Storytelling as a Tool for Social Development and Community Outreach in Museums and Heritage Sites

Nowadays oral storytelling is frequently used as an effective method to reevaluate values and attitudes amongst different members of the communities in order to enhance social development and community outreach. In this regard, museums and heritage sites, which are the incarnation of human’s stories throughout the time, may be considered among the best milieus to apply the art of storytelling and effectively utilize it for social development. This approach may contribute to convert museums and heritage sites to be among the best places for social-based informal learning. This paper has 2 main objectives: · To experiment the heritage storytelling as a basic tool to enhance social development among young communities. · To measure the effectiveness of two storytelling techniques: The first is a participatory technique through which children hear the story from the storyteller then try to convert it into an improvised play, while in the other technique children are asked to learn a long script of a play by heart and to rehearse repeatedly. To reach the two goals of the study, the researcher participated as a freelance storyteller in a summer camp which has taken place in a community center at a popular district in Historic Cairo, and in which she has applied the heritage storytelling technique on children from the local community. To experiment the heritage storytelling as a basic tool to enhance social development among young communities, the researcher applied the focused or group interview method with framework of questions that allow for conversational style and additional questions. Through this method, the children expressed their impressions about the characters of the stories and the actions and reactions of those characters in the different phases of the stories. To measure the effectiveness of the improvised and the non-improvised storytelling methods, the researcher applied the direct observation method through which she monitored the children’s ability to convert the narrated story into an improvised play. She also observed the willingness of children to learn a long script by heart and to rehearse repeatedly in order to act in an excellent way and without mistakes at the final performance. Based on the observation method, the researcher evaluated the 2 storytelling methods and presented their advantages and disadvantages and ends by giving recommendation about the best practice of using the storytelling technique as a tool for social development.