Keynote – Storying as a way of bridging research-practice gaps within classrooms and beyond [Forum special series, Arts & culture in KM part 24]

This article is part of a special series of summaries of keynotes and presentations from the KM Triversary Forum 2025, and also part 24 of a series exploring arts and culture in knowledge management.

Storying is an essential part of our everyday knowledge-making processes. It serves as a critical tool for healing, weaving, communicating, and collaborating with human and more-than-human lives. Since my childhood, my association with storying and listening to stories has been profoundly intimate and therapeutic. When I was five years old, I was diagnosed with the neurological condition of epilepsy. The consumption of high doses of carbamazepine tablets generated multiple health side effects, and one of them was stuttering. There was a time when it was impossible to speak a single sentence without a stutter. In public places, like classrooms and sidewalks, it became an immense source of embarrassment for me because every time I wanted to ask a question or respond, my consistent stutter invited disgust and ridicule, eventually discouraging me from interacting publicly. To find suitable avenues for expressing my disappointments and frustrations, I started telling myself stories.

I would often close the door of my study room, stand in front of the mirror, walk around the room, or, while taking a shower, speak to myself, sharing ‘stories’ about my everyday experiences with friends and teachers, library readings, lunchtime games in schools, and others. Sharing stories with myself made me feel temporarily safe and healed, without being judged and ridiculed by anybody. Self-talk, along with speech therapy that my parents inducted me into, gradually enabled me to recognize storying as an impactful method to navigate the fear of public embarrassment. Unlike rote-learning mechanisms in schools, which demand a machine-like response to questions, storying allowed me to pause, slow down, reflect, and then build my thoughts and reactions. Most importantly, it allowed me to embrace my slowness and stutters as just another ‘style’ of communicating.

With time, as I ventured into higher education as a researcher and teacher, storying became an essential theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical agency in knowledge management, and, most importantly, a potential bridge to address the gaps between theory and praxis that I consistently encountered as a school student. Although I officially come from the discipline of English literature, my research intersects the fields of sociology, anthropology, and environmental humanities, and as part of this, interacting with and listening to stories from different communities is deeply essential. A majority of my research is centered on inter-racial and diaspora communities, such as Anglo-Indians, Anglo-Scots, and Afro-Indians, learning and documenting their myths, folklore, dance, music, food, and rituals in written and audiovisual formats. My interactions and socioemotional intimacies with these communities always initiate through the method of storying, so that my prejudiced ideologies can be bulldozed, the outsider-insider hostilities and tensions can be addressed, and the learning and sharing process can take place in horizontal, rhizomatic, cobwebbed, and comfortable ways.

Storying, i.e., storytelling as a theory, method, and performance of everyday communication through mutually respecting, loving, caring, and sharing influences my classroom pedagogies as well. Currently, I teach at a college in Oman, where I interact with several first-generation learners who are highly reluctant to think aloud, question, share their opinions, or engage in counterarguments and disagreements. The reluctance primarily stems from the experience of continuous mockery, discouragement, and embarrassment that learners face in their schools, families, and societies when they try to challenge, interrogate, and dismantle sociocultural prejudices. Inviting learners to share stories as a critical thinking process plays a pivotal role not only in making learners feel welcome and heard in the classroom but also in allowing them to share their opinions from their respective positionalities without being surveilled, censored, dehumanized, or labeled. My classrooms also include students with special needs, such as hyper-autism and dyslexia, for whom sharing questions, opinions, and counter-opinions through stories makes them feel like an essential part of the knowledge-building community.

The purpose of sharing these instances is to highlight the necessity of weaving grassroots visions of knowledge-making and management processes as continuous, reciprocal actions of humanity, love, and care, beyond the pedestalization, gospelization, and fortifications of academic disciplines, curricula, pedagogies, and research methodologies. In a highly precarious time of genocides, ecocides, starvation, and socioeconomic crises, this is the least we can do for each other’s well-being, as a part of which, theories and pedagogies of knowledge management, instead of creating “clones” (hooks, 1994, p. 5) of exploiters and gatekeepers, become a liberatory practice.

Biography:

Sayan Dey works as an Assistant Professor and Department Chair (English Studies) at Bayan College (affiliated with Purdue University Northwest), Oman. His latest monographs are Performing Memories and Weaving Archives: Creolized Cultures across the Indian Ocean (Anthem Press, 2023), and Garbocracy: Towards a Great Human Collapse (Peter Lang, 2025). He was awarded the Nicolas Cristobal Guillen Batista Outstanding Book Award for Performing Memories and Weaving Archives in 2025 by the Caribbean Philosophical Association. His research interests are posthumanism, decolonial studies, environmental studies, critical race studies, culinary epistemologies, and critical diversity literacy. He can be reached at www.sayandey.com.

Presentation resources: Video recording (coming soon).

Header image source: Author provided.

Artificial intelligence (AI) statement: AI was not used in the preparation of this presentation.

References:

Boris, V. (2025, October 25). What Makes Storytelling So Effective For Learning? Harvard Business Impact. https://www.harvardbusiness.org/insight/what-makes-storytelling-so-effective-for-learning/.

Dey, S. (2025, September 23). Touch, Eco-Intimacies and Rhizomatic Turns. Radical Ecological Democracy.  https://radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/touch-eco-intimacies-and-rhizomatic-turns/.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.

Suggested readings:

Phillips, L. G. and T. Bunda. (2018). Research Through, With and As Storytelling. Routledge.

Gravett, Karen. (2019). Story Completion: Storying as a Method of Meaning-Making and Discursive Discovery. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 18. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406919893155.

Colla, R. H., & C. F. Kurtz. (2024). “Storying research: Exploring the benefits of participatory narrative inquiry as a methodology for wellbeing research.” International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41042-024-00147-4.

Koch, T. (1998). Story telling: is it really research? Journal of Advanced Nursing, 28(6): 1182-1190. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2648.1998.00853.x.

Reynolds, R-A. and K. Murris. (2024). Re-Storying Schools as ‘Research Sites’ of Climate Change in the Chthulucene: Diffractively Reading through the Land of a Primary School in South Africa. The Journal of Environmental Education, 55(1): 52–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2023.2259831.