Storytelling is what helps instructions and evokes empathy in the reader or listener. Here’s how this happens:
Concreteness: Stories are concrete, tangible examples that further help the learners to really understand abstractions and complex ideas. By contexting the information within a story, complex subjects are both easier to learn about and remember.
Identification: Stories allow learners to associate themselves with characters and situations, and this could be a means to the assimilation of perspectives into the learner’s way of thinking. It creates an avenue that allows one to “walk in someone else’s shoes” and hence build empathetic skills.
Structuring: Stories allow learners to transfer concepts to analogous contexts in the real world, thus reinforcing the value and relevance of what has been learned.
Engagement: Storytelling engages students and gets them far more interested in the content. The emotional and playful nature of stories triggers cognitive processes, such as remembering, rethinking, and reconnecting.
Empathy: Stories related to different cultures, backgrounds, and experiences develop empathy in the learner by letting them view things from multiple dimensions. Stories of “unlikable” characters or people who are very different from the learner are especially good in this respect.
In a nutshell, storytelling is a way of making pedagogical content—concrete, vivid, human forms are given to difficult ideas. It generates not only conceptual understanding but also helps in developing concepts like empathy, critical thinking, and communication.