Hello, I'm Robert Averies from the Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence.
You're about to listen to the second episode of our Methods miniseries.
Today's episode, we're joined by Jenna Isherwood and Beth Norfolk to discuss the research and
scholarship method of story circles.
Enjoy!
Okay, so let's kick things off with some introductions. And given that this is the Methods miniseries,
our guests today have agreed to share their favourite reading method, their favourite
method of reading books.
Morning Beth.
Good morning. My name's Beth Norfolk. I'm a mature student studying English literature.
So this method is quite appropriate for me. My favourite method of reading books is definitely
physical books. I listen to a lot of audiobooks and I use my Kindle all the time, but there's
nothing that can beat having a reading book in your hands.
And hi, my name's Jenna Isherwood. I'm from the International Student Office at the University.
And my favourite method of reading books is probably physical books. And I would never
call myself an early adopter of new technologies, but I do now enjoy reading my Kindle.
Fantastic. So we've already got something in common, our preference for physical books.
I'd add myself to that group as well. Fantastic. So I guess a good place to start then today
is to explain to listeners what story circles actually are and how they're used in research
and scholarship. Jenna, could you tell us a bit about story circles from your experience?
Yeah, so story circles can be used in quite a wide variety of ways in different settings,
but essentially they're a kind of structured small group experience where you get an opportunity
to share a story that you bring and you also have an opportunity to listen to other people
and share stories on a topic that is usually provided in advance.
Great. Could you give us a sense of what that looks like in practice?
Yeah. So you might find story circles being used in sort of community building type settings.
They're also often used in places like sort of restorative practices or mediation. And
actually that was the first time I came across the idea from having volunteered as a mediator
some years ago. But, and then when I was thinking about doing a research project, I discovered
that they could also be used in a research setting. So for helping people in a group
to explore a topic together and bringing their own kind of perspectives to it. And as well
as the opportunity to kind of share and hear a story, there's usually some sort of guided
reflection and debrief activities that happen afterwards as well.
Why do you think the telling of narrative and stories is such a good way of eliciting
ideas and experiences from students, for example?
The thing that I love most about using stories in this setting is the way that they're able
to capture the kind of complexity and interconnectedness of people's experiences. So the project
that I did with Light was about the university as a place of kind of global or intercultural
community, either as a community like that or one that had the potential to be. And I
found that a lot of the ways that we talk and think about that in practice in the university
often have to do with putting people into boxes and categorizing their identities in
certain ways. And I found that story, when we actually listen to the stories of people's
experiences, they don't fall so neatly into those boxes and it just creates a space of
kind of empathy and where people can hear the kind of multifaceted nature of our everyday
experiences that we all have different kind of perspectives and stories that we can bring.
So that was kind of how I became interested in the method.
About yourself, Beth, how did you first learn about story circles and start to use it in
your own research?
I applied for an internship about mature student strengths and story circles work really, really
well in that context because quite often, particularly within a university setting,
mature students are often seen as a group which need problem solving. We're often seen
as a group that have got a lot of potential, but we're put into, like Jenna was saying,
into these very specific boxes and categories, which often result in the university trying
really hard to help mature students, but it doesn't always reflect their experiences and
their values. So our project was designed to look at mature student strengths from their
own perspectives. So to take away that barrier of these are the issues and actually these
are the strengths that we want to celebrate. And it worked really well for that kind of
project because you're getting people's narratives and people's narratives that are very rarely
spoken about in this context and in this setting and allowing people to just speak freely and
with their own peers so people can reflect off of each other as well. So it worked really
well for us.
And could you give us a sense then, Beth, of how you use the method in a step-by-step
process?
Yeah, sure. So we initially ran the method as a one-off staff pilot where we asked a
group of staff to come in and tell us about their experiences. Most staff had never heard
of a story circle. So we explained that to them and explained that they would have roughly
five minutes to tell a story about that one experience that they'd had helping mature
students. And that really helped us to realise what we needed to do outside of the pilot
because it quickly became apparent that that was quite a lot of pressure to tell the story.
