Storytelling in African Teacher Training

Susan Perrow has spent 30 years working in Australia and Africa in early childhood teaching, teacher training, mentoring and storytelling. Susan is best known for her creativity with therapeutic storytelling. This work culminated in 2008 with the publication of an extensive resource book on Healing Stories for Challenging Behaviour.

This thesis explores processes that have helped me as a white Australian in post-apartheid South Africa to collaboratively develop storytelling courses for black South African early childhood teachers. The study is an action research project that documents, in narrative style, my journey of learning and change as a teacher-trainer in the townships of Cape Town from 1994 until 1999. In the literature review the importance of storytelling as a teaching and learning tool has been researched, and the effects of South African history on the storytelling culture of the African people has been investigated. To help understand my own way of being in a different culture, components and complexities of working and communicating in cross-cultural situations have been explored, as well as reflection on myself, my whiteness and aspects of whiteness. The research journey has involved two main cycles of planning, acting, observing and reflecting, the first one retrospective. Qualitative data has been documented from in-depth interviewing, open-ended questionnaires, reflexive journals and feedback from critical friends and course participants.