Unlocking potential with the power of storytelling
Nonprofit gives ancient art a modern purpose
BY JENNIFER KOHLHEPP
Staff Writer

Roosevelt's Jaymie Reeber Kosa was recently named executive director of Storytelling Arts Inc., a nonprofit advocating the use of storytelling in classrooms.

ROOSEVELT - The art of storytelling has its roots in the very beginnings of civilization and has grown throughout time to convey history, values, culture and purpose.

Storytelling Arts Inc., a nonprofit organization based in Roosevelt, recognizes the power of this ancient art and is dedicated to helping unleash more of storytelling's potential to help students overcome barriers that may be interfering with their learning processes.

Jaymie Reeber Kosa, a Roosevelt resident, was recently named executive director of the nonprofit that promotes storytelling as an effective teaching strategy that develops literacy and motivation to learn, offers educators professional opportunities to improve learning in their classrooms, and provides storytelling residencies, including programs for low-income, special-needs and at-risk students.

Kosa has loved listening to stories all of her life and became a middle school teacher to inspire students to develop a love for stories and for learning. For 11 years, she taught in her alma mater school district in West Windsor, where she instructed a sixth-grade self-contained classroom, and courses in language arts, reading/literature, media literacy and storytelling. She also worked with special-needs children for one year at the Newgrange School in Trenton.

Storytelling