Public storytelling guide

Your practical goal is to host a storytelling event that showcases the stories of people with IDD in your community. You can alter the plan, but we suggest five storytellers and in-person workshops and show.

Step 02

Choose a theme

The event organizers should meet and choose a theme. Your theme should be one word that will be used as a storytelling prompt – but that also helps shape the narrative of the conversation you want to have. For example, to accompany a story about people with intellectual disabilities trying to live successfully in the community, we used the theme HOME. If you are considering a reporting project focused on the impact of special education, you might want your theme to be SCHOOL.

You want to be sure to give your storytellers agency to tell the kind of story they want, in the way they want to tell it. In workshops you will talk about different ways a prompt will encourage a story, and the storytellers will learn from one another’s stories – but ultimately if someone wants to tell a story you might worry is too “positive,” that’s ok. In terms of format, we have had storytellers write poetry and fiction, although typically the stories will be straightforward memoir.

Some examples of themes that have worked in the past

  • Love

    A painting of a figure standing in a garden with a sun on its chest.

  • Work

    A reporter with long red hair types on a laptop.

  • Friendship

    A grid of many different smiling faces in bright colours.

  • Money

    A pink piggy bank with a fan of dollar bills.

  • Family

    Four arms in different colours grip each other’s wrists in a square.

Here are some tips for choosing a theme

  1. 1.

    A successful theme is narrow enough to give direction, but broad enough to allow most of the ideas storytellers come up with to fit. Make sure to think about the different ways a theme can be interpreted. This population might have a different interpretation of a word than you do. We recommend a simple, one word theme like the ones listed above.

  2. 2.

    You don’t want to be too vague. MEMORY won’t work as a prompt because we need to give direction on what type of memory. But you also don’t want to be too specific like TAKING RISKS, which also won’t work.

  3. 3.

    NOTE: Your storytellers aren’t going to be characters in your reporting, per se. This is more meant to amplify work you’ve already done and/or begin to explore the IDD community in depth to identify significant issues that could be the topics of upcoming reporting projects.