Applying Online Storytelling Techniques to the Job Search

Posted on by

Time once again for one of my favorite pastimes, looking at ways to apply material about storytelling to the job search.

Today’s target is a posting about Donnie Claudino, TechSoup Canada’s marketing manager, who spoke at a conference about teaching charities about using online technology to improve their fundraising and marketing about how to use storytelling in online media. The post was written by “Andrew” on TechSoup.org.

Claudino used storytelling to land a job when he, as an American, wanted to immigrate to Canada.

Key to his storytelling message was the exhortation to know your audience. In the job-search, you must know as much as possible about your audience, the employer. Claudino notes you must “determine what action you want these people to take;” in the job search, you want you audience to invite you to the next step in the hiring process — whether interview, next interview, or job offer.

The “questions to ask yourself about your story” that Claudino proposes can easily be applied to job-search stories:

  • Is the story transformative? Does your story have “heart-fire?” Does it have emotional pull? Is it believable and honest? [A story that shows your passion and enables the employer to become emotionally invested in you as a person and prospective employee will go a long way toward getting you the job.]
  • Does it make [the employer] want to do something? Is the story inspirational and [can it] move [the employer]? More importantly, is there a clear course of action? [Hire me!]
  • Can the story be repurposed? [In your cover letter, can you expand on a story you told in a clipped bullet point in your resume, and in your interview, can you expand on the same story even further? Can you re-purpose the story in networking situations, your career portfolio, and in a personal branding statement?]

Suggesting that stories can “live” online, Claudino says, “The best strategy is to have a connected and consistent message in as many places as possible but which ultimately drives visitors back to a site to take a specific action.”

That’s why it’s a great idea for job-seekers to tell their stories on a personal Web page with their name as the domain name (like my katharinehansenphd.com). The Web site can introduce an online portfolio, full of stories of accomplishments and results. In addition to — or instead of — his or her own Web site, the job-seeker can have story-rich profiles on sites like LinkedIn. Contact information should be readily available so the employer or recruiter can take the specific action of getting in touch.

Twitter Storytelling: Chapter 2

Posted on by

“Twitter is a storytelling tool,” writes Tim Girvin. “Every person tells a micro-story in the 140 characters of text that are tied to the messaging output from many tiers of devices.”

I’m not totally convinced, and neither are all of story practitioners in my Q&A series.

But folks have continued to attempt storied uses of Twitter since I last wrote about this topic. Here’s the latest:

  • Laurel Papworth writes:

    Twitter is The Human Narrative in real time. And yes the Capitalisation is important. Twitter is not just a marketing tool, nor a place to get cool links to awesome videos and blog posts. It’s not even simply a place to organise a bbq or be introduced to a potential client. Its primary purpose is to tell the Human Story, in 140 character paragraphs.

    She goes on to cite stories of breakups, car accidents, and deaths told through Twitter. She also cites Twistori, a site that presents ongoing feeds of tweets that begin, “I love…,” “I hate …,” “I think …,” “I believe …,” “I feel …,” and “I wish…” Papworth calls these “Automated stories from the web.” I’m not so sure. She then cites Twittilate, “one lady’s dirty monologue,” as storytelling. Again, not so sure. Finally, she mentions Twittories, “stories composed 140 characters at a time by a diverse group of collaborators using Twitter.” These, I think, are getting closer.

