Teaching Interviews as Storytelling
Lesson planning toward ethical promotional writing
Targeted Course Outcomes
Identify the stakeholders, values, and rhetoric of non-profit communities
Identify and evaluate diverse communication goals for different audiences
Conduct primary and secondary research relevant to our topics and integrate appropriate sources
Produce clear, concise, effective audience- and purpose-specific rhetoric
Goal
Introduce students to interview best practices and explore the dynamics involved with using interviews as foundations for nonprofit storytelling through in-class activities
My role
Teaching intern
Deliverables
Lesson plan, slides, discussion and reflection prompts
Context
In Spring 2024, I served as a teaching intern for WRA331: Writing in the Public Interest in the department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures (WRAC) at Michigan State University. The course focuses on developing rhetorical practices that apply to nonprofit communication work. As a teaching intern, I supported the course by assisting with planning on a weekly basis, planning and teaching multiple lessons myself, mentoring and providing feedback for students, and participating in conversations around what would improve the course in the future.
For their third project in the course, students were asked to interview someone affiliated with a nonprofit of their choice (volunteer, participant, staff member, etc) and turn that interview into a story that promotes the mission of the nonprofit. Before sending the students off to interview community members, we wanted to make sure they understood general best practices for interviewing as well as the dynamics involved with interviewing and telling someone else’s story. I developed an activity for students to practice interviewing and storytelling in the lower-stakes classroom environment.
Lesson Plan
Process:
Identify priorities: I knew students needed to leave this lesson feeling prepared to interview a community member for the purposes of creating a story about their organization, and able to navigate that rhetorical situation ethically.
Scaffold: Before class, students were asked to view Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story.” I used that as a jumping off point for the lesson, asking students to identify their takeaways from the video and to identify times when they have encountered the problem of the “single story,” both within and outside of nonprofit communications. Starting with this conversation got the whole class on the same page about the ethical concerns around telling stories of people who have different life experiences. Following this, we established why we were doing interviews for this project, and what the students already knew about best practices for interviews. We followed this with a deeper discussion of some of the potential relational dynamics that exist in an interview situation. Finally, I had the students practice interviewing and storytelling through an in-class activity, outlined in more detail in the next section. Finally, we did a group debrief to reflect on the dynamics of the activity.
Feedback: I received feedback from both my faculty mentor and my co-instructor on this lesson. The primary change I made was moving away from a discussion that framed interviews’ “power dynamics,” instead discussing the obligations and vulnerabilities of each party in an interview situation. This was a way of making the discussion more accessible to students who did not have prior knowledge around the term “power dynamics,” as we hadn’t discussed that term in-depth before. My faculty mentor also suggested that I make sure the whole class had an understanding of what “leading questions” looked like by either giving examples myself of leading and non-leading versions of the same question, or having the students do so.
Through a large group discussion, students filled in the obligations and vulnerabilities for each party involved in an interview.
Interview Activity
Here, I am highlighting the steps of the interview activity that the students completed in class. This was the central component of the lesson, and I believe it would be a useful template for an exercise that can be done by any communicator hoping to use storytelling to promote their organization while honoring the interviewees’ vulnerability in sharing their experience. View the full lesson plan for the PDF version of the activity.
Outcome & Impact
Overall, students produced multimodal pieces of writing to tell the stories they learned from their interviews. In many of our individual conferences with students, they expressed that their interviews went on much longer than they anticipated because their interviewees were so engaged with the questions they were asking. Giving students an opportunity to practice interviewing and storytelling in the classroom was a helpful tool not only for their successful completion of the project, but also for their ability to make genuine connections with community members around their nonprofit work.
Lessons Learned
Expand each lesson to learn more.
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Because this is a project-based, deliverable-focused course, we had a very limited amount of time to spend on complex, albeit very important, concepts such as positionality and power dynamics. In any future version of this lesson, I would want to spend more time digging into thos concepts more deeply.
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The main activity in this lesson dedicated the majority of the time to interviewing and sharing stories. In future iterations, I would dedicate more time and guidance to the process of turning the interview into a story. I would break the activity into two class sessions, where between sessions students are given prompts to guide them in formulating a story that connects the interview and the mission.