Daily Times

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

Creating and telling stories are considered to be some of the effective ways in concept building and enhancing imagination. Stories are appealing to all age levels. The Holy Quran says: “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 as an essential part of teaching and learning process. Parents and grandparents are encouraged to tell stories to their children and grandchildren.

In olden times, and even today, there have been great storytellers who were influential in leaving a profound imprint on people’s ways of thinking. Their spoken or written words, even when fabricated, were and are taken literally by many. There were people who looked into their messages. Others were more concerned about the truth of the stories. One such person even criticised one of the most famous classic storytellers, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, for narrating a discussion between the mother of Hazrat Yahya (AS) and Hazrat Marium (AS), as the two holy ladies lived in different times. To that Rumi responded that his accounts were nothing other than stories of fidelity and love, and that his narrations did not always match historical facts.

Storytelling is an art, but people have always been engaged in storytelling. For sure, people would continue to present their true or false stories in future as well. Some may view stories as insignificant; however, for teachers and students they matter a lot. 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 printed or other forms. However, that does not mean that others cannot make up stories. Everyday individuals tell and listen to different stories, and they do that on a regular basis, yet it is likely that they remain ignorant of their storytelling abilities. Some may think that it is the area of specialised people, and thus their reluctance to venture there. The truth however, is that every individual is a storyteller and must try to listen to and tell stories.

Teachers and parents, in particular, need to share stories with children, and must pay attention to children’s endeavours of inventing and or restating stories. Every such opportunity that children get enhances their thinking, imagination and creativity. Moreover, their language skills improve considerably. Lack of such an opportunity can adversely affect their thinking and creativity.

Creating and telling stories are considered to be some of the effective ways in concept building and enhancing imagination

I have observed and experienced a dismal situation of students in higher grades-10th grade to university level students-and some teachers who are hardly aware of their storytelling or writing abilities. When they are asked to create a story, at first, they think that it is an almost impossible task, as they have hardly been provided with such an opportunities before. Therefore, expecting them to create stories make them feel uncomfortable, and they straightaway decline to create written or verbal stories. What can one expect of such students and teachers and their role in society? Lack of imagination or thinking power produces a generation that is a follower of myths, irrationality and extremism.

It can be argued how creativity is related to storytelling. It is clear that while making or reading stories, story readers, tellers and/or listeners are likely to think about various connections between and amongst different living and non-living things, and use their prediction and many other skills before reaching different conclusions. They are also likely to make novel connections, and thus by employment of their 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.

Reliance of parents on electronic media, and allowing children to sit passively in front of a cartoon show, do have some benefits, such as learning language skills; it may even lead to some creativity. It can also be a cause of an emotional attachment gap between parents and 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, ultimately pushing them to undesirable outcomes.

In many rural contexts across the globe, there has been a tradition of storytelling. In order to kill time, old people in Gilgit-Baltistan used to gather at a place or visit one another’s home to listen to and share stories. Those stories were mostly confined to folklore or their family or village related histories, which youngsters would listen and transmit to the next generation. That tradition is now rarely observable due to the advent of electronic media and other outlets.

In order to restore or enhance creativity, teachers and parents need to encourage students to not only read and listen to stories they also need to be encouraged to create stories. Our society also lacks a reading culture. One of the reasons behind lack of interest in books and a reading culture is the unavailability of storybooks at different levels of schooling. Mostly, our textbooks have boring stuff, and in some cases, even when we have good stuff available, we do not provide children with many choices. Schools have libraries with books that are not easily available to students, and even if they are made available, most of them are really boring, and have been piled in libraries without careful selection and without much consideration.

Consequently, in the absence of good storybooks, we have not been able to develop a reading culture. In order to stretch students’ minds and increase their creativity and imagination, it is important to make quality storybooks available in school as well as at home, in the form of mini libraries, besides making story telling and/or listening a regular feature.

In the era of knowledge 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, rare in Muslim societies as a whole. 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 libraries are filled with books that cater to 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