So we went back and we discussed what a story was, what a narrative was, does it need to
have a beginning, a middle and an end, can it just jump in? And it really helped our
thinking in how we would structure the sessions going forward. So when we actually got into
the sessions with mature students, it was important that we co-created that space with
them. So we did the same thing, had a discussion about what a story would be, but tried to
take the pressure away by saying it doesn't have to be a full five minutes, it doesn't
have to necessarily have a beginning, middle and end or a hook or be exciting. And then
we asked students to work with us to co-create themes. So we did three sessions and each
theme was based on something that mature students themselves perceived as strength. So it was
completely co-created from the bottom up. And then when we got into the actual sessions,
we had the start of the session would be every single person going round in a group. But
then after that, we had a session where people could just relate to each other's stories.
So if something had come up in a story, we could go back to it, we could discuss it.
And that really worked because it really lessened the pressure on having to tell the story.
And we got lots more narrative out of that session as well. So just co-creating it really
helps to develop the method.
Yeah, it's really interesting to hear the sort of similarities and differences in the
way that you used the method. I think the starting point that you mentioned about working
with mature students and with a sort of strength based approach and trying to encounter some
of the narratives that exist in the university, sometimes quite well meaning around wanting
to kind of help and support, but actually kind of categorising people's experiences
in a particular way and sectioning them off from like the rest of the university community.
I think that speaks to me as someone that's thinking about how that can quite often happen
with the experiences of international students, which is a student label that I always use
with kind of scare quotes around it because there's quite a lot of problems with that
label and I tried not to use it actually as far as possible in the research that I did
and just waited to see how and when it was brought up by different people in the context
of the stories and the research. So that was one thing.
And I was interested what you were saying about the way you worked with students and
staff in my project. I had students and staff participating in the story circles together
and so the story circle there would be sort of four to six people and I wanted to make
sure that staff never outnumbered students in the groups for reasons of thinking about
kind of power dynamics and people feeling comfortable and stuff or comfortable enough.
But it was important, it was an important element of my project to bring students and
staff together because there was sort of two parts of it. There was the sharing of experiences
in the circle and then there was kind of a separate part that was about generating ideas
for action and I've often found in my work at the university that we do lots of thinking
about what students' experiences are and lots of talking to staff about ideas of what
we could do. And I felt that there could be more positive sort of actually practical things
implemented if we got those two groups kind of thinking together because the knowledge
and experience they have is valuable and sometimes different. So that was another thing that
we did kind of differently. But I found that that was it created a useful space for sort
of raising different people's awareness of the other group because students and staff
can often be kind of like categorised as kind of very different when in actual fact we are
often trying to achieve the same things. Could you tell us a bit more about your research
then, then Jenna? It was kind of an opportunity to delve a bit more richly I suppose into
a problem that I have heard sort of spoken about in my area of work ever since I joined
the university like nearly ten years ago now which is that there's this sense that the
university community is not cohesive and that international students insofar as they kind
of claim that label for themselves feel that they are kind of seen as a separate group
and finding it difficult to make kind of connections with people from the UK basically is often
how the problem is kind of conceptualised. And I think there are issues with sort of
framing it in those terms that it's a UK international kind of issue partly because students think
of themselves in that way because the university tells them that those labels are meaningful.
And but often when you hear people talking about like a agreeing that this is a problem
whether or not we agree that's the right kind of frame for it. But the solutions that people
tend to discuss is things like oh we just need more events that will bring people from
different backgrounds together. But in practice we know that we already have a lot of things
that are trying to do that and sometimes they're successful and sometimes they're not and sometimes
they're counterproductive possibly. So I wanted to have a more like nuanced conversation that
really brought in all the kind of complexity of these issues and I wanted to bring lots
of different people's perspectives together to try and see if we could think beyond the
usual solutions which is let's have some more events which is normally what people kind
of come up with.
Amazing. It's clear to see the similarities between the research that you both did. Story
Circles is a method that enables staff and students and different types of students and
sectional groups to break down some of these assumptions around mature students and international
students and I guess look more closely into the complexities of the student experience.
Is that something that you found was a benefit of using the Story Circles method?