    • The blogger at The SocioSphere attempted to get a storytelling project going with Twitter. Can’t tell if it went anywhere; I don’t think so.
    • Twitterature: Penguin books will publish a book about literature, written in 140-character tweets, to be called Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less.
    • Dan Baum told the story of why he left a job as a staff writer at The New Yorker over three days of tweets. (turns out I already mentioned this in another post, but not in the context of Twitter storytelling, so I’ll repeat it here.)
    • Twisters: As reported by WAToday.au @arjunbasu writes short (obviously) stories on Twitter. “I call them Twisters,” he says, “because everything on Twitter has a stupid name.” These kind of work for me in the same manner as six-word memoirs.
    • Storystreaming Platform: Framing this idea not so much as story telling, but storystreaming, Kevin Sablan proposes a “platform [that] could be used to make sense of the confusing flood of information coming out of social media streams” (see illustration below and here for a larger image). He would use it with venues other than Twitter, but Twitter is the first one for which he’s proposing the platform. To understand what Sablan’s trying to do, you need to grasp his concept of Storystreaming, which spins off of lifestreaming, which I’ve written about before. I like how Sablan distinguishes storystreaming from lifestreaming, particularly this point:

Story-centric: Current lifestream solutions, at least those I’m familiar with, document a person’s life, but every story includes multiple characters, events and plot. A storystream platform needs to document a the events of a story, not a person.

Difficulty NOT Talking About the Difficult Stuff

Posted on by

Storytellers, memoirists, journalers, bloggers — anyone who talks or writes about himself or herself in a public forum — is faced with the dilemma of how much to reveal about oneself.

Penelope Trunk, whom I wrote about not long ago for her brave column on the relationship between her two abortions and her career, has written a new blog entry, “How to Decide How Much to Reveal about Yourself”, which is sort of a misleading headline because Trunk freely acknowledges that rather than agonizing about whether to reveal an aspect of herself, she instead has “more difficulty not talking about difficult stuff,” and by difficult stuff, she means not only the aforementioned abortions, but also, as she writes, “marriage, sex, … [and] running out of money over and over again.”

She then goes on to reveal that she was in one of the towers of the World Trade Center when it fell, one of those who narrowly escaped the building. And then that her parents had physically and sexually abused her, though she has virtually no memory of the sexual abuse.

Trunk’s explanation for why she reveals so much of her personal story:

So what I’m telling you here is that I’m scared of secrets. I’m more scared of keeping things a secret than I am of letting people know that I’m having trouble. People can’t believe how I’m willing to write about my life here. But what I can’t believe is how much better my life could have been if it had not been full of secrets.

So today, when I have a natural instinct to keep something a secret, I think to myself, “Why? Why don’t I want people to know?” Because if I am living an honest life, and my eyes are open, and I’m trying my hardest to be good and kind, then anything I’m doing is fine to tell people.

That’s why I can write about what I write about on this blog.

And when you think you cannot tell someone something about yourself, ask yourself, “Really, why not?”

It could be argued — and one of Trunk’s commenters brought this up — that it is not that difficult to talk about this stuff when Penelope Trunk is not your real name. But Trunk has been transparent about why she uses the pseudonym and what her original name was.

About the list of traumatic and private things she’s written about, Trunk writes, “But each of you has a list of things in your life similar to that, it’s just a list you don’t want to talk about.”

She’s right. But I tend to be more like Trunk than like those who have trouble revealing the difficult stuff. At various times in my life, I’ve written publicly about my reproductive decisions, my alcoholism, relationships, family, and the fact that I was raped when I was of college age.

Why have I written about that stuff, and why do I sometimes talk about personal stuff in this blog? I agree about living an honest life.

There is probably also an element of catharsis — both for me and for my readers. When you open up about the difficult stuff, people know they are not alone. The 264 comments (so far) on Trunk’s blog entry that I skimmed seemed overwhelmingly positive and supportive; undoubtedly Trunk’s story was cathartic for some of them.

For me, there is probably also at least a small element of narcissism. One of the pleasures I get from blogging is the same as one of the highs I used to get from teaching — listening to myself talk — in this case, listening to the writing voice inside my head talk.

What I wish Trunk had talked more about is what happens to you professionally when you talk publicly about the difficult stuff — after all, her blog is Brazen Careerist and usually about career and job-search issues.

Can Trunk talk about this stuff publicly because she is secure and established in her career? I am no longer employed by any entity outside my family, but I still worry about what personal revelations would do to my career. I would still love to teach again someday and am not sure if talking about the difficult stuff would be an obstacle. I even worry when I write about more lightweight, frivolous, and personal things in this blog — like my love affair with a local steer.

