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Soil Stories workshop
At J.P. International School in Muradabad, Uttar Pradesh we were working with 82 teenagers, creating soil related narratives. Muradabad is a small rural town where most families farm, so many kids there have a connection to soil – which also became apparent when we invited the students to share their personal stories dealing with soil. In groups of five they created one story cube by combining key elements of their own stories with terms from our introduction into the topic, or elements of myths and legends.
This resulted in fifteen story cubes that were amazingly rich in associations and ideas. Depending on the words displayed, the students invented a part of a story that was to be continued by the following group.
Since the time was limited, we could not explore the full narrative potential of the story cubes during the workshop, but we could see that they would work very well, both as a creative method of story telling and as an inspiration for the kids to think about soil in an unusual and fun way.