Yeah absolutely. I think it gave students that are not always so represented in university
conversations the chance to actually say no this is our experience and how we perceive
it how we feel it how we respond to it in our university lives. And I think it was quite
powerful to use a strengths based method because when we did the staff pilot the conversations
that we had were about helping mature students overcome barriers even though we sort of framed
it as being about strengths. Whereas when we got into the student group and we started
to explain the method of our strengths we got lots of interesting conversations coming
about about in general broad themes about resilience and about determination and quite
a lot of powerful things came out of allowing people to speak about their own experiences
which was really interesting and what we'd really hoped that we would get out of it and
we did get out of it so I found that you know really useful and it's sort of like Jenna
was saying about not putting people in those boxes which are quite useful sometimes in
university views but I think that it does end up in just stereotyping that small group
of students when their experience is vast and I think Story Circles really helped tease
out that there are multiple experiences multiple identities really for experiences that come
into university life and I think other research methods may be not so powerful in exploring
that from a sort of narrative standpoint.
Yeah I should mention at this point and I'll see you on the verge of saying something so
I'll be quick we will provide links to any research outputs resources that came from
these two projects so if anyone's wondering what the findings were what the next steps
might be we will provide links to those things. Sorry Jenna.
No I was just going to build a bit on what Beth was saying that one of the things that
I really like about Story Circles as a method is it's not all about kind of participants
providing information and insight to the researcher it actually creates an environment where participants
can build relationships with each other and hear and gain something from hearing the collective
views and in a topic like mine it's kind of similar to Beth's which was about kind of
like community building and building understanding there was I wanted a sense that people might
be able to just hear something and go off and do something with it completely independently
of what I might end up writing up as the kind of research recommendations and so that was
useful because it was a you know it was a range of different students and also it was
staff who were primarily had some interest in this topic mainly because they were working
on designing and running the kind of events and activities that we might be able to influence
with the project so I was kind of keen that yeah that it wouldn't all just be like what
I thought the outcome and the recommendation should be like they could hear things in the
story circles and then just go away and do something straight away with it and actually
we had a reflection at the end where people shared what they were planning to do as a
result of attending the session and there was lots of different talk about kind of motivation
to make changes to practice to talk but also just smaller interpersonal stuff like I am
going to make more effort to speak to different people and that kind of thing which I feel
you wouldn't get from having someone fill in a survey or even potentially attend a focus
group.
Sometimes research methods can feel quite extractive you're getting information from
students which has its own purpose but strikes me that the story circles there are many other
additional benefits to students themselves engaging in the method.
Yeah and definitely I think it's actually quite rare I think to have an opportunity
where there is a group of listeners who will just sit and quietly listen to you for like
five minutes like I guess we're sort of having it now in a little bit of a way like you're
feeling a bit more listened to than you might normally do in the course of day to day conversation
so people did reflect in our story circles that just being able to speak uninterrupted
on a topic that was kind of relevant or important to you and be listened to by a number of people
and have them respond in some way is powerful and also just having to focus on listening
to somebody and hear really truly hearing what they're saying is powerful as well.
We had a very similar thing and our participants really valued that experience like to be able
to be heard and reflect while listening so not trying to do things at once but hearing
something and then naturally relating it to themselves so people could say I heard what
you said and it really made me reflect on this and actually we found that more strengths
came out of that session as well.
And how structured were the story circles?
It is a reasonably structured method I would say more so than say like a kind of open conversation
in a focus group or something like that so there's timings people are asked to in this
version that I did we'll speak for up to five minutes and then they responded to each other
in a timed and kind of ordered way as well and people I think sometimes people can feel
that that's like slightly restrictive but also recognise the benefits of it in enabling
people to have a kind of equal amount of time to share and people reflected and particularly
those that might sometimes have struggled to feel confident to speak in a group they
found the structure helpful for giving them time and space to say what they needed to
say and also in some later discussions to kind of think of ideas and put them forward.
Yeah ours was similar so we gave people initially we gave people up to five minutes to speak
but we did find that that put a little bit of pressure on parties so we allowed them
to sort of guide themselves as to when they felt like they'd finished saying what they
wanted to say but then we had a session after that as like an open reflection session.
