Collaborative Storytelling

Activity

Ongoing engagement, Warm up activities

Collaborative Storytelling

Jasmina Najjar

Promote a sense of community and break the ice in class with collaborative storytelling activities.

Tech needed: Shared online space

Asynchronous

Accessibility: Text-based

Duration: Variable

Student preparation: None

Educator preparation: None

ACTIVITY PURPOSE

Promote a sense of community and break the ice in class with collaborative storytelling activities.

USEFUL FOR

Can be used at any time in the semester and even as an on-going activity throughout the semester.
Fun way of encouraging students to pay attention to details, engage in close reading, and think of logical possible scenarios. Teaches how to follow a unified style and voice. Is an outlet for students’ creativity.

PREPARATION

Setting up a shared editable Google Doc or a Wiki within your LMS.
Deciding whether you want to let students collectively create a prompt to begin the story or wish to use an online random plot generator to get things started such as Plot Generator or reedsy Plot Generator.
Another alternative is to get the ball rolling by creating a basic story plot related to the course (e.g. An anthropologist conducting field research or a scientist working at a research lab or an entrepreneur setting up her business).

INSTRUCTIONS

Post preparation, make it clear how many times you’d like each student to contribute to the story (e.g. 3 times) and how much content (e.g. a paragraph each time).
Remind students to read what has been written so far carefully.
Emphasise to students that they have total freedom to create exciting twists and turns and move the story forward, but whatever they add has to make sense and seem logical given what comes before it. That means being true to the characters, plot, and style so far.
Create ground rules for your students, for example, please don’t delete or edit the work your classmates added, etc.

DURATION

This is an asynchronous activity. It can run from the start to the end of the semester, or can be done for just a few days.

ADAPTATIONS AND EXAMPLES

Microsoft Word online and any other tool that lets multiple people work on the same document.
Can be done using video/audio/visuals and not just text.
Can be done on Twitter using a hashtag.
Can be done using Twine for interactive non-linear storytelling.
Can be done synchronously on Slack or WhatsApp, or via text chat on Zoom or orally on Zoom.
Can be done synchronously as ‘Improv’ with additional restrictions like, beginning of each sentence starts with the next letter of the alphabet (A, B, C) or each person has a certain length sentence (3-10 words).

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

A shared online space (e.g. Google Doc or Wiki) and student access to it.

USEFUL RESOURCES

How to Outline a Short Story [Template Included] by Jessica Majewski, When You Write.