During my undergraduate degree, I had the opportunity to work with five different researchers across different areas of psychology. I genuinely enjoyed each experience, but it was through exploring these different areas that I began to recognize what fascinated me most: how do people learn? As a student in a course on learning and behaviour, that curiosity crystallized into a research question of my own.

Given the opportunity to design a small observational study, I turned that question toward the university classroom. I developed operational definitions for several teaching practices and recorded how frequently they appeared across lectures. When I analyzed my results, two instructors stood out. According to my observations, they demonstrated the same teaching practices at nearly identical frequencies. Yet the experience of sitting in their classrooms could not have been more different. In one, students packed up early, scrolled through their phones and rarely responded to questions. In the other, they leaned forward, volunteered answers and lingered after class to continue the conversation.

My coding scheme couldn’t explain why one classroom felt so different from the other. Then I noticed something I hadn’t been measuring: one instructor regularly shared stories.

Sometimes the stories were personal and sometimes historical; often, they used analogies to make difficult content more relatable. Whatever their form, they appeared to invite students into the material in a way my checklist failed to capture. That observation became the foundation of my honours thesis and led me to consider storytelling as a pedagogical tool that can help students better engage with and understand course material.

From curiosity to inquiry

It may seem like an obvious topic to study—after all, storytelling is arguably the oldest method of sharing knowledge (Andrews et al., 2009; Landrum et al., 2019). Yet, despite its long history in education, surprisingly little research has examined how university instructors conceptualize storytelling. Much of the existing literature has focused on K–12 education (e.g., Roney, 1996) or digital storytelling (e.g., Smeda et al., 2014), leaving aside questions about instructor-led storytelling in higher education. I wanted to better understand how instructors define storytelling, why they use it and what role they believe it plays in student engagement and learning.

To explore these questions, I surveyed 28 Memorial University instructors from a range of disciplines who taught classes of 60 or more students. Participants were presented with a series of vignettes, adapted from Andrews and colleagues (2009), each depicting a form of storytelling previously identified in the literature. For each vignette, instructors indicated whether they considered it to be storytelling, how frequently they used that method, their willingness to use it and its perceived benefits. Participants also answered a series of broader questions examining their overall storytelling practices, perceived impacts on themselves and their students and any hesitations or concerns surrounding its use.

Understanding storytelling as a teaching practice

Overall, instructors recognized most of the vignettes as storytelling, although agreement varied across vignette types. This suggests that while storytelling is a familiar feature of university teaching, instructors may not always share the same understanding of what constitutes a story in the classroom.

Beyond recognition, instructors overwhelmingly viewed storytelling as a valuable teaching practice. Those who reported using storytelling more frequently also perceived greater student engagement and understanding of course material. Perhaps equally noteworthy was that instructors reported few concerns about using storytelling. Fears that stories might undermine professionalism or blur appropriate boundaries received little support, suggesting that many instructors view storytelling as a legitimate and appropriate part of university teaching.

Although my sample was small, I observed an interesting gender difference, with men reporting more frequent use of storytelling than women. While this finding should be interpreted cautiously, it contrasts with previous research suggesting that women tend to engage in storytelling practices more frequently than men (Dindia & Allen, 1992; Sprague & Massoni, 2005). This discrepancy may reflect the higher education context, the types of stories instructors tell, or the characteristics of this sample.

It’s also important to consider who participated in this study. Most respondents were tenured or tenure-track faculty with more than a decade of teaching experience. It’s possible that storytelling looks different for instructors earlier in their teaching careers, who may experience different pressures, hesitations or even benefits as they develop their teaching style. Exploring those perspectives would be an exciting direction for future research.

Looking back, it’s fitting that this project began with something I wasn’t measuring. Storytelling has been helping people learn for thousands of years, yet we still know surprisingly little about how it shapes learning in university classrooms. Ironically, the instructor who first inspired this project would often preface a story by warning the class they were about to “go on a little tangent.” My hope is that this work encourages educators to think more intentionally about the stories they tell—not as tangents from learning, but as an integral part of it.

References

Andrews, D. H., Hull, T. D., & Donahue, J. A. (2009). Storytelling as an instructional method: Definitions and research questions. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning, 3(2), 6–23. https://doi.org/10.7771/1541-5015.1063

Dindia, K., & Allen, M. (1992). Sex differences in self-disclosure: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin., 112(1), 106–124. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.112.1.106

Landrum, R. E., Brakke, K., & McCarthy, M. A. (2019). The pedagogical power of storytelling. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 5(3), 247–253. https://doi.org/10.1037/stl0000152

Roney, R. C. (1996). Storytelling in the classroom: Some theoretical thoughts. (ED405589). ERIC. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED405589

Smeda, N., Dakich, E., & Sharda, N. (2014). The effectiveness of digital storytelling in the classrooms: A comprehensive study. Smart Learning Environments, 1(1), Article 6. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40561-014-0006-3

Sprague, J., & Massoni, K. (2005). Student evaluations and gendered expectations: What we can’t count can hurt us. Sex Roles, 53(11), 779–793. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-005-8292-4