Educators as Readers: Home

Educators as Readers:  Personal Enrichment, Professional Development.

1. The Benefits of Reading

• Great readers of our time
• 20 Mins a day - benefits

2. Story Telling

• How to use the narrative arc to bring your curricular content to life

3. Comfort Zone

Is it time to step out of your comfort zone and read a variety of literature for a genre you haven’t read before:

• Graphic Novels
• Novels In Verse
• Narrative Non-Fiction (Memoirs)

4. Formats

• eBooks
• AudioBooks
• Podcasts

• Tap the Transformative Power of Stories to Build a Kinder World

• How to Tell a True Tale: Neil Gaiman on What Makes a Great Personal Story

• Iris Murdoch on Storytelling, Why Art Is Essential for Democracy, and the Key to Good Writing

• The Role of the Artist in the Age of Trump, And the power of stories that are unshakably true

• What Silent Film Taught me About StoryTelling

• "English majors are down 25.5 percent since the Great Recession, just as world’s top economists say we need more ‘storytellers'."

• National Book Award winner Adam Johnson: 'Storytelling isn't a game to me'

• Brain Pickings – An inventory of a meaningful life.

  The Moth

  The Paris Review

  This American Life

  Serial

• “In 2013, P. Matthijs Bal and Martijn Veltkamp, researchers from the Netherlands, sought to answer the question of howreading fiction influences empathy. What they discovered help[s] articulate the “how” of the work we do as educators to engage kids with transformative text.”

• “According to Bal and Veltkamp, the key is in the transportation of the reader. When we are transported across time and space, we become engrossed in a simulation of a social experience and our emotions are triggered. Those emotions lead us to infer what the characters are “thinking, feeling or intending” which in turn gives rise to our taking on a character’s perspective. 
• Once we re-engage with the world beyond the story, the newfound understanding of a different perspective is integrated into our own life and presents itself as empathy.”
   
• “It’s worth noting, also, that Bal and Veltkamp cited the work of well-known psychologist Jerome Bruner, which articulates that it is the narrative structure of a text that has the potential for transporting the reader, and ergo making the empathy connection. Narrative nonfiction, therefore, also has the potential for building empathy as well. In the realm of nonfiction, biographies, memoirs and narrative explorations of distant people, places and cultures all have the potential to shift understanding and engage the heart.”
   
• “In our modern world, it seems we could do with a bit more empathy, a little more understanding of perspectives different than our own. When we learn the stories of our fellow humans that newfound understanding lends itself to compassion, connection and grace.”
   

• Rues, K. (2019, October 24). Tap the Transformative Power of Stories to Build a Kinder World. (Rues, 2019)