For Students
For students, Storyhouse is an opportunity
Are you passionate about sharing research?
Do you want to advance your skills for communicating clearly and effectively in a noisy, distracted world?
Interested in intentionally investing in your abilities as a storyteller?
At the Storyhouse, you will invest in your abilities as an public speaker, writer, and storyteller — while you help us share research that impacts people's lives and health!
The Storyhouse experience is equal parts professional development, communications training, and an opportunity to make a difference.
The Beginning
You will select a recent academic article from a curated set of publications. This will be the “source material” for your story. We provide the training, coaching, and an artisanal workshopping environment for transposing academic research into an audience-specific narrative. From there, it is a journey of practicing, collaborating, iterating, and performing.
The Deliverables
Each member of the Storyhouse team works on three main end-of-term deliverables.
1. Tell the Story on the Stage
Present your narrative about a recently published research study at a filmed, end-of-term storytelling finale event.
2. A Finely Crafted Narrative
After pitching, workshopping, and practicing, watch to see how your ~450 word manuscript narrative goes out into the world.
3. Podcast Episode Interview
You will be interviewed for an episode of the Storyhouse podcast to share and reflect on what you learned about dancing with science to narrative.
Why Me?
Tactical Skills Building
Regardless of your career path, honing your skills in science communication can greatly enhance your critical thinking, problem-solving abilities, and build a mental toolkit for addressing complex concepts. At its core, the Storyhouse experience equips you to effectively convey information and engage diverse audiences.
Other reasons you might want to participate include...
you love making science relevant and engaging
you are obsessed with "ah ha!" moments — and inspiring other people to have them, too
the word "interdisciplinary" makes your heart flutter
you want out — way, way out — of your comfort zone
you are thinking about graduate studies and want to experiment diving into research
Massively transferable skills
The Storyhouse focuses on training and inspiring your passion for these four (highly transferable) skills:
Science communication, or SciComm, involves informing, educating, and heightening public awareness of science-related topics, while also fostering a sense of wonder and appreciation for scientific discoveries and discussions.
Knowledge mobilization means increasing the use and usefulness of research by making sure that the right people can access it, understand it, act upon it, participate in it, and inform where it goes.
Narrative theory, boardly speaking, looks at the ways people use stories to make sense of their world and how people make sense of the stories in their world.
Performance studies and the time-honoured practice of standing up in front of a bunch of people and telling them a tale. The tradition is ancient, but it never gets old, and it is an applicable skill no matter where you go in life.
Prerequisites
Be willing to put yourself out there! Storyhouse involves public speaking and live, on-stage storytelling
Participating in the Storyhouse requires a commitment of approximately 2-3 hours per week minimum for the term
You must be able to attend a weekly workshop (1 hour) on a specified schedule
You must agree to share your creative outputs in the program through a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license so that it can be adapted and shared
You must be willing to create or use an account on Substack so we can publish your narrative on this site
You must be willing to sign your institution’s photography/videography consent form, so that the recording of your narrative performance can be distributed widely by them