DreamScope Theatre

© 2025 Puja Goyal

We had just been contracted to produce an annual day for a school, and the theme was Indian Independence.

The children were informed about the changes in schedule and soon we will be starting practices. I usually start with meeting the children and describing the production and then telling them the story instead of diving right in with practiice and instructions.

The boy in the back row had mastered the art of disengagement. Thumb tapping rhythmically against the edge of his bench, eyes half-lidded, he could recite a date while dreaming of cricket. He just didn’t want to listen to anything that afternoon.

But that afternoon, something shifted. I saw that it would be a challenge to get his attention, so I simply leaned against the desk, kept my script down, and said, “There’s a well in Amritsar where mothers once hid their children… not from monsters, but from soldiers.”

The room stilled. And the boy looked up.

That’s the thing about stories. They’re not just bridges — they’re time machines. They collapse centuries into seconds. They fold facts into the human heart. In a world that prizes speed, metrics, and syllabus completion, storytelling reminds us to slow down and feel something.

That day, I didn’t “teach” the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. I took them there. We traced the path into the walled garden. We imagined the sound of locked gates behind us. We followed a fictional family — a girl named Anjum and her grandfather — whose afternoon stroll turned into a nightmare. And then we just sat with the silence.

One student whispered, “Did they ever get justice?”

And just like that, history became personal.

Storytelling is more than a flourish or filler. It’s a survival instinct. It’s how we’ve always made sense of cruelty, courage, change. But in classrooms — and boardrooms, and Zoom calls — it’s too often filed under “optional.” We teach data. We present slides. We rarely, if ever, teach people how to move someone’s soul with a sentence.

Articulation — not just what we say, but how we shape it — is the undercurrent of all meaningful communication. Whether you’re teaching teenagers or leading a team, your ability to conjure an image, to pause at the right word, to let silence sit, is what makes people trust you. It’s what makes them care.

You could reframe a science lesson on deforestation as a folk tale of a greedy forest that swallowed its own roots. And it could start an activism by students — some of whom had never planted a seed — to start a tree-planting drive. Not because of the data. Because of the story.

So here’s my soft nudge to you, dear educator, communicator, reluctant speaker: tell the story before you teach the concept. Tell it without fear of being “too much.” You might be the first person who ever made that lesson come alive.

And when you do — when a child forgets their fidgeting and sits up just a little straighter—you’ll know you’ve done something bigger than deliver content.

You’ve created a connection.

You’ve handed them not just knowledge, but meaning.

And isn’t that what we’re really here for?

As for the boy who was disinterested in the annual production, well, he went on to play the part of Mangal Pandey and performed to a loud round of applause.

Coming Soon: The Storytelling Classroom—a professional development workshop by DreamScope Theatre, designed for educators, facilitators, and communicators seeking to elevate their teaching through the art of storytelling.

Because the future of education begins with how we speak, listen, and connect.