Storytelling for Intercultural Understanding and Intercultural Sensitivity Development

Abstract

For centuries, we have exchanged stories to transmit knowledge and experience in social contexts. These stories never belonged to the tellers but were dependent on shared narrative sources and, therefore, understood in certain cultural circles. When these stories were deciphered by “newcomers”, they worked like a door opener, enabling access to new thinking patterns and value systems. Once upon a time – that is, about 70 years ago in the USA, American scholar Joseph Campbell pointed out similarities in narratives worldwide in his book “The hero with a thousand faces.” This approach showed what an important role storytelling has played in all cultures throughout the centuries and how the stories were constructed according to the same scheme without the knowledge that such a “universal scenario” exists. Intercultural communication is a balance act between searching for similarities and realizing differences. When we define culture “as a set of stories that we enter” (Bruner 1990), we immediately realize the importance of storytelling in this process. The complexity of narrative realities in today’s world is highlighted in the first section of this chapter, which focuses on identities and their stories in the twenty‐first century. In the following two sections, I propose several answers to the question, “Why storytelling in the intercultural context?” with a short selection of storytelling methods useful in intercultural education. Furthermore, I devote the last section to the use of storytelling in multicultural teams and introduce the ABCs of storytelling.