And in the reflection part of ours we they did the story circle in sort of four groups
of four to six and then they did an initial reflection activity in those small groups
and then they sort of collaborated together to think about the main points they wanted
to share from the small group into a bigger group discussion and then we had it was up
to 20 people in the large groups so there was a bigger circle where people shared kind
of insights and then gradually built into more of a conversation and I think building
up from the small to the big group meant that people were more comfortable to share in the
slightly larger forum because they'd built that kind of trust and had more of a sense
of what they wanted to contribute by that point as well.
That's really interesting.
We didn't have a large group so we had been four and five people in each session so they
spoke with each other and at the end of each session they worked together to create a diary
prompt so after we had the discussions in person they would go away and reflect on that
prompt and email us back a diary entry.
Fantastic, the previous episode, hopefully listeners will be familiar with, was about
reflective journals and logs and diaries so it just goes to show how you can kind of combine
some of these creative methods and how that can lead to even richer insights.
It all comes together.
I think there is a one, from what I know of your project Beth, I think there was one key
difference in how the data was actually kind of collected, correct me if I'm wrong, but
so in my project I as a facilitator and I had a co-facilitator, Alexa Athelston from
my team as well, we didn't actually participate in the story circles or listen in to the stories
that were being shared and we also didn't record the stories that were being shared
in the story circles.
What we asked people to do was use some handouts that we created to reflect on the themes that
they heard and what was kind of striking to them and some other kind of prompt questions
both they did it individually first and then they did it in their small groups and then
we had the large group discussion.
So we made notes on the large group discussion but we did not record and transcribe the story
circles themselves and that was a particular decision that I made in order to make people
feel comfortable because I was less interested in sort of mining the data from the story
circles themselves in order to sort of extract research findings.
I was more interested in how that would generate different thinking and relationships among
the participants and they could then bring that insight into the question of what are
some ideas for action about helping to create a stronger sense of intercultural community
in the university but you might well make different choices about how to collect data
and record story circles if you were designing your research in a different way and I believe
you did it differently in your project.
We did, so there was myself as a research intern and Chloe Shepherd and our lead researchers
didn't sit in on the process and weren't in the room but myself and Chloe were in the
room so we recorded each story circle and then we made notes on that afterwards to try
and draw out more themes and things to do with us in the next week and those were also
shared with the participants as well.
So being part of that we could offer prompts so if the story circles saw the five minutes
and if people were struggling to speak to that we could offer a prompt or ask a question
just to sort of enable that reflection to happen a little bit more easily for the participants
and then of course we had that data to go back and look on because we were really interested
in finding out what would our students think their strengths are and sometimes the discussions
that came out were not always related to the themes that the students had co-created so
we had themes that we would speak about but they were much much broader when it actually
came to the discussion so having that recorded and with Chloe and myself being in the room
we were able to tease those things out those unexpected sort of avenues that we went down
which we weren't expecting to go down so it really helped us to really enrich our research
project in that way by being there and sort of we didn't engage in the dialogue with them
but just sort of offered prompts to help the reflection.
I think that thing that you mentioned about the broadness of the topics is an interesting
feature of story circles as a method like I can't really envisage how it would work
if you were trying to like really discover something very focused and partly why I wanted
to use it was because I wanted to understand what the participants thought was relevant
to the question of intercultural or global community building because these are terms
that the university kind of uses in its strategic language and its communications to and with
students but the sense my I'd never had the strongest sense of what people actually felt
those terms meant in practice and one of the themes that came out of the discussion was
actually a gap between people's everyday experiences and the institutional language that's being
used about some of these topics and yeah and the stories were really kind of an insightful
way of hearing about that.
It just goes to show that there's no one way of using these research methods and that
they're important questions to ask yourself with regards to what's the role of the researcher,
how does data, where does the direct data come from and where does it go to and what
the implications of that for how participants interact and for how you analyse the data
so I hope that this is giving people insight into the kinds of questions that they should
be asking once they've chosen them on a method that's not the last step it's then thinking
about how do I use it and there are many ways and there's no necessarily right or wrong
yeah I think for us we we used things written down on paper to by the participants to make
a very clear distinction like if you're writing this down we are collecting it and using it
as the research data and if you're saying it to each other in the circle that is happening
in the circle and that's not being collected as part of the research data and then when
we're in the large group discussions if you're saying it in the large group discussion we're
making notes of what you're saying kind of thing so that was it was to make it quite
clear I think but it did mean that even collecting the data in that way just the the kind of
sheer like range of stuff that people shared and the multifaceted nature of it and the
different kind of because later in the afternoon we also had people writing things on post-it
notes and flip charts and all this stuff you know just the the challenge for me in terms
of actually analysing that data in a sort of semi-methodical way in the time that I
had you know one day a week one year research project with I think I kind of scratched the
surface of what what you could do with the insights people shared and Beth did you do
something different with the analysis because were students more involved in the analysis
of the project?
