Your stories are a priceless gift for others.

When I was a young girl, I spent summers on my grandfather’s farm. After the school year ended in our small suburban town, our family of four packed the car with our clothes and not much else and drove to stay with my father’s father for several weeks.

The farm had a few dairy cows and hayfields, nothing extravagant. There was a partly collapsed wooden barn, an old chicken coop, and a pump house for the water well with a light that blinked green when it was running. In truth, I remember a lot about the farm, but mostly I remember my grandfather’s stories.

My grandfather took me around his land to show me the wild plants and explain how you could use them for food. He described how he grew up on a farm, the chores he did, and the places he roamed. He taught me how to poach eggs while answering questions about his arm tattoo shaped like an anchor, from his time in the Navy. In a quiet voice, he told me how much my grandmother had loved me.

In the end, my grandfather’s stories changed my life. Inspired by him, I spent those summers collecting interesting rocks and twigs and berries and then organizing my treasures into categories I created. It seemed only natural for me to go on to earn a college degree in science, and, eventually, become a science educator, like my grandfather the farmer.

The education community now recognizes storytelling as a highly effective teaching strategy. Educators, including university professors, take workshops on how to teach through stories. In K-12 schools, teachers design projects that ask students to tell a story, often through digital storytelling that uses combinations of writing, photos, audio, video, animations, and maps. The best science courses discuss how famous discoveries were made and the life stories of the scientists.

In Edwardsville, we have some amazing resources for potential storytellers. One is Youth Be Heard (youthbeheard.org), led by a local resident, which is an online platform for youth to share their stories through writing and art. At SIUE, the IRIS Center (iris.siue.edu) helps faculty, students, and community members use the tools of digital humanities to highlight stories of people and places in the local area and beyond. And the SIUE STEM Center (siuestemcenter.org), in a project funded by the National Institutes of Health, is supporting middle schoolers in our region to tell stories about their surroundings through photography and writing.

You never know how the gift of your time, and stories, might make a difference in another person’s life. I appreciated the toys my grandparents gave me, but I lived their stories. Stories won’t be returned because they are too small or not the right color. The stories we tell are perfect, because they are a part of us.