5.2 Story and place: lessons from australian aboriginal storytelling  (Page 4/4)

Materials and preparation

• Decide on the assignment specifics: How many students in a group? Can one student tell the story while others do sound and gestures, or must they take turns? Will the students be making up their own story? Using a given story? Choosing a story to use? What are the rules (length, genre, elements to be included) for writing or choosing the story? Whatever the assignment, make sure it gives plenty of opportunity for mimicry; strongly suggest or insist that the story take place in a setting with familiar sights and sounds.
• Decide what can be used - visual props, musical instruments, materials that make certain sounds - and whether you will provide them or ask the students to come up with the materials themselves. If you are doing the entire Australian Aboriginal Music and Story unit, the students should be encouraged to use their didjeridus to make some of the sound effects.
• Each group should get a chance to perform their story. Estimate and reserve the class time necessary for this, based on the number of groups and story length requirements.

Procedure

1. Lead the The Place of Place discussion or some other introductory discussion, as appropriate for your class goals.
2. Tell the students that using mimicry is a very common technique among storytellers, including 1950's radio shows that mimicked sounds, and modern comedians who may use it to tell funny stories, as well as in many ancient traditions around the world.
3. Outline the specifics of the assignment. Make sure the students understand that mimicking a specific person or group in any way that might be hurtful is not acceptable.
4. In describing the mimicry aspect of the storytelling, give specific examples: a story of a basketball game, for example could include crowd sounds as well as gestures imitating a basketball player or the actual sound of a basketball hitting the floor. A camping trip story could include mimicking sounds or movements of frogs or birds.
5. Allow the students sufficient in-class or homework time to do the assignment.
6. Have each group perform their story for the class.

Australian aboriginal culture

This module focuses on activities rather than information, but the points included below should help you prepare your classroom discussion.

Australia is an entire continent, and its original peoples have lived there for tens of thousands of years. Talking about Australian Aboriginal culture is therefore like talking about "Asian" or "European" or "American Indian" culture. Yes, there are many similarities (just as the cultures of Germany and Italy share some similarities), but there are also differences between groups from different places. (If you have time, you can include a class discussion listing some similarities and differences between two cultures that the students are familiar with.)

Australian Aborigines see the world very differently from Westerners. Even fundamental concepts such as reality and history are viewed differently. Westerners, for example, tend to equate "reality" with "what we can see and hear and touch", and a cause-and-effect "history" of events. Aboriginal understanding - and many of their stories - center around the concept of The Dreaming . The term applies to an early creation period, when totemic ancestors such as Kangaroo, Shark, and Honey Ant, roamed across the landscape creating sacred sites and other important places. This creation time is sometimes called Dream Time . But The Dreaming is not considered to be something that is in the past and done. The term also refers to a "time outside of time", in which past, present, and future coexist, and which Aborigines consider to be more real than the forward-flowing time (both the time and the "touchable" things that we experience) that Westerners consider to be reality. Personal and group connections to The Dreaming are therefore a very important part of Aboriginal religious, ethical, and cultural traditions. If the students are sufficiently mature and it is appropriate, you may want to include a class discussion of concepts that seem very real to the students even though they aren't "touchable" in a physical sense: God and angels? Justice and equality? Love? Ask the students for examples of how these "realities" affect or interact with the physical world. Or discuss familiar "realities" that go beyond, or are more powerful than, the parts of them that you can touch (family, church, nation, school, team, ethnic group, are some possibilities).

Most traditional Aboriginal music, dance, and art is strongly connected to The Dreaming. Because it is an expression of powerful and deep personal, group, and cultural connections to reality, it is sometimes considered "secret" or "sacred" information not to be shared with outsiders, and even "public" art, music, and stories are often considered to be owned by a specific group. You may wish to lead a discussion of the treatment of sacred rites and/or of copyright-type ownership rules in various cultures. If you are doing the entire Aboriginal Australian Music and Story unit, you will want to include information on the connections between The Dreaming, storytelling, and music. Many groups, for example, use songs to tell the stories of Dream Time. In some central Australian groups, the songs are arranged in series; sometimes hundreds of short songs may be in a single song series. Each series follows a songline , which is the path that one of the creative ancestors followed, and the series is always supposed to be sung in the correct order as it follows the ancestor's movements. The songs, which follow the creative exploits of totemic ancestors (such as Kangaroo, Shark, and Honey Ant), are so specific that you could travel across the Australian landscape following a songline. Men play clap sticks and women use body percussion to accompany the group singing that retells these stories. In some groups, a didjeridu may also accompany the singing.

Traditional stories often include very specific information about where the story happened. This emphasizes the strong ties between a people and their traditional lands.

Traditional storytellers often use gesture and sound to mimic the things they are describing. This is good storytelling technique that is found in many places with a strong oral storytelling tradition.