Storytelling as a Cultural Practice

1.Insight

Storytelling, as a cultural practice, permeates all phases and areas of human life and opens up possible worlds (Bruner, 1986). From their earliest days, children grow into a culture of storytelling, acquire language and develop writing skills, are introduced to literature through stories, and learn to communicate through storytelling in multimodal ways: orally and in writing, by playing, drawing, designing, singing, dancing and more (Dehn et al., 2014; Hoffmann, 2021). Through the process of narrating, experiences are structured, identities are formed, social contexts are shaped, and desires and futures are imagined (Wieler & Petzold, 2008). Narrative connects different times in history (Bruner, 2005), various disciplinary fields in education (Corni, 2013) and diverse linguistic-cultural spaces (Merkel, 2021; Spotti & Kroon, 2020, Lazzeretti & Gatti, 2022), but it also requires time and space itself (Gatti, 2013). Against the background of an educational landscape that is currently competence-oriented, the question arises as to what role the art of storytelling plays in educational contexts, and what possibilities it opens up for learning. This edited volume aims to address this question, theoretically and empirically, from pedagogical and linguistic perspectives.

Storytelling, whether orally or in writing, is not a mere account of events or experiences but a constructive act in which imaginations are formed, thoughts are structured, meanings are produced, and experiences are made (Herrmann, 2023; Schüler, 2019). In this way, events and experiences are shaped through perspective and acquire a subjective meaning. Moreover, narrative is also a way of worldmaking (Nünnig, 2010). By constructing realities through the performance of storytelling, narrative generates its own power. It shapes the cultural memory (Assmann, 2012; Gatti, 2016) as well as the communicative memory (Welzer, 2010) of societies. In classroom interactions on literature, both areas can be negotiated and combined (Hoffmann, 2012, 2018). Even in terms of interaction and media reception, storytelling can offer numerous participatory spaces for new members in linguistic and cultural communities when multimodal resources are involved (Naujok, 2023; Wittig, 2020). While doing so, spaces for multilingual and intercultural understanding are created (Hoffmann & Mastellotto, 2023).

Picturebooks and other multimodal forms of narrative, as well as social contexts of their reception like reading aloud situations or scenic play, play a crucial role in the acquisition of language and literature in different educational contexts (Campagnaro, 2021; Trisciuzzi, 2017). Narrating and listening, narrating and reading, and narrating and viewing are closely connected and mutually dependent, since both the interactions and the imagined listeners influence one’s own narratives. In this reciprocity between the different participants in the narration processes, a culture of storytelling can arise from early childhood onwards (Nentwig-Gesemann & Nicolai, 2011). The tellability of a story (Fludernik, 1996) and the way it is told are produced interactively in social situations (Quasthoff & Becker, 2005) and can differ in different linguistic-cultural and media contexts in terms of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics (Irsara & Domahs, 2020; Lazzeretti & Gatti, 2023). The processes of storytelling are dependent on different media environments and developments, concerning the context of both reception and production (Gnach et al., 2007; Vollbrecht, 2018).