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My name is Evan and I'm an Ozaholic
and I
wanna do something a little fun and a little different
today and that is
to talk about the creation
of what became America's best-loved
best-known story The Wizard of Oz
and click your comfortable walking shoes three times
and get ready for that but the reason I want to do that
is because I think its
really instructive to look at storytelling
as a powerful learning tool so to use Oz as a prism
to talk about that and I don't mean a teaching tool
you're all educators and you're all storytellers yourselves
but I mean actually teaching kids
the art of storytelling itself as a way to
perceive the world integrate what they're learning and explain the world
and it's really a I think becoming a core
skill in what we've talked about today in the world which is becoming
increasingly right brained
and creative and storytelling is
actually of course nothing new it's been the central thread if humanity and you
could actually trace it
in an evolutionary sense the cave paintings were
from from tribes that were very good storytelling so they are naturally
selected
because they were able to convey what went on in the hunt
to their other tribe members
through the cave paintings and have it persist through generations these were
the people that survived and that's why we're hard-wired
as a species as storytellers and this
plays into all our organizations I think I look at my company
as a tribe and if we're better at story-telling than the next company
we're going to do better and this is
sort of a typical scene in my company Innosight we're an innovation
consulting firm
what we do is we have this business development lab and we
we're very creative we bring in clients
to solve big challenges so this was a brainstorming session on
solving a big public health challenge but it could be inventing a new car or
an airplane or
working with Procter and Gamble on a new consumer product
and my job there is as Stephen says I'm Director of Storytelling
and what that means is innovation really can't happen without stories
so oftentimes after a consulting engagement is over there's an impact
and
it could take months it could take years and I will tell the stories both in
written narrative form but also making videos
of little documentaries about what we do for our clients
so what is story this
has many definitions but what I want to
talk about is different aspects of why it's such a central thing and
hope to a provoke some discussion on why storytelling should be
really be an organizing device for curriculum
a story is a major change event a transformation
it's a series of designed episodes it's not just an anecdote
but the scenes of a story are very carefully designed
it's a powerful way to convey information and mask complexity
that's very important especially in the world I work in
there's very complex things that happen in industries
and people aren't really necessarily interested in the details
it's a way to deliver
emotion and surprise a story is like an emotion
delivery machine storytelling provides equipment for living wisdom
it's also big business you're in education storytelling is
big in your business but also in consulting
if you're a lawyer in health care than
move to narrative medicine just about every industry
some economists have calculated that storytelling accounts for about 25
percent of GDP
so why do we tell stories and
there are many different reasons and some people have come up with some
just
great quotes about we're ideally set up
to understand stories not logic
but we perceive the world through stories narrative imagining
and that kind of
analytical thinking is important we have a lot of MBA's at our company
we have to sort of deprogram them
because they are set up to do powerpoints
and its are you know it's really about
pictures so I want to talk a little bit about
The Wizard of Oz and why I was so drawn to this
the story of our Frank Baum I don't think was really
understood I got interested in it because I was reading
his original novel out loud at bedtime
to my second grade daughter and
she was a big fan of the movie but had we had never read the book and it was
a great experience it took about a month to do
and at the end there's a little bio of Frank Baum in it that said that he failed
and at a series of careers his whole life
he was a oil salesman he was a chicken breeder
he managed a baseball team he had a variety store
all these things we talked about failure and
and then at age 44 he writes
the best known story ever created on American soil
so how did that happen I was 44 years old at the time too and I thought
thats kinda inspiring like your greatest success even though you're old
can happen like in the future and that
really prompted me to start researching
who Frank Baum was and
of course we were inspired by the movie and
the story and we'll talk about the model of storytelling in a moment but
every story has a hero in my book it's Frank Baum but of course in the movie
and
and his novel it's Dorothy and what are some of the elements
of the early part of the story well
every story has an ordinary world Kansas its boring
and miserable for Dorothy but there's a call to adventure
she sees something very colorful appear
and starts singing we sort of all do that in our lives a little bit
we could relate to that but we really
relate to Dorothy when we start to empathize with her
and creating empathy and likability for your character is so important
such a great skill to teach here she's saying
Uncle Henry you're not gonna let her take my dog away
and this really bonds you to Dorothy right at the beginning of the story
and then some stories have a device for taking you
from the ordinary world into the special world into the unknown
and here this was a supernatural device or
a a weather-related event I
and one of the most memorable scenes in all film
but we all know the movie and