I long to write about a traumatic period of my life, providing self-help suggestions along with the narrative to assist others who’ve gone through the same thing I did.

We hear — and I especially hear in the career-management circles I travel in — about “personal branding.” My best friend recently posed the excellent question: How do you strike a balance between establishing a personal brand and revealing too much about yourself?

What does it do to your “brand” to disclose the difficult stuff about your personal story? What does it do to your career?

I would like to believe I live an honest life like Trunk avows. Most of the time, I, like Trunk, ask myself, why not self-disclose? I put myself out there more than most people. But a little sliver of fear — for my career, for my “brand,” for what my readers might think of me — holds me back from full disclosure.

Do These Videos Pass Test for ‘Compelling, Inspiring, Radically Simple’ Storytelling?

Posted on by

Video is everywhere these days … it’s more and more ubiquitous. Often I’ll see an interesting Twitter tweet or other storytelling reference that when I click on it, turns out to be a video.

Nothing wrong with that except that I have zero patience and often am too restless to sit through a video.

Back in the spring, my friend, video storyteller Thomas Clifford wrote a blog entry, “Is This The Future Of Video Storytelling For Organizations?” He was talking about a particular video series on the online Washington Post site, On Being, “video portraits that take you into the musings, passions and quirks of all sorts of people,” but perhaps Clifford’s characterization of these short videos should be used as criteria to evaluate any piece of video that claims to be storytelling:

  • Compelling
  • Inspiring
  • Radically simple

Clifford then asks these questions:

  • Can organizations use video narratives as a way to learn from one another?
  • Are video narratives an effective way to genuinely engage employees and its customers?
  • In a time of information saturation, should organizations integrate narratives into their communications efforts? If so, how?
  • Can our individual stories be part of a larger brand’s story?

All great questions that I would like to apply in a broader way to the videos I’m listing here. I’ll return to those presently.

A bit earlier than Clifford’s post, Amanda Hirsch quoted Tom Kennedy from 2002 (who built the award-winning multimedia unit at Washingtonpost.com): “I believe we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of the Web ‘s potential as a story-telling device.” Hirsch’s followup: “Seven years later, I believe we’re still just scratching the surface.”

So, as you review the videos listed here, ask yourself if they demonstrate we are still just scratching the surface in Web-based storytelling, or have we gone beyond? Do these videos pass Clifford’s test of compelling, inspiring, and radically simple? And, now returning to a broader view of Clifford’s questions:

  • Can people use video narratives as a way to learn from one another?
  • Are video narratives an effective way to genuinely engage Web users?
  • In a time of information saturation, should organizations, individuals, and brands integrate narratives into their communications efforts? If so, how?
  • Can our individual stories be part of a larger brand’s story, the larger human story, the online content story?

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, do these videos indeed represent storytelling?

