ABSTRACT
Telling stories is one of the ways that we can begin the process of building community, whether inside or outside the classroom. We can share both true accounts and fictional stories in a class that help us understand one another. For years, I was hesitant to share personal stories. I had been trained to believe that anyone who relied on a personal story as evidence upholding or affirming an idea could never really be a scholar and/or an intellectual, according to dominator thinking via schools of higher learning. Telling a personal story to document or frame an argument was a sign that one was not dealing in hard facts, that one was not scientific enough. I am grateful to have lived long enough to learn how much information we have been given and told was hard science or data was really a story, the interpretation of data and facts. When the information received, most especially in hard science, countered the data once held to be immutable fact, the story changed. I am grateful to have 50lived to see a moment in cultural history where we know via science about our brain and how it processes information, about the stories it tells and allows us to tell. In The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion through the Art of Storytelling Annette Simmons expresses it this way:
Stories are “more true” than facts because stories are multidimensional. Truth with a capital “T” has many layers. Truths like justice or integrity are too complex to be expressed in a law, a statistic, or a fact. Facts need the context of when, who, and where to become Truths. A story incorporates when and who—lasting minutes or generations and narrating an event or series of events with characters, action and consequences. It occurs in a place or places that gives us a where.
