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Home / Politics & Society / Professional Development for Teachers / Teaching Migration Through Data and Storytelling / How storytelling helps us make sense of the world

How storytelling helps us make sense of the world

Stories can be a powerful tool to illuminate individual lives and experiences of migration. Watch Dr Gameli Tordzro explain more.
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(Upbeat music)
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<v ->I think storytelling is how we make sense of everything.</v> All we do to communicate is tell stories. So for instance, if I engage in a conversation with you for a period of time, we may have is exchanged so many different little, little stories of what we understand, what we go through, how we see the world, how we think other people see us. But also our aspirations. The challenges we face in the world. We put all that in storing, and it means that when people migrate, for whatever reason, why they migrate, they want to be able to do that. They want to be able to capture their experience in migration. They want to be able to capture how they evolve.
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They want to be able to preserve what they sense, the interactions, they half with others and their environment. So that’s how we story. What we do is that we rob off each other, in everything we do as humans. So one of the things I say is that,
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in every encounter that you have with one person or the other, there is an opportunity you can treasure to either enrich or impoverished for that matter. So the choice we make regarding how we interact
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for me, is what shapes our lives, the basis of storing and storytelling is the memories we create. And those memories, the creation of them are always based on interaction. So whether you’re interacting with yourself with another person or your environment, that’s how we create memories. But I think that is what migration does.
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If you have an experience of moving in the world and you meet people who have also had the same or similar experiences, there is a unique connection that you can have. I see the different languages I speak,
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as being enriched from where I learnt those languages, because, the way I conceptualize the world
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is based on those languages, there are some things I can say in Evi, I can’t say in English. So if I couldn’t speak Evi, it means that the expression of those things are lost to me, (singing in a Evi language)
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I can’t sing that song in English. (laughing) I can’t sing it in English. I cannot say what those words express in a different language, than in song, that is in Evi, but value is what we create when we interact. And we interact with ourselves, our bodies, the objects we carry, the memories we create the stories we tell, which one can say, it’s a metaphor for, what you get when people migrate and bring along their values to share with everybody.

In this video, Dr Gameli Tordzro explains how stories can be a powerful tool to illuminate individual lives and experiences of migration.

We promote the use of storytelling in two different ways in this course. Firstly, by sharing stories of migration with the students, and secondly by supporting students to create their own narratives around migration informed by stories and data.

In the next steps in this activity, we will share resources that you can use in the classroom so that students can learn about individual stories of migration. This includes reading six individuals’ stories whose data is in the large data set that we are working with, and an animation called Life on the Move. We have found that sharing these stories with students is a highly engaging activity and also helps them to develop empathy and understanding for people who migrate.

As we begin to explore how we can use a large data set in the classroom, we suggest that students are supported to create a tangible output to their work by creating a poster. Through creating this poster, students will create their own narrative around migration that is informed by the data.

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This content is taken from
SOAS University of London online course,

Teaching Migration Through Data and Storytelling

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In week 3, we will also touch on how other subjects can be brought into this project so that it becomes cross-curricular. We will discuss how students can use dance, drama, art and ICT to further develop their own data-informed stories on migration.

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This content is taken from SOAS University of London online course
Teaching Migration Through Data and Storytelling
View Course
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Teaching Migration Through Data and Storytelling

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