  • In Passion for the Land, Ranchers and Cooperative Extension agents partner with media artists and UC-Davis university scholars to produce and present digital stories on current challenges to agricultural viability and rural community life in the Sierra Valley. The one I watched, “Is Sustainable Attainable?” was well-done and definitely a story, although I thought the narrator/protagonist was a bit sing-songy in his delivery.
  • Ohio State University has developed a reputation as a hub for digital storytelling, and among its impressive set of resources, OSU’s Web site has a section that describes the OSU Digital Storytelling Program’s mission this way: “to help the academic community communicate their passion for teaching, research, and outreach through personal, engaging storytelling.” A collection of “Academic Story Examples” is offered here. I enjoyed The Human Connection. The site also offers a nice set of resources.
  • My Facebook friend, Evelyn Van Til, who is also connected with Ohio State — she’s an academic and career coach there — just today sent me the video, “Happiness” (embedded at the bottom of this post), the story of her personal journey to discover that “happiness is created in the daily practice of choosing to see the positive.”
  • The storytelling philosophy of MediaStorm, writes Carrie Brown-Smith at The Changing Newsroom (quoting MediaStorm’s Brian Storm), “is to let the subjects speak in their own words. They use on-screen text to connect the dots and drive the narrative, but the audio is in their sources’ own words. They combine stills and video to great effect and always incorporate some kind of surprise for the audience.” This is pretty close to the style Clifford spoke of with the Washington Post‘s On Being series. Defying my personal impatience with watching videos online, Brown-Smith reports that on MediaStorm, 65 percent of those that start watching stick with the site’s 21-minute videos to the end. In explaining why, Brown-Smith perhaps adds three more criteria to what we should be looking for in online storytelling: high quality, easily shareable on social media, and defiant of audience expectations for short-attention-span stuff. I watched Intended Consequences (pictured), about sexual violence during the Rwandan genocide, which was actually just under 15 minutes. I was not impatient.
  • Also rather long (just over 9 minutes) but absolutely stunning is a piece excepted from the TV show “Ukraine’s Got Talent.” Highly touted in the Twitterverse, the video features the show’s winner, Kseniya Simonova, creating a jaw-dropping sand animation that clearly makes a huge emotional impact of every member of the audience. As you watch the video, you can tell the artist is depicting wartime, but the reason for the audience’s outpouring of emotion is unclear until you learn the background, as I did on Associated Content. It is:

  • The Great Patriotic War, or as we call it in America, WWII. Ukraine was probably the area most devastated in the war, even more than Germany. It was a conflict that saw nearly one in four Ukrainians killed. A population of almost 42 million lost between 8 and 11 million people, depending on which estimate one references. Ukraine represented almost 20 percent of all the causalities suffered during WWII. And that was after Stalin had killed millions during the manufactured famines before the war. It to this day touches every Ukrainian.

All the videos I saw passed Clifford’s basic tests of compelling, inspiring, and radically simple (some were more compelling than others, and some may not have been quite “radically” simple).

I’m not video-savvy enough to answer whether these demonstrate whether we are still just scratching the surface in Web-based storytelling, or whether we’ve broken new ground.
What do you think? What’s lacking in video storytelling? What’s the next step?

Storied Food and Changing Eating Habits

Posted on by

My 22-year-old son works as a produce specialist in a health-food store and has become quite an evangelist for natural foods. He has been campaigning to change his parents’ eating habits and urged me to read The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

So I’ve been reading it — or rather listening to the audiobook because I’m a super-slow reader, and listening to audiobooks is a productive thing to do as I work on outdoor chores on our Washington land.

Pollan talks about “storied food,” food presented in natural-foods stores with brochures about how the beef cattle “living in beautiful places” ranging from “plant-diverse high-mountain meadows to miles of Aspen groves and think sagebrush flats.” He notes that he, like many consumers are inclined to pay higher prices for such meat. Not only only do we perceive that the meat tastes better, but we also love a good story.

The chapter from which those quotes come from is full of discussion and examples of storied food.

But previous chapters told a grim story of factory farms, a narrative that would never be told at a natural-food store or any other retailer. This is the story of cattle crammed into feedlots, mired in manure lagoons, cattle that are fed a mush of corn (which they were never meant to eat), supplements, chemicals, and antibiotics (in part because their unnatural corn diet renders them susceptible to disease).

I don’t eat a lot of red meat, but we do have a weekly tradition of a steak cooked on the grill. It’s yummy, and I look forward to it. Hearing the story of the factory farms does indeed have me seriously questioning this habit. Of course, I tell myself that my boycotting factory-farmed beef will do nothing to stop the practice.

But then I think of “storied food” that is close to home. A few miles from our home here is a farm with a couple of horses and the most fabulous specimen of bovine you’ve ever laid eyes on. We just call him Bovine because we were unsure of his gender at first. Pretty sure Bovine’s not a girl cow — no udder. And probably not a bull because — ahem — something seems to be missing down there. So he’s probably a steer.