I don't have to tell you that story it's the most seen movie in
in human history and and kids watches over and over and over
it's the most reputed viewed movie as well
but all these icons the imagination were created by one person and I wanted to
really get under the covers about
and figure out how it happened the book came
out in the year 1900 and it was an instant success he was like the JK
Rowling
of his time and this was before radio television and movie so the
so books were it in this was I'll just
captured people's imagination right from the start
so who's Frank bomb
he was a dreamer he grew up
in a arm as the Sun over
fairly wealthy oil man and
was self-taught he had an English tutor
as a kid he grew up in the Syracuse New York area
and he read all these books to sort of escape because he was a sickly
kid
he had a heart disease when he was
young and was very scrawny and physically weak
and so he would read Gulliver's Travels
or Alice in Wonderland or Mark Twain
and these books took him to new worlds Jewels Burn
and and at a young age he told his sisters
when I grow up I want to write a great novel that wins
me fame
so I wanted to figure out how this happened so I embarked on this journey
this is me going back to where
Frank Baum was born just outside of Syracuse
and so I went on a road of research to to all the places he lived in libraries
and what I found is this was his ordinary world
his father was fairly wealthy he had a farm
and it was fairly
mundaine and he'd want to escape it
but there were challenging times to this is 1871 this picture the farm but
in 1873 the father lost all his money in a panic of
1873 which was like a
.com bubble bursting in those days
the economy just completely tanked and they were actually poor after that
but around this time Frank Baum's father
and this really parallels the story and why
I think he was able to write about Dorothy in this way
at the age of 12 his father suddenly sends
Frank Baum away from his home uproots him from his home
and he was sent away to a military academy
and he didn't want to go he was
he was a bookworm he was not interested in
are going to boarding school and this is a picture of him
at the peekskill military academy
and something really interesting happened I'm he took a train
to Albany many took a a boat on the Hudson River
and the any got off his doc
and Peekskill was a Dutch town and the Dutch came over
came in these ships that had up these Dutch paving bricks
as ballast and the bricks were bright yellow in color
and the roads that were
used that big the use these bricks to pave some other roads in town because
they had leftover
and Frank Baum would get off the dock
and he had to go to the military academy up the hill
so he would ask for directions and what would people say
follow the yellow brick road
so essentially
this was a very physical thing that happened to him but
what happened again and again in his storytelling later in life
is he infused meaning into
these physical things that he saw in his life
he had a terrible time the military academy they made him march
and do terrible things he wanted to go home he imagined
the yellow brick road was the path back home as well
he faked or had a heart attack
because it is heart disease and they sent him home so we went back down the
yellow brick road back on the
river and home after about less than a year there
but the amazing thing is the road
is still there in Peekskill from that time it's not even
preserved as a tourist attraction so I was just amazed to
corroborate this with the town historian
and see this section of yellow brick road the Hudson Rivers right in the back
another thing that happened to Frank Baum and this is what he did time and
time again see
and kids can do this too I think this is really the fuel of storytelling is
taking
something that happens in your ordinary life
and transforming it into art
transforming it as a metaphor for for literature and
he was very bored in
Syracuse he grew up he was working for the Fathers
oil company he was not particularly interested in that
he wants to go on an adventure he read about Mark Twain being out west
one of his heroes we wanted to do Dakota Territory
and this is a common occurrence in this wasn't
actually a terrifying photos when photography was fairly new
to capture a tornado on film on
it was just terrifying to people so this was
circulating and when he went when he got out there he would see
these twisters coming across the plains especially in springtime
and he would he wrote about them
lifting houses up in the air or lifting pigs and livestock up in the air
and it must have stuck with him so
this is the way the house was pictured in
in the book in the novel a brilliant conception to get
Dorothy from the ordinary world to the special world
and that's what I want to talk about the main reason for telling the story is
that all stories have a structure and The Wizard of Oz is just a great example
of that structure and this is the old way I think storytelling was taught
when I was in
grade school it used to be you learned about character setting rising action
falling action de newma
and it wasn't very inspiring I didn't even know what de newma was
like what is that and I don't think
stories have necessarily a rising action and falling action it's
there peaks and valleys and it would be boring if it was just like this
and it's very linear this is all accurate there's a call to adventure and
and there are problems
and they have to be resolved but
this is really not a good model for
teaching storytelling so I think a real powerful model and probably the best
is the hero's journey are you familiar with Joseph Campbell's model
the Hero's Journey
so a lot of you already are and
I think this really shows that storytelling is not a linear thing but
it's a circular thing
and that when you get a called to adventure and you go from the known
world to the unknown
and your going through a thresholds
and you have helpers and mentors and challenges and you
