Asian Congress
of Storytellers

Keynote by ABBI PATRIX

Storytelling as an Experimental Discipline: Sustaining the Art of Storytelling in Today’s Society

There are many places throughout the world dedicated to the storytelling art form. What we have in common is the love of oral stories that have been transmitted through time by books and human beings. We are actively working on transmission so that oral performances find a real place in today’s society. This goes beyond styles, forms, languages and repertories. The globalised scale of communication today inclines us to share more and more through the oral and to ensure that it is transmitted to the next generations.

CONCURRENT SESSIONS 1 - 3:

Session 1 by RANDEL MCGEE

A Thousand Voices Speaking Perfectly Loud!

Randel and Groark introduce the techniques of using the vocal chords and other speech makers to produce a variety of character voices and sound effects to add excitement and colour to your storytelling presentations.

Session 2 by SHERRY & BOBBY NORFOLK

Helping Struggling Readers: How Storytelling Can Make a Difference

We’ll explore practical strategies for fostering a love of reading, and helping kids develop the skills they need, in the public library and classroom. This workshop is NOT about teaching kids to read. IT IS about bringing kids, language and literature together in meaningful ways!

Session 3 by RUTH KIRKPATRICK

Storymaking with Children with Special Needs – A Different Point of View

Join this participative workshop where you can learn how to tell appropriate stories to children with special needs using props and puppets. Plus, make a story ‘soundscape’ using percussion instruments. Expect to have a lot of ‘noisy’ fun!

CONCURRENT SESSIONS 4 - 6:

Session 4 by ROGER JENKINS

Interact & Bond with Children with Special Needs and the Hearing Impaired using Simple Storytelling Techniques

Join Roger as he demonstrates the different ways stories can be told to children with special needs so as to build interaction, empathy, language and communication skills. Teachers, parents and counsellors can practice your storytelling skills with specific emphasis on creating stories around your child’s social experiences. Plus! special reference will be made to sharing stories with the hearing-impaired, to foster clear communication skills both verbal and non-verbal.

Session 5 by BEATRIZ MONTERO

Storytelling for Babies and Toddlers

This workshop is for learning how to tell stories to babies between 0 and 3 years of life. Storytelling for babies and toddlers, whether told or read, helps in the development of baby’s brain neurons. Storytelling for babies and toddlers is not therapy, nor a teaching method. It is a pre-reading entertainment activity for teachers and parents about how to tell stories to infants with creative activities to fully develop the intellectual and emotional capacities of the child.

Session 6 by LILLI RODRIGUES-PANG

Culture, Language and Your Stories

Come to this workshop with a story to work on. Together we will break down stories with the view of adding language and culture. We will overview applied examples of how multilingual stories have been used to transmit cultural understanding within the classroom and community.

Keynote by DR. GIDEON ARULMANI & KAMINI RAMACHANDRAN

Myths Within: Exploring the Story’s Psychological Elements

Only at the most superficial level is The Story a medium of entertainment. Stories are actually commentaries on social values defining codes of behaviour and storehouses of collective human wisdom. The commonality of mythologies and folklore across cultures has always been intriguing. This has prompted psychologists to point out that a fundamental character of the story is that it is closely connected to our inner landscapes. Embedded symbols reflect the human psyche. Characters carry features of human personality. Situations mirror human predicaments. Plots portray wish fulfilment. This Keynote presentation will examine the psychological underpinnings of The Story.

CONCURRENT SESSIONS 7- 9:

Session 7 by RUTH KIRKPATRICK

Storymaking with Young People

Join this participative workshop where you can consider the needs of Young People in the adolescent stage of development with regard to Storytelling and learn the structure to ‘transform’ young people from ‘listening’ to a story, to ‘making’ a story.

Session 8 by LILLI RODRIGUES-PANG

Improvised Stories

In the mental health, community and early childhood settings improvisation has been both joyful and a powerful tool to use. It is a way to truly interact with your audience and develop confidence in our inherent abilities to tell stories. In this workshop we will play a lot – with words, others and ourselves and find a place of within to spontaneously create stories.

Session 9 by ABBI PATRIX

La Maison du Conte: Transmission and Research (sharing session)

The art of storytelling has to be researched as an experimental discipline. Abbi will share and discuss about the work he has done at La Maison du Conte, where more than 30 young artists-storytellers are exploring their art and searching for the right words to use in storytelling.

CONCURRENT SESSIONS 10 - 12:

Session 10 by SHERRY & BOBBY NORFOLK

The Moral of the Story: Character Education through Storytelling

Meaningful character lessons can be developed non-didactically through storytelling! Use storytelling to infuse character education throughout the curriculum, resulting in character education instruction that is non-confrontational, one which is accessible to all learning styles and applicable to multiple intelligences.

Session 11 by SHEILA WEE

Telling Together: Interactive Storytelling for Children with Special Needs

In this practical workshop Sheila shares her approach to using storytelling in the special needs classroom, demonstrating how to create successful interactive storytelling experiences for groups of children with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities.

Session 12 by DR. GIDEON ARULMANI & KAMINI RAMACHANDRAN

Happily Ever After: Using Stories to Help Adolescents Meet Life’s Challenges

This workshop presents the cultural preparedness approach as a conceptual framework that could guide the development of counselling interventions that are responsive to felt needs. The learning that occurs between an individual and his or her culture is drawn from a deep repository of experience that has accumulated and grown over the ages. It is precisely here that the relevance of stories to counselling emerges.