We feed him apples, which he absolutely loves and gobbles up. And I worry about him. Is he destined to be steak dinner? Is he the family pet? Is he a child’s 4H project (which doesn’t mean he still couldn’t be steak dinner)? I’ve noticed steer manure is popular here; maybe his function is to produce manure.

As I think about changing my eating habits away from factory-farmed beef, I think of our Bovine, the protagonist of a potential food story. It would still be tragic for me — or anyone — to eat our magnificent Bovine. But if someone does, they could at least take comfort that he had a happy grass-fed and apple-chomping life while he was here — not a miserable life of suffering that the factory-farmed cattle lead.

I mean, just look at him … the hero of a pastoral story of the vanishing small American family farm (his farm is for sale, by the way).

Read more of Pollan’s discussion of “storied foods” here.

To what extent are you influenced by “storied food?”

Cautionary Tales for Business

Posted on by

Sometimes storytelling that teaches a lesson is inadvertent. It’s not intended as “business narrative” or one of Steve Denning’s springboard stories meant to spark change. It’s just good reporting and writing that tells a story that provides a lesson businesses can learn from.

Want to convey the lesson that you should be careful who acquires your business because it may lose everything that made it great and eventually go under? Then read the sad story of gardening-tool importer Smith & Hawken by Jim Welte at marinij.com. Current owner, Scotts Miracle-Gro Co., intended to sell Smith & Hawken but decided to liquidate it when it couldn’t sell the subsidiary. As Welte reports, original partner Dave Smith said, “When Scotts bought it and Smith & Hawken was owned by the largest pesticide seller in the U.S., I suggested people boycott it. It had completely lost its roots.” Further:

Both Smith and Hawken said the company that bears their name had long since veered away from being a gardening company and was unable to take advantage of the recent surge in interest in gardening because of that.

“How could you possibly have a gardening store in this economy and go wrong?” Hawken said. “I’ll tell you why. This wasn’t a gardening store anymore.”

Smith and Hawken had not originally sold their company to Scotts. It had gone though several owners before it ended up with Scotts. But perhaps the lesson of this well-written story is that when you sell your business, especially if it bears your name, you may have to be prepared for it to lose its character and even its very existence. Perhaps there are terms of sale that can keep your good name from getting sullied.

How about communicating the message that if you want to sell products, you should probably respond enthusiastically to those who buy those products? A column by Neal Rubin in The Detroit News makes one wonder if indifferent salespeople might be one reason GM is where it is today. Are they really all so demoralized they can’t sell anymore?

Rubin asked a salesperson at a Buick dealership about a redesigned model, the Buick LaCrosse, he’d seen on the highway. The response:

He said I’d probably seen a GM executive on a test drive. If I’d been on the other end of that call, I’d like to think I’d have sensed a potential sale. I probably would have asked for a name and phone number, and promised to get in touch the instant a LaCrosse graced the premises. But nope; that was pretty much the end of our relationship.

Later at another dealership, he asked three questions, including one about the LaCrosse. The response was even worse:

I’d come through his door. I’d asked questions about two vehicles. He didn’t introduce himself, he didn’t offer to show me a [name of the other model Rubin asked about], he didn’t ask if I’d ever driven one.

Keep in mind, this story takes place in Detroit. “We’ve learned in these last months that we’re all in the auto business,” Rubin writes, “and we need it to work better. And I’m tired of asking myself the same question: In our alleged service economy, where the heck is the service?”

Eventually Rubin finds a dealer — referred to him by the National Auto Dealers Association, who offers him encouragement.

Read any stories recently that offer valuable business lessons?

Moon Landing Stories

Posted on by

I don’t have a good moon-landing story. Forty years ago, I was 15. I watched the grainy, black-and-white video of the landing on a snowy, black-and-white TV. I always associate the moon landing — for some reason — with the Miracle Mets of 1969 and with my fervent participation that summer in a theater workshop for teens.

