, but one day the boy bear invited the girl bear to a birthday party, but how could she cross the river safely to attend the party?

 

The students wanted to illustrate how boats developed, and had lots of experiments about what floats, what sinks, how to propel a floating boat and so on. Their problem was that the children were more (or as) likely to think of building a bridge, swimming or swinging over the river on a rope. How far is it legitimate to steer the children towards a solution that the students themselves have prepared beforehand? In the end the students wrote into the story that the bears tried out all sorts of other solutions. The water was too cold to swim in, the trees were not long enough to build a bridge, the bears were too frightened to swing over on a rope. This was done clearly to limit the ideas the children might have to overcome the problem!

 

It still left lots of ideas about building boats and rafts, with lots of sensible experiments that could be done in miniature in the kindergarten.

 

A second example

 

For somewhat older children a group developed a story around friction. The story was of children left playing in a garden after the grown-ups had left the playgroup. In the garden was a very heavy wooden trunk which the children could just lift but couldn´t drag into the house. They knew the trunk shouldn´t be left outside overnight, but had no-one to help them get it into the house. The students built into the story that there was a collection of wedges, rollers, and other assorted bits and pieces of wood, metal, plastic and so on nearby. Could these be used to help them? The students then developed experiments using rollers, hard and soft coverings and so on to illustrate the scientific principles of friction.

 

A third example

 

For older children one group developed a science fiction story, of a group of Star Trek type explorers landing on a hot planet with no fresh water, and only a few simple tools. The aim was to show how fresh water can be won from condensation, using only the sun. Again the story was designed in a very elegant way to limit creativity among the children. There was in fact only one solution, and the children had to find it! This is doubtless effective, but is not really in the spirit of Storyline.

 

A fourth example

 

For 5-6 year-olds one group developed a story about water in a well which was just below the level the bucket could reach. How could they get the water into the bucket? Here again the solutions could be to lengthen the rope, but the solution the students wanted was to illustrate the principles of water displacement, ie by filling the well with stones to raise the water level. Their solution was again to limit the children´s creativity by excluding the lengthening of the rope, although this could have been just as interesting an experiment, by unwinding the rope, making it thinner, and using knots, to find out how strong a rope needs to be to pull up water.

 

 

 

 

The other examples

 

The others developed stories around the mixing of colours (this was a very well developed story, but not really “technical” enough, as the children could only learn which colours make which other colours), gaining fresh water from saltwater, using a periscope to see what is going on next door (the problem here being that the solution was too complicated for the problem!), a different story leading to the creation of a raft and a not very well thought through story on shadows.

 

 

Summary

 

Storyline works well in theory for early technical education. So far none of the nine developed stories have been tried out with real children. Originally I thought it would be an issue whether the stories could be played out for real or in “miniature” in the kindergarten. This didn´t however seem to be a problem. Our students had no difficulty creating appropriate stories, but found it very difficult to get the right balance between necessary forward planning (or “control”?) and really allowing free rein to the children to develop solutions (“freedom”), which seems to be at the heart of the concept. On the one hand I can understand the desire of the students to be well prepared for all eventualities, and therefore by necessity limiting those eventualities. On the other hand, are the aims of developing solution-building skills losing out to the desire to teach science in age-appropriate ways to pre-school children? Are these two aims maybe incompatible? I would be grateful for feedback from colleagues in Barcelona in February on this problem.

 

 

 

Adrian Greenwood

BBS VII  Braunschweig

 

January 2004