Role-Play Rubric
8.2 Do I Know Who I Am? 66
I selected the words “Do I Know Who I Am?” from The Secret Garden as a heading for this section because it resonated with me and my activities at that point in my teaching of accounting pedagogy.
Whilst inside the secret garden, Ben Weatherstaff, the gardener, climbs on a ladder and peeps over the secret garden wall because he is shocked to hear voices in the garden that has been locked for 10 years. Colin haughtily questions him, asking whether Ben Weatherstaff knows who Colin is.
Likewise, I too was eager to find out how I was changing and who I was now becoming.
The second trimester commenced on 14 April 2014. During the vacation, I had what seemed to be a brilliant idea: I planned an activity for the third-year students along the lines of a personal oral storytelling session. I had examined the literature on oral storytelling and I came across an old Indian proverb, “Tell me a fact and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever” (as cited in Green, 2004). This made me think back to my days as a learner in school when teachers did not have advanced technology such as computers, data projectors, and interactive whiteboards. They sometimes conveyed their knowledge in the class using stories. When I questioned myself on what was most memorable for me from school, I discovered it was the stories my English teacher told the class when I was in Standard 6. He taught us history as well, and he would use his English teacher voice and expressions with the history content and convert it into a story. Most of the class excelled in history, which we initially had
66 “Do you know who I am?” (Burnett, 1969, p. 182).
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regarded as the most boring, dead, and lifeless subject in the school curriculum Contrarily, this teacher made the facts come alive by asking the learners to dramatise certain sections in the history curriculum. The class used to hang onto his every word and we never had to learn history in rote fashion because we just remembered his stories (as described in Chapter Six). Similarly, I wanted to engage students in an oral storytelling session because as Bruner (1991) pointed out, stories could bring the normally lifeless concepts to life and make them more meaningful for students. Green and Brock (2000) described how stories can affect both our thinking and feelings, which can cause us to create mental images that can provide a clearer picture of a concept.
More significantly, Polichak and Gerrig (2002) alerted me that when telling stories, individuals pay attention and react to the stories if they participate in the action of the narrative—curiosity entices them to want to know what happened next. In this way, I understood that stories could have numerous benefits in the class because they could ignite students’ interests, thus making the flow of the lectures smoother. The stories might also aid students in remembering the material as well as reducing their anxiety and reluctance to learn. I wanted to have students share stories from their own lives as a form of active learning. I anticipated that students might be more inclined to listen to a story told by their peers.
I hoped that if students could relate their stories of the real world to the accounting content of partnerships, they would be able to make meaning of that content. I anticipated that it would become relevant to their own experience, and would enhance their interpretation of the accounting content.
In this regard, I wanted third-year students to relate a personal story that involved financial issues about themselves or someone they knew, for instance, a family member, a friend, a relative, or neighbour. They had to, thereafter, try to link the story with the section on partnerships in accounting. I told them no matter how trivial the incident seemed to be, it did not matter because I was more interested in how they could link it with the accounting content.
On Tuesday, 22 April 2014, the third-year students were scheduled to perform their storytelling activity. I had asked them to make a link between their stories and an accounting section they thought would be applicable to the story. I also wanted to see if they could relate their stories to partnerships.
The students had some difficulty doing this but they helped each other by giving their views on where the story fit the accounting content best. The oral storytelling session is represented in the vignette below.
192 Vignette: Oral Storytelling Activity
I heard many stories from the students. For example, one student related how someone he knew had had an automated teller machine (ATM) card stolen and money withdrawn. Another story was about a grandmother who was robbed of her pension at the taxi rank, while one student told a story about how his house was broken into while they were sleeping. Although all these stories were original and interesting, the story about the father of one of the students, Pretty,67 seemed the most relevant to me and I chose to relate that story.
Pretty’s father had been injured at this workplace and lost an arm. He could not work anymore and so the company paid him compensation as well as the pension that was due to him. He invested the money with the pastor from his church into a small manufacturing firm. However, one day he went to cash a cheque at the bank and was told there was no money in the account. On enquiring with the pastor, he was informed by the pastor that he was sure the bank had erred and that he would go to the bank immediately. Sadly, the pastor left and never returned. He had swindled all the money, stolen the church vehicle, and disappeared.
Following the story, I engaged in a dialogue with students about which section in accounting they thought was best suited to this story. They related this story to the section on partnerships and engaged in dialogue about the legalities involved in a partnership. This dialogue between students carried on for a while and while the students were giving Pretty advice about what her father could do, they did not realise they were actually learning a lot about partnerships. They were also able to give Pretty some advice on the recourse her father could follow.
The storytelling activity went on over two lectures from 22 April 2014 until 29 April 2014. At the end of the two weeks, I asked the students what they had learnt from this activity. The students told me they had enjoyed the storytelling sessions and could engage with the accounting content that was discussed without having to refer to any notes. They claimed they would remember the sections discussed because the stories had personal meaning for them and when they thought about the story, they could recall quite easily the accounting content.
After the discussion with students, that afternoon, I watched the video recording of the storytelling activity and wrote my reflections in my reflective journal.
Apart from the students learning about a particular section in the accounting content, I learned a lot from this activity. The stories of the students were meaningful to them and, therefore, they were able to construct their own meaning in a natural setting without me trying to force them to learn. The stories were authentic stories and occurred in the students’ natural home environments. Removing them from their natural environment and teaching them a concept was not so readily understood as when it occurred in their own contexts. The students gave their different opinions and views on each other’s stories, for example, when they helped Pretty by giving her advice. In this way, they were unaware that they were learning so much about partnerships. (Personal journal, Tuesday, 29 April 2014)
67 Pretty is a pseudonym used for the student.
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