The space program and I grew up together. TV sets would be wheeled into my grade-school classrooms to watch the Mercury launches. I was as enthralled as any other kid back then. Then I went through as long period, as I suppose many baby boomers did, in which I was blase and apathetic about the space program.

As an adult, though, I consider myself a space geek and devour anything I can find about it, especially those Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo years.

One of my favorites was the wonderful Tom Hanks-produced HBO series, “From the Earth to the Moon.” I especially love the theme song, which I give you here to celebrate this great day in human history: 01 From The Earth To The Moon Main Theme.m4a

What’s your moon-landing story?

A Clearer Picture of ‘What’s at Stake?’ in Job-Search Stories

Posted on by

It’s probably pretty typical for authors to immediately second-guess what they’ve written in their books and be champing at the bit to revise as soon as the book is published.

I wish I’d been more original with Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get a Job and Propel Your Career.

For example, the standard story formula for job-interview stories has long been Situation –> Action –> Result (or Problem –> Action –> Result or Challenge –> Action –> Result), and that’s pretty much what I presented in the book.

Gerry Lantz was the first to open my eyes to the notion that the SAR/PAR/CAR structure might be a bit ho-hum, and perhaps something more compelling was possible. He suggested structuring the story around the question “What’s at stake?”

Even though I found a good example of a What’s at Stake? story in Tell Me About Yourself, I admit that I had not totally wrapped my head around the concept.

But it became clearer to me when I read a blog entry by James Shelley. In turn, it was Shelley’s citation of Robert McKee’s seminal Story that helped me see the light. McKee writes:

What is the risk? What does the protagonist stand to lose if he does not get what he wants? More specifically, what’s the worst thing that will happen to the protagonist if he does not achieve his desire? If this question cannot be answered in a compelling way, the story is misconceived at its core. For example, if the answer is: “Should the protagonist fail, life would go back to normal,” this story is not worth telling. What the protagonist wants is of no real value, and a story of someone pursuing something of little or no value is the definition of boredom.

McKee’s “What is the risk?” is pretty much the same as Lantz’s “What’s at stake?”

When applying this question to a job-interview story, it usually works better to ask the question, “What does the protagonist’s employer stand to lose if it does not get what it wants?” What would have happened to the employer if the protagonist had not increased sales or cut costs or solved some trenchant problem? What would have happened if the protagonist had not been there to act?

Shelley goes on to say, “True risk deals with issues of ‘life and death’ importance…” In a job-search story, the risk usually won’t be life-and-death (unless the job-seeker is, say, a medical professional, firefighter, police officer or the like). But the life or death of the job-seeker’s employer could be at stake.

Here’s an example from Tell Me About Yourself in which the employing company (which was the protagonist’s father’s firm) would probably have gone under had the protagonist not acted:

Two summers ago my father, who was the backbone of my family, had a massive stroke and was left partially paralyzed. This happened just a few short months before I was supposed to start attending college, and at the time I didn’t know if I ever would go to school. My dad put me in charge of his online business, which I had known very little about. I turned into the sole provider for my family overnight. I spent my days on the computer by my father’s hospital bed, very thankful that I could work and still stay by his side. My father kept getting better and better and eventually went back to work for himself. In a very short time, I realized that taking care of your family is the most important thing you can do, and to do so, you need to work hard and succeed so that you can provide them with everything they need.

Footnote: Shelley’s post also captures why storytelling is effective in the job search — because the audience for the story — the hiring decision-maker — becomes invested in the storyteller. The listener cares about the storyteller. “The stories you love the most are stories that literally seem to suck you in because you start caring for the things that the characters care about,” Shelley writes. He then quotes Jack Hodgins from Passion for Narrative:

We become involved in people’s lives when we care about them, and we begin to care about them when we understand what it is they hope for. Then we are put in the position of cheering them on, tensing on their behalf, getting impatient to discover whether they succeed.

