Stretch minds!

To be able to live in an era of challenges and cutthroat competitions of the 21^st century and beyond, individuals need to be creative. One cannot be expected to be creative without developing thinking skills and the best ways to develop it is to use the skills. 

Creating and telling stories are considered to be some of the effective ways in concept building and enhancing imaginations. Stories are appealing to all age levels that is why even Allah declares in the Holy Quran: “We relate unto thee, the best of stories through our revelations…)(12: 3). Experts of early childhood care and development across the globe use storytelling an essential part of the teaching and learning process. Parents and grandparents are encouraged to tell stories to their children and grand children.

In olden times and even today there have been great storytellers who have been so influential in leaving profound imprint on people’s ways of thinking. Their spoken or written words, no matter how fabricated, have been taken literally by many. There have been people who have looked into the messages. Others were more concerned about the factual situation of the stories. One such person even criticized one of the classic storytellers, Moula Rumi, for narrating a discussion between the mother of Yehya and Merium (A.S) as the two holy ladies lived in different times. To which Rumi responded that his accounts are nothing other than stories of fidelity and love and that his narrations have nothing to do with historical facts.

Despite the fact that storytelling is an art, everyone from the past and present has been constantly engaged in storytelling. For sure people will continue to present their true or lie stories in the future as well. Some may view stories as insignificant, however, for teachers and students they matters a lot. Especially, when they are given the task of creating a story, it enables them to use their thinking and reasoning faculties.

There are some people who have been bestowed with the taste and art of storytelling and whose stories are available in the printed forms and otherwise. However, this does not mean that others cannot make up stories. Everyday individuals tell and listen different stories on a regular basis, yet it is likely that they remain ignorant of their storytelling abilities. Some may think that this is the area of specialized people that is why they might be reluctant to venture.

 The truth however, is that every individual is a storyteller and must try to listen and tell stories. Particularly, teachers and parents need to share stories to with children and must heed to children’s endeavor of inventing and or restating stories. With every such opportunity children get, they enhance their thinking, imagination and creativity. Moreover, their language skills improve considerably. Lack of such opportunity can adversely affect their thinking and creativity.

I have observed and experienced shocking situations of students at higher grades such as grade 10 to University level students and some of the teachers as well who are hardly aware of their storytelling or writing abilities. When they are asked to create stories, at first they think that it is almost impossible task for them as they have hardly been provided with such opportunities before. Therefore, expecting them to create stories make them feel weird and they straight away decline to create written or verbal stories. What can one expect of such students and teachers and their role in the society? The lack of imagination or thinking power can then produce, the generations who are followers of myths, insanity and extremism and terrorism. It can be argued that how is creativity related to storytelling?

Obviously, it is clear that while making or reading stories, the story readers, tellers and/or listeners are likely to think about various connections between and amongst different living and nonliving things and use their prediction and many other skills besides reaching at different conclusions. Consequently, they are also likely to make novel connections. Thus by the employment of thinking abilities; they are more likely to be creative. That is why, the more children will be oriented with stories, the more they are likely to be creative.

The reliance of parents on electronic media and allowing children to sit passively in front of a cartoon shows do have some benefits, such as learning language skills and may even lead to some creativity. It however, causes emotional attachment gap between parents and their children and may rob children of their creativeness for being passive spectators. This gap on the one hand may result in creativity deficit disorder and on the other may lead to different emotional and psychological problems in their subsequent lives and ultimately push them to undesirable outcomes.

In many of the rural contexts across the globe, there have been a traditions of storytelling, and in order kill times, old people in the context of Gilgit-Baltistan too used to gather at a place or visit others homes to listen and share stories. Most of the time such stories were confined to folklore, their family or village related histories, which the youngsters would listen and transmit to the next generations. That tradition is now rarely observable due to the advent of electronic media and other reasons.

In order to restore or enhance the creativity, teachers and parents need to encourage students to not only read and listen stories; they also need to be encouraged to create stories. Our society lacks reading culture as well. One of the reasons behind lack of interest in books and reading culture also stems from the unavailability of story books at different levels of schooling. Most of the time our textbooks have been boring stuff and in some case even when we have good stuffs available we do not provide children with much choices.

Schools have libraries with books which are hardly made available to students and even if they are made available they are really boring and have been piled in the libraries of schools without careful selection and without considerations. Consequently, in the absence of good story books, we have not been able to develop reading culture. In order to stretch students’ mind and increase their creativity and imagination, it is important to make quality story books available at schools as well as at homes in the form of mini libraries, besides making story telling and/or listening as a regular feature.

In the era of knowledge society and information technology, Muslim Societies are still grappling with the control of information, which has been mistakenly considered as a cohesive force. Creation and use of knowledge is unfortunately is very rare in the Muslim societies as a whole. And the creation of knowledge starts with thinking minds.

To develop a taste for creativity and imagination let us start employing our thinking skills.  In order to develop thinking minds let us focus on small libraries at schools and homes. It also needs to be made sure that the libraries are filled with books which cater the needs of students. Finally students must be guided to read these books and then encouraged to create their original stories.

The writer is an educator aafiyatnazar@gmail.com first published on
https://dailytimes.com.pk/480727/stretch-minds/