Brett Dillingham / Storyteller

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Brett dillingham Storyteller

Keynotes & Workshops

Keynotes:

A Pre-history and History of Storytelling… and Why It Matters To Teachers
The Foundation of Culturally Responsive Literacy- Storytelling
Oral Language Development At Its Best: Telling and Retelling Stories
Stories of Place and Culture: Encouraging children to create and tell their own stories

Workshops:

Performance literacy is a process by which a student writes a story and then performs his/her writing using sound, expression, and movement. It is a powerful storytelling process, and includes oral language development, the writing process, and content from the curriculum and parental/community involvement. In this workshop participants learn the components of performance literacy, focusing on the Visual Portrait of a Story and its use in telling and retelling stories.

Culturally responsive performance literacy is the process of teaching students to write and perform personal narratives that affirm their cultures and identities. Many modern schools are highly diverse and need multicultural content. This challenges educators to find ways to engage children of different cultures - including third culture children - in literacy development, language learning, content area exploration, and responsible citizenship within our global community. Storytelling offers a process to engage all children in constructive, interesting and meaningful academic and socio-emotional growth.

Developing oral language- speaking and listening skills- is the foundation for reading and writing. After all, we don’t expect children to read and write words they have never spoken nor heard in context. Yet because of a variety of factors (very little conversation at home, too much television, English as a second language, etc.) many children come to school with vocabularies that are insufficient for comprehending even simple texts, or writing simple stories. In order for children to learn the syntax (sentence structure) and vocabulary that will allow them to read and write, they must speak and listen to stories that they can understand- stories told in context. They must tell, retell and listen to stories told by their peers (and teachers) on an on-going basis.

In this workshop teachers learn a process that pre-school through grade 1 teachers can use to strengthen the foundation of their students’ literacy- speaking, listening and beginning writing.

In this workshop, teachers learn how to work with parents to teach children speaking and listening skills. In this workshop teachers learn to teach parents a process their pre-school through grade 1 children can use to strengthen the foundation of their literacy- speaking, listening and beginning writing.

We want our students and children to grow up with a strong sense of morals and character. Family storytelling is certainly the first- and probably the best- way children have been taught morals since the first human walked the earth. We teach our children how to behave- and how not to behave- through stories. This process has been tested with my own children and with students in classrooms around the world from Alaska to New Mexico, Europe to Africa and Asia. The workshop informs parents and teachers how to include their children in stories that develop their morals, character, emotional intelligence and literacy.

In addition to fostering the acquisition of language and literacy skills, students enhance their listening, speaking, and viewing skills by means of performance literacy. Students create an oral storytelling using a graphic organizer called a visual portrait, tell and retell their stories with partners, rewrite their stories during Writers’ Workshop, create podcasts for a class web site, and perform their stories in front of peers and family members.

The workshop activities teach educators how to facilitate children's oral and written language development, increase listening and reading comprehension and inspire an interest and love of their community, museums, writing and reading. By completing their digital storytelling projects, the students learn a process to honor their community’s history and academic ways to respond to their culture. They participate in educational activities with a strong theory and evidence base and experience culturally responsive literacy and place-based education. Students learn how to organize, coordinate, and publish student digital storytelling, based upon cultural artifacts and historical documents, to real audiences of other students, parents and their community and a worldwide digital audience.