So ours was shorter than yours so we only did this over the summer so there are a lot
more avenues that we would like to go down but we for reasons of time couldn't do it
yet but maybe perhaps in the future that's somewhere else we could go but for our analysis
when we finished our set of story circles we invited all of the participants back in
to go over the transcripts of what has been said and to draw out those broader themes
and also some more narrow themes compare that against what we initially thought we would
discuss to then sort of create groupings of what these students have put as their key
strengths which was surprising in some ways I think some things came out that people didn't
necessarily think were going to be there which is a really positive aspect of story circles
I think it's the unexpected and because we gathered that information we were then able
to go back over this is story circle one, two and three and this is what came out of
this one or we realised that in some of them the conversation took a turn from what somebody
said and we were able to completely go down the avenue and just follow it down and that
came out in the analysis that people had similar stories and similar strengths but that only
came out when they heard it being spoken about by somebody else which was quite powerful.
That sort of reminds me of and this isn't me kind of linking back to something that
I said intentionally but when we were saying earlier about how research shouldn't be sort
of extractive it should be involving students genuinely and involving students in the analysis
and giving them a stake in.
So we tried to have the participants be involved in every stage so before we started the story
circles we got participants involved in setting up the story circles so we really wanted to
co-create it from the ground up because we were asking them about their experiences and
their strengths so it was really important to us that they really fed into the whole
process so we had a focus group initiate to design what it was they wanted to talk about
what they thought they would talk about in that session but with the freedom that they
could go off topic, off-piste if they wanted to do that and I think they then felt a sense
of sort of ownership over the project which really helps them to feel quite authoritative
in what they were speaking about because we weren't going to take that data and transform
into oh you said this they knew from the start that they could be involved in the analysis
they wanted to be so I think that really helped feed into their sense of freedom with the
project their sense that they we were genuinely interested in what they had to say we weren't
trying to achieve an aim we were trying to be as open as possible would be and I think
that really helped.
Yeah it feels like we're going quite deep into the sort of philosophy of research and
what we're setting out to achieve and what's the purpose of research and that again is
a contested.
I think it's really important like particularly when we think about the topics of both of
our research projects like mine it was about kind of community building and how different
people feel like they are or are not part of a cohesive community in the university
and your project sort of being about how certain groups of students do or don't feel that way
and so I think like having a research design that kind of almost like models what you the
change you want to see that's kind of how I thought about it that like in this small
way a story circle might actually provide participants with the kind of experience that
the university kind of buzzword language says is available to them in as part of the university
kind of experience but we know in practice doesn't always hold true but you can kind
of try and see it in practice in the research method that I guess that was my kind of like
what's the word utopian vision for this project.
Sounds like a stage there and I think this is true that the story circles has many many
benefits but I'm just curious to hear about what the challenges were using story circles
would you like to kick that discussion off Beth?
So the challenges were initially explaining story circles in a way that made sense but
didn't put pressure on participants because I think in our initial session the biggest
challenge was reassuring people that they didn't have to have an amazing story when
you say story to people they sort of assume oh it has to be it has to have a hook it has
to be funny or it has to be dramatic or something has to happen and it was trying to get out
and that's where we're in Yorkshire so you've got like a bunch of people in the competition
there's a lot of literary heritage that people felt the need to live up to so sort of dismantling
that a little bit and so we had a discussion about what participants thought our story
was that we tried to drill down that it doesn't have to be something absolutely incredible
it's worthwhile and valid to tell the story that means something to you and so we tried
to have those guidelines there so five minutes so you can tell the story but we also tried
to remove the pressure of having to have this incredible people narrative and that was a
challenge initially and I think that developed over the three sessions that we did so by
the end people coming in feeling very comfortable quite confident in the stories they were telling
but in the very first session there were lots of blank spaces and gaps where people sort
of felt like I've said too much I've said too little sort of reassurance of participants
was a bit of a challenge that we found but it did work and it did sort of develop over
time and it was nice to see that the confidence build in the method.