What Is Storymapping?

Posted on by

I’ve mentioned storymapping before but am now seeing enough new material on the subject that a definition seems in order.

The blog Emerging Upstate Arts Professionals describes what storymapping, a project of The Center for Digital Storytelling, is:

Essentially, “storymapping” is a method of reclaiming the dialogue and character of individuals and a community. The presenters use modern, readily available technologies, to create a map of stories in cities around the world. Usually these cities or town have a dramatic, traumatic, or interesting story to tell, stories that speak to a forgotten time or place, stories that have been embellished or changed over time, or stories that are happening at the moment. Individuals who participate are asked to tell a story, any story of a place — they are not interviewed. The stories are recorded and/or videotaped, edited and uploaded, and then the people (encouraged by signs placed in the locations of each of the stories) call a phone number and hear the story. The program is supplemented by a website with video of some of the individuals telling their stories at the locations they are talking about. The Center of Digital Storytelling has worked with organizations and individuals in 16 cities, all over the world.

As an example of a phone number you can call to hear a story, the blog offers 504-256-1116. “When prompted, choose and dial any number between 01-20.”

These 16 storymapping projects are listed here.

Here’s another blog post about a collaborative brainstorming session on future storymapping projects.

Using Story to Teach [Hi]story

Posted on by

Clay Burrell says history isn’t learned, but story changes that problem.

He suggests scrambling “the major periods of history in a random cluster on the board or a handout:

“Medieval Period,” “Cold War,” “Roman Empire,” “Enlightenment,” “Age of Exploration,” “Classical Greece,” “Industrial Revolution,” “Greek Heroic Age/Trojan War,” “Renaissance,” “Sumer,” “Solomon Builds the Jewish Temple,” “Scientific Revolution,” “Alexander the Great,” “World War I and II,” “Mohammed and Islam,” “The Crusades,” “Egyptian Pharoahs,” “The Reformation,” “Buddha,” “The Romantic Era,” “The Catholic Church Begins,” “Confucius.”

The instruction, then, to students:

“Make a list in which you place these major historical events and periods in the correct chronological order. Then, write the approximate dates you think each one took place or began.”

Burrell says that in most cases, students (high-school seniors) fare poorly with this exercise. So then he says to them:

“You’re about to graduate and become adults. You won’t have many more chances to get your head around this story, which truly educated adults should know. If I promise that this 5,000 year old story is really pretty easy to learn and know — as a story — do you want to take this opportunity (possibly your last) to learn it?”

Burrell says that “telling the story of the last 5,000 years as a narrative, as the real Greatest Story Ever Told – full of gut laughter, wistful “what ifs,” amazing characters and events, philosophical wonder, and chains of cause and effect over centuries, over millennia, all liberally peppered with audience-participation requests for predictions, connections to earlier episodes, summaries of why Marx couldn’t have come earlier than the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment couldn’t have come before the Renaissance, on and on” is one of his strengths.

However:

… hearing the story, being mere audience, isn’t enough to learn it. Like the bards that kept the Iliad and Odyssey alive through several centuries of the Greek “Dark Age,” during which reading and writing disappeared, and the story lived through oral transmission from older to younger storytellers, the students need to rehearse what they’ve heard from teacher — and a simple, low-tech way for them to do that is simply to re-tell the story they’re hearing, episode by episode, as simple written narrative summaries.

Another twist on “history as story” is the History Engine project, which sounds like it gives students the opportunity to build narrative summaries similar to those Burrell talks about — using primary sources (but focusing on American history only):

The core of the [History Engine] project is student-written episodes — individual snippets of daily life throughout American history from the broadest national event to the simplest local occurrence. Students construct these episodes from one or more primary sources found in university and local archives, using historical context gleaned from secondary sources to round out their analysis. Students then post their entries in our cumulative database, giving their classmates and fellow participants around the country the opportunity to read and engage with their work.