Enabling students to express through stories

Kathmandu, Oct. 14: Katha Bunaun. Let’s weave stories.An initiative by the organisation Canopy Nepal, Katha Bunaun is a week-long programme that works with schools to help enhance young learners’ skills in story writing and telling. It is designed to assist young learners in embodying their imagination and has been crafted by Canopy in line with its larger goal of providing underprivileged children equitable access to education and promoting interactive learning practices.

But most of all, Katha Bunaun is about letting young students express themselves in their own words, said Monal Bhattarai, programme manager at Canopy. “Many of our schools do not have spaces that allow students to cultivate a voice and to present their thoughts and concerns,” she noted. They are rigid and expect children to be part of their structures, she believed.

“Katha Bunaun seeks to give the platform that our educational institutions have not been able to – a platform for children to communicate for themselves, about themselves and to themselves and learn how to do it,” Bhattarai said.

Through the medium of stories, Bhattarai said that Katha Bunaun sought to encourage children of both public and private schools to explore and express the issues they found important in their lives while also helping them understand complex social themes like gender bias, single-parent households and same-sex relationships.

“For this, we primarily focus on secondary school students, that is children of grades 6 to 9. But we have also worked with older students of grades 11 and 12,” Bhattarai shared.

Katha Bunaun’s curriculum, which Canopy works with schools and students to implement in six-day sessions, is designed around the trainees, it claimed. Before every session, a ‘pre-evaluation’ is conducted to assess the needs of the participating children. This informs how the session is conducted over the six days after which, Canopy conducts a ‘post-evaluation’, selects stories that most exhibit the students’ creativity and growth and publishes them in its biannual magazine ‘Buneka Katha’ (Woven Stories).

But does this system work? Does Katha Bunaun help students’ self-expression? Canopy claims it does. Started in 2017, over the past five years, Katha has helped children open up about their problems of bullying, family discord and others, Bhattarai and Mohit Rauniyar, chairperson and executive director, provided several examples to The Rising Nepal.

Stories also lend themselves particularly well to adolescents, said Psychologist Kusum Baral. Baral is not associated with Canopy in any way and is not aware of its activities. However, when talking about schoolchildren and teenagers in general, Baral feels initiatives that teach them ways to articulate their feelings are important. 

“Grades 6 and 7 are when kids start developing physically, mentally and socially. They start analysing their environment and their places in it. They also start experiencing new difficulties,” she said, adding, “They should be provided with the space to communicate their condition and raise their queries. They should have an outlet to rant and vent their frustrations. They should be free to express themselves.”

But in our society, teenagers often do not get this freedom, Baral said. “They are expected to behave – and censor – themselves as they are no longer children. But they also are not able to assert their perspectives in their families and societies because they are not yet adults.” So, platforms that provide them with an expressive avenue are important.

And stories in particular are an ideal medium, she reiterated, as they do not require skills to compose rhymes and stanzas like poems and need not be structured like essays. 

They also offer a narrative veil where children can guise the issues they may not be comfortable directly confronting as the plot of their tales and the plight of their supposedly imaginary characters.

“Storytelling sounds banal but it is very powerful,” she said. Canopy informed that Katha Bunaun focused on developing the storytelling skills of students in both public and private schools. The programme has also been implemented in a few schools in the United States and there are discussions about translating the curriculum, currently available in Nepali and English, into French.

Meanwhile, Canopy also organised an inter-school story writing competition under the Katha Bunaun banner in Kathmandu on September 23 where students from 17 schools of Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Sindhupalchowk participated.