Mtro.

GATTACA
Storying in the Classroom
The Genetic Approach
MSc Pedro José Mayoral Valdivia
MA Secundino Isabeles Flores
MEd María Cass Zubiria
pett30@hotmail.com
secoo@hotmail.com
mcassz@yahoo.com

Introduction
People in all times and places have told stories. In the oral tradition, storytelling
includes the teller and the audience. The storyteller creates the experience, while
theaudience perceives the message and creates personal mental images from the
words heard and the gestures seen. In this experience, the audience becomes cocreator of the art. Storytellers sometimes dialogue with their audience, adjusting
their words to respond to the listeners and to the moment.
There are many kinds of stories, such as fables, parables, myths, legends. Stories
are of many moods, suchas humorous, inspirational, didactic or educative,
frightening, tragic, romantic.
Folklorists sometimes divide oral tales into two main groups: "Märchen" and
"Sagen". These are German terms for which there are no exact English
equivalents; the first one is both singular and plural. "Märchen," loosely translated
as "fairy tale(s)" (though fairies are rare in them) take place in a kind ofseparate
"once-upon-a-time" world of nowhere-in-particular. They are clearly not intended
to be understood as true. The stories are full of clearly defined incidents, and
peopled by rather flat characters with little or no interior life. When the
supernatural occurs, it is presented matter-of-factly, without surprise. Indeed,
there is very little affect, generally; bloodcurdling events may takeplace, but with
little call for emotional response from the listener. "Sagen," best translated as
"legends," are supposed to have actually happened, very often at a particular time
and place, and they draw much of their power from this fact.

The intrinsic nature of stories was described by Reynolds Price, when he wrote:
"A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homosapiens--second in
necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive
without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to
narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small
accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."

GATTACA storying in the classroom.First of all, we decided to make our speech fitted in a congress topic, then it didn’t
seemed to be that crazy, and let me tell you why, storytelling is the ancient art of
conveying events in words, images, and sounds often by improvisation or
embellishment.
GATTACA strategically was chosen as a key word to get the audience attention,
but it is an acronym where the different letters stand forspecific actions to be
done previous, during and after storytelling. That action took us into the idea of a
genetic approach, where the main components guide our actions into a clear and
defined way of telling stories, using specific strategies to encourage the storyteller
effort in an educational environment, not only in an ESL context but in whatever
moment we want to tell a story.
Storyingis an invented word by our storytelling trainer Steve Ansel, we just loved
the word and we decided to use it, it means so much, is a friendly way to say
storytelling and for kids it is great when it is time for storying.
We are naturally storytellers the RNA of the genetic theory; the messenger of DNA
(stories) we just have to add the proteins of the storytelling action: performance,materials and lots of feeling, to help our audience to decode the different
messages we will be sending while storytelling. Therefore we decided to assign
special actions to each one of the genetic letters and instead of guanine, adenine,
cytosine, thymine, our letters stand for:

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Goals perfectly defined

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Act, perform, characterize and dramatize

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Training before performing

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