have an all is lost moment in The Wizard of Oz of course it's when
Dorothy's trapped in the witch's castle and then something transformative
happens and
you atone and you transform and you change the gift of the goddess
being the slippers and
the knowledge of that she had the power in her all along
you return to where you were storytelling is a circle
and I think that's really the power of his model that
that great myths give us clues to the spiritual
potential of our lives the threshold guardians
we all know them Frank Baum invented these people
where did they come from he had German
ancestry his father would go to Germany his brother
and the Muchner Kindl the Munich child
is the mascot of Oktober Fest
so it still is today
this is my daughter Lily with Jerry Maren one of surviving munchkins
a Lollipop Guild kid and his wife who was not born
at the time of the movieGerry is one the two surviving munchkins and Lily
was
amazed to meet them be taller she was nine years old
and this is what she wrote she drew this afterwards on our trip
back to the birthplaces Frank Baum
I'm just briefly his mentor in life was
and and all stories need a mentor was his wife
I'm mod who is a I'm very
smart young woman she was at cornell
very unusual to be a student
in those days at a coed University Cornell was the first coed University in
the in the east
I and they fell in love
but they were opposed to buy mods mother
I and evolve fierce mother in laws of all time
Matilda Joslyn Gage and was
the fiercest she was 1.avi leaders have the women's movement
and this is her arm second from the right next elizabeth katie stanton
Susan B Anthony is I'm
second to from the left and these were the three leaders
the women's movement I'm so mathilde gage wrote books
that form the women's movement I'm shuster written out of history by Susan
be Anthony was
Jim much better public relations but she also wrote about witches and witchcraft
and and and
the hunting a which is in the middle Middle Ages
so this is the way the which looked in the book and of course we talked about
the story there but it's really about
this duality and we all know that if we saw Wicked
that the which has some good in her the Wicked Witch and
then there's the the White Witch Glinda
and this was really inspired by
living with Maude and her mother-in-law the with the mother in law would
live with them
all winter long sometimes after her husband
was a very compliant
man named Henry and he was like the Uncle Henry inspiration
so Matilda if he didn't marry into this family
this story would not have happened so
the duality of the witches very important
we talked about Frank Baum working for an oil company
and it wasn't just oil for fuel but they made lubricants
and he would have to go out and sell this stuff
and it was called Baum's Castorine it was a very successful product at the time
for lubricating buggy wheels and
they were made into these cans and I was able to visit the company
that makes this stuff and they're still in existence today outside of
Syracuse
inspired one of the iconic
characters again a duality a tin man
is he human is he a machine
does he have a heart or does he need one
and I've always been amazed at how faithful they were with the book if
you look at the composition of the
original drawings you could see them
almost perfectly mirrored in the movie they were very reverential
to the book the final icon I just want to talk about
is the Emerald City
which was really inspired after Frank Baum hit a very low point in his
failures
he heard about the world's fair happening in Chicago in 1893
and he went there to be a newspaper reporter
writing about it and the architecture
you could see are directly inspired
the Denslow drawings of the World's Fair Denslow was the illustrator of the book
and also illustrating the World's Fair for the newspapers
at that time you could see some of
the motifs in the rotundas and cupolas
of course when they made the movie was more like an art deco
kind of thing but
this place at the imagination that the central place of the story
was so important to him he called the book the Emerald City when he finished
the manuscript
the publisher said that they didn't want a jewel name in the title
and they
came up with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and we talked about how important it was
to kids when it came out
but thats the story of Frank Baum
Frank Baum was transformed
I think one of the lessons that I learned is that
this narrative form doesn't just apply to fiction but it could apply to
our own lives and how we perceive the world
and he was on a path to find out who he was his true self
and Oz is really a spiritual journey for him
this is him when he was out doing publicity shots for the book
finally became happy to
get that first check that first royalty check
after struggling all these years and become a successful author
at age 44 I one interesting coda
of the story is that he died in 1919
the movie was made twenty years later
so he didn't live to see it but his wife Maude did
and she got to meet Judy Garland and
do publicity for the movie when it came out
so that's the heel clicking moment
we go back to the ordinary world and
what it's all about is integrating the experience
she went on this adventure Frank Baum went on an adventure we all do
and the
the understanding of and that's why this last scene is so brilliant it was
treated a little differently in the book but
it's about attaining
enlightenment seeing both sides
within each other so that's the model I wanted
to share with you and I think it's really
exciting for kids because they love stories already and to become
storytellers themselves I think is a really important thing for them
and some of you are already doing it in your classrooms
but there are just so many great models
for teaching storytelling
this is one of the best and I think it's just
inspirational for kids to learn
how to create this way so thank you very much