Is there any particular advice you'd give to people considering using Story Circle?
Yeah so I think the co-creation method that we used is really helpful because we're not
imposing this method on students we're giving them the opportunity to design it themselves
they can think about what it is they want to say if they've got anything that they want
to get out in particular they can say in this session I'd like it to revolve around this
theme so giving some of that ownership to students almost take some pressure away a
little bit and I think always having the reassurance that you don't have to speak for five minutes
it's not going to be a complete blank silence for three and a half minutes if you've only
spoken for 90 seconds and I think for our project having Chloe and myself there to just
prompt that we'd take little notes on what people had said and if it went silent or if
they'd seem to struggle to say we could ask a follow-up question but just sometimes then
enable them to carry on with I think being responsive to the needs of the participants
and being a little bit less rigid with the structure sort of helped us to develop.
How about you Jenna?
I think maybe there are some differences in that mine was like a one-off workshop I did
a pilot but it was a one-off session so we didn't have people coming back kind of repeatedly
over a number of weeks which I really do like the sound of that I can really see the benefit
of that and but I definitely and so I started with a with a general survey and that was
how I gathered expressions of interest from people who might want to come to this story
so I collected and I gave them a bit of an overview about what it would involve and people
registered their interest and then I sent them more information and then they decided
if they definitely wanted to do it.
So all the way through from sort of like how you're working with people in the survey through
to giving them the info to sort of setting up I really wanted to bring a strong sense
of kind of like hosting and responsiveness to all of those interactions because I saw
the whole journey as part of helping people to feel kind of like comfortable and trusting
of the of the space that you're creating for them not necessarily that it's an entirely
safe space in the sense that you can't be responsible for everything that they might
hear in it you know and that people have to be responsible for what they choose to bring
into the circle and but sort of setting up guidelines and expectations and but also on
the day having things like refreshments when people arrive so it feels kind of more friendly
and then we did some icebreaker activities before we started the in the whole group and
in the small group so it kind of builds up to the bit where you actually share the story
and so it just it takes quite a bit of time and because I wanted sort of an idea generating
kind of workshop as part of it as well it was it was five hours that I asked people
to commit to although one hour of that was a break in the middle and we had I gave them
a voucher to go off and get lunch so they have a bit of kind of space so it was like
I guess the challenge is recruiting people who have the time and inclination to come
along to do something like this and and people who want to engage in a bit where you're going
to have to sit in a room with other people and talk about yourself for a period of time
like that's not a comfortable proposition for kind of everybody yeah yeah but I did
I did manage to recruit some participants partly because of it being a light project
and I was able to use some of the budget to give people vouchers for the time so I gave
them vouchers kind of to the value of what we would have paid them if they'd been student
assistants attending so that really helps too I desperately wanted some participants
who didn't think what we were currently doing was great basically because we could I wanted
people who you know maybe had a wide range of experiences on the kind of topic on the
activities you know people that hadn't heard of any of it maybe never thought about it
before and you know on the whole I would say there was more participants involved who kind
of were interested in the topic and had engaged with some relevant activities and thought
the whole thing had some value but we did you know still have the odd person that was
a bit more like what what's all this about what are these words I just wanted the voucher
and so I've turned up and actually I was like great we want these people in the room because
otherwise we are kind of in danger of preaching to the choir sometimes it's often a challenge
isn't it? I think I did I did include some language in the recruitment materials that
sort of specifically said you know we we're especially welcoming people who you know have
got different views on this topic a range of experiences and I can't remember the exact
language I used but I tried to sort of specifically say that we were we were welcoming of those
views and that we wanted to hear them and I do think a story circle does create an opportunity
to tell a bigger story about your experience which would make it a place where you could
bring something that was challenging or difficult although I did have to reassure some participants
that they didn't have to tell a story about something that had gone badly because that
was the kind of an assumption that some people made that they were wanting to hear about
negative experiences when actually it could be negative or positive or some element of
both and it weren't being prescriptive about that. Great and I suppose it would be good
to ask you both at this stage have any plans to use the method in the future? Well a real
positive of the method was that lots of the participants fed back that they would welcome
the opportunity to participate in story circles again not necessarily as part of a research
project but as part of a kind of an activity that brought people together and so with that
in mind one of the outputs from my project was to create a kind of fairly elaborate case
study and toolkit demonstrating how I'd used story circles in this project and the resources
and some UNESCO resources that I kind of built the method out of and I hoped that that would
enable people to kind of pick up the idea and think about how to use it in different
contexts and colleagues in my team have used them since so we run a volunteering program
called intercultural ambassadors where students come together and they get some training and
support to work in a team that runs a project or event that's about bringing people from
different backgrounds together and so we've incorporated story circles into the training
for that where they it's got an element of team building within the teams that they work
in and also helps them to think about kind of experiences of feeling or not feeling part
of a community and how insights from that they can use in their project development
to think about the kind of experience they want to give people in the projects and so
that's been really fruitful that's happened for a couple of years now that we've done
that and we are also thinking about how we would use story circles in some workshops
that we offer for international students where we are aiming to create a space for them to
kind of share and reflect on their experiences of culture change and cultural difference
in a way that doesn't kind of reinforce us and them thinking about cultural difference
that is more about people's kind of the complexity of people's day-to-day lived experiences so
that's something we're hoping to embark upon.
I can't wait to keep track of what you're doing over at the International Students Office
and how you use story circles and likewise I know that Beth you did your research last
summer with Ryan Wilkinson he's using not sure if it's story circles per se but similar
kind of method in his light fellowship.
Yes yeah that's right it's part of a research project over the summer but we have from that
had an output of making some courses and going to things like student education and success
conference and different places where we can share our findings but hopefully to spark
a wider conversation because our research was about mature student strengths it's not
often highlighted it's often barriers to mature student success so I'm quite hopeful that
our research might then spring be a springboard for other piece of research but also just
for the wider university community to recognise the strengths that mature students are bringing
to the university because they're there they're really really there there are so many strengths
and our research is just highlighting the really the tip of the iceberg of what mature
students can bring.
Are you presenting something at the student education conference?
Yeah we've got a slot for presentations so hopefully we'll be able to champion the mature
student there.
I guess the thing that I should say now is it was a great presentation because this is
going out after student education conference I'm really enjoying it.
So do I have any final comments or any burning reflections before we...
I would just like to say that I did produce quite a lot of documentation about the kind
of things that people discussed in the story circles or in the sort of workshops generally
in my project and I'd really encourage people to have a look on the website page from my
like project if you're interested in this question of intercultural and community building
and helping create environments where students can kind of connect across boundaries in the
full sense of who they are as people because that's really what people wanted like I think
that was a big kind of main point from my project is that people wanted the kind of
experience that perhaps a staff we might describe as intercultural or staff in my area might
describe as intercultural which is about kind of connecting people yeah across boundaries
and creating kind of their own smaller cultures in the environments that they're in and when
people sort of were able to kind of get that idea on the table and have a sense of what
it might mean in practice people were open to and interested in that in a way that seemed
a lot more kind of inspiring than kind of some of the ideas that we might have had as
a starting point like let's have an activity where we can invite people together to share
their cultures like there's only a small contingent of people for whom that sounds like an appealing
proposition.
So I would say if you're interested in that kind of topic please do look at my research
outputs because it's been really great there's been a lot of interest in story circles and
I also would like to see an equivalent interest in the topic of the research as well.
Yeah I would say if anybody's doing any research with underrepresented students that this is
a really positive and beneficial method for hearing stories that you will not hear from
other methods so if you send a form out to people you won't get those intricate narratives
that the story circle method can draw out particularly when you're speaking to students
who maybe have less of a voice in the space than other people we're actively giving those
students back that voice and I know that our participants really valued being heard by their
peers but also being heard in a wider sense as well having their their stories championed
being listened to by the wider university something that really beneficial for them.
Great okay well all that remains to say is thank you both very much for coming on.
Thank you.
Really enjoyed learning more about story circles today and we'll see you next week with our
third episode which focuses on listening rooms.
Thanks for listening and see you next time.