Talking About History

Last Tuesday evening I talked for an hour with Eric Wolf on his weekly web cast about historical storytelling. What a great time it was. How often does a person get a chance to talk about something they are passionate about for an hour? Not often, for me anyway. We talked about how those stories from history find us, and how research fits in. We mulled over the difficult parts of creating an historical story, and, finally, we dug into ways that historical telling fits into the curriculum along with some specific ideas and techniques. It turns out that Eric had a family member in the Civil War and has created a program around that character. It was so interesting to learn about the changes he has made to that program and why.

Preparing for that conversation caused me to revisit all the historical stories I have in my repertoire. I looked back at all the research and practiced them so that I could talk about them with Eric. I hadn't told a few of the stories for quite awhile, and they were fading from my list of tales. I forgot how much I like them.

Below is a link for that conversation. Once you’re on his site it will be difficult to leave without listening to a bunch of other storytellers…Syd Lieberman, Lyn Ford, Brother Blue, Dianne Williams, who is the co-author of The Storytelling Classroom…. just to name a few

Here's the site...Historical Storytelling With Children<