Use storytelling to shape learning experiences

Story Design at ELI 2019

Story Design was introduced to conference attendees at the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) 2019 conference in Anaheim on February 21st, 2019. Additional information and resources used in the session are available via the resources link.

Resources

What is Story Design?

Story Design describes both a structure and a process. As a structure, story design is the shape of a learning experience. It’s the purposeful organization of a curriculum as a story, whether that’s in a single class session or spanning an entire course. As a process, story design suggests a methodology for crafting a learning experience as a story, akin to the process a screenwriter undertakes in writing a feature film or television series.

The Story Design framework is based on a longstanding three-act film story structure, and draws from rich histories of storytelling dating back to Aristotle’s Poetics. But the premise is simple: if a class, course, or workshop is itself a story, then how can it best be crafted to engage participant characters in an exciting educational journey? Because Story Design is intended to be flexible enough to apply to entire courses, individual class sessions, workshops or simple demos, I’ll often refer to these all as learning experiences throughout this site.

Story Design as Structure

From the opening hook that captures the attention of the students and orients them to the journey, to the final thought that reflects on the lessons learned along the way, Story Design suggests a film-like story structure to the entire learning experience.

SD Structure

Story Design as a Process

Like a feature film scriptwriter, the educator can use story design to step through a process to arrive at the structure of the learning experience and develop this into a rich story that engages students as characters and co-authors.

SD Process

Story Design and Digital Storytelling

To be clear, Story Design is not Digital Storytelling, at least not in many current definitions of the term. In academic circles, digital storytelling is often described similar to LaFrance and Blizzard’s definition as “an innovative, technology-based method by which 21st century students utilize technologically advanced resources to produce meaningful stories and presentations that in turn allow for an enriched co-construction of knowledge” (2013). While there are numerous exciting opportunities for digital storytelling, Story Design as an instructional design framework does not focus on integrating digital storytelling as pedagogy (though this may be an attractive option for some designers). Instead, Story Design sees each learning experience as a story to be told, whereas digital storytelling may simply be one tool used to help tell that story.

Story Design is intended for instructors and students

While Story Design is intended as one way to create a “recipe” for a course or lesson design, it’s not a recipe that needs to be kept secret. In fact, if participants are intended to be both characters and co-authors of the story of the learning experience, it would make sense that they are privy to this process. After all, one of the reasons we engage with stories is because we identify with the characters and we want to travel with them in their story journey. If a student realizes early in a class that there is a narrative arc that she is traveling on, she may be more invested in seeing where that journey takes her. So feel free to tune students into the fact that they are participating in a story you’ve designed, and one that they’ll be invited to co-create along the way.

Why Story Design?

Story Design as an instructional design framework isn’t entirely new. As with most how-to’s or methodologies, it is greatly informed by its predecessors and in the case of Story Design, this includes those in the areas of instructional design and learning theory, as well as from considerations of aesthetics and story structure dating back to Aristotle’s Poetics. What I hope it adds to the field of instructional design is a more accessible approach to designing learning experiences that connects to the universally human practice of storytelling. I feel that where instructional design as a field of study has leaned heavily on learning science (and for good reason), this has sometimes resulted in sterile instructional design models with obtuse flowchart illustrations that turn off many educators. As helpful as some of these may be, a tool is generally less effective when one doesn’t like to use it, so I created Story Design to connect to the storyteller in all of us.

– Ben Gottfried, M.Ed. Learning Technologies, M.A. Film Studies