Stories That Heal: Using Shared Narratives To Encourage Intercultural Understanding
Stephen Farren, IH Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland
Context:
Storytelling has always been a way of making sense of difficulty, highlighting resilience, and sustaining hope. Stories can be vessels for passing on values, rebuilding relationships, and helping individuals and communities navigate disruption or loss. In ELT, however, stories are often treated primarily as linguistic input, with less attention paid to their emotional and intercultural significance.
This lesson showcases storytelling as a gentle, voluntary, and relational practice that supports intercultural communication while maintaining respect for learners’ emotional boundaries. Instead of encouraging personal disclosure, learners work with symbolic, fictional, and culturally diverse narratives that allow them to explore experiences of challenge and healing at a safe emotional distance.
The lesson hopes to promote intercultural communication by encouraging learners to notice how different cultures express resilience, care, and recovery through narrative choices, values, and metaphors. It is grounded in trauma-informed pedagogy by offering choice, predictability, and opt-out possibilities, recognising that learners may carry experiences that are not immediately visible.
This approach has been trialled informally in adult ELT and teacher education contexts, where learners shared that they felt an increased confidence when discussing sensitive themes through stories rather than personal experience.
Lesson general aim: To develop learners’ intercultural communicative competence through shared storytelling practices that promote empathy, reflection, and emotional safety.
Learning outcomes: By the end of the lesson, learners will be better able to:
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Interpret how cultural values and experiences shape representations of difficulty and healing in short narratives.
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Compare different cultural perspectives on resilience using descriptive, non-judgemental language.
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Reflect on the role of stories in building understanding and connection across cultures.
Materials needed:
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Short written stories or micro-narratives (150–200 words) from diverse cultural contexts
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Paper or notebooks
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Optional: slides with guiding questions
Target audience: Adult or young adult learners (16+) / CEFR B1-C1
Setting: Face to face classroom
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Timing |
Content/Activity |
Materials |
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10-15 mins |
Pre-tasks Warm-up: Stories Around Us Learners work individually first. On the board, the teacher displays three prompts:
Learners choose one prompt and make brief notes. Examples may be fictional, traditional, cultural, or drawn from books or films. Personal stories are optional but not expected. Learners then share in pairs using sentence stems such as:
This stage establishes emotional choice and shared expectations. |
Paper/notebooks Optional: slides for prompts and sentence stems |
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10 mins |
Task 1: Reading for Meaning and Care Learners read a short story dealing with a challenge (e.g. migration, environmental change, separation) that includes an element of recovery or support. Individually, learners underline:
Guiding questions:
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Short written stories or micro-narratives Optional: Slides for prompts and guiding questions |
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10-15 mins |
Task 2: Intercultural Reflection In small groups, learners discuss the story using question prompts:
Learners are encouraged to speak from observation rather than personal experience. |
None Optional: Slides for questions |
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10-15 mins |
Task 3: Creating a Healing Micro-Story Learners choose one option:
Learners may work individually or collaboratively. Sharing is voluntary. |
Paper/notebooks Optional: Slides for task options |
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10-15 mins |
Post-tasks and final reflections Learners respond orally or in writing to the following prompts:
The teacher briefly draws attention to language used to express empathy, resilience, and possibility. |
Paper/notebooks (if writing) Optional: Slides for prompts |
Other Comments:
The lesson can be adapted for online delivery using breakout rooms and shared documents. A potential challenge is emotional discomfort if stories are too closely with learners’ lived experiences. This could be addressed by offering multiple text choices, reinforcing opt-out options, and consistently framing tasks around interpretation rather than disclosure.
Overall, the lesson demonstrates how stories can function not as prompts for confession, but as a way of developing intercultural understanding, care, and healing through language.
Stephen Farren has been a teacher and trainer for 20 years. He is particularly interested in how ELT connects to the world beyond the classroom. Stephen is currently on the committee of GAELT (Green Action ELT) and is passionate about creating learning environments that are socially sustainable, inclusive and humane.