What Our Ancestors Knew: Teaching and Learning Through Storytelling.

This article explores how storytelling served as a foundational way of teaching and learning long before formal educational institutions and printed texts emerged. Lawrence and Paige argue that the oral traditions of many cultures transmitted deep cultural knowledge, values, histories, and practical wisdom across generations. Because the stories of Indigenous and oral cultures were rarely written down, they have often been marginalised in mainstream educational narratives, yet these stories sustained cultural continuity and identity through their intergenerational retelling.

The authors emphasise that storytelling is not merely entertainment but a meaningful pedagogical practice that embeds learning in relational experience, memory, and cultural worldview. Stories offer opportunities for reflection, personal connection, and healing, challenging dominant discourses that privilege Western-centric ways of knowing while validating Indigenous and oral knowledge systems.

For the Telling Your Stories Project, this article provides strong research support for positioning storytelling as a central teaching and learning practice. It affirms that narrative practices rooted in lived experience and cultural tradition can deepen engagement, foster identity and belonging, and support learning that is relational, culturally grounded, and transformative.