Using Storytelling to Support Children and Adults With Special Needs ─ Transforming Lives Through Telling Tales

This innovative and wide-ranging book shows how storytelling can open new worlds for learners with or without special educational needs. With sections that outline both therapeutic and educational approaches, the leading practitioners who contribute to this practical resource draw on their extensive experience, and distil their own approaches for the reader to use as inspiration for their own lessons.

Providing a highly accessible combination of theory and practice, the contributors to this book:

• define their own approach to storytelling
• describe the principles and theory that underpin their practice
• demonstrate how they work with different types of story
• provide extensive case-studies and assessment frameworks for a range of different special needs and age ranges
• provide some ‘top tips’ for practitioners who want to start using stories in this way.

Using Storytelling to Support Children and Adults with Special Needs will be of interest to all education professionals as well as therapists, youth workers, counsellors, and storytellers and theatre practitioners working in special education.

Nicola Grove is Founder of Openstorytellers, the first arts company of intellectually disabled storytellers (www.openstorytellers.org.uk). She is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Language and Communication Science at City University London, UK. She has published widely in the field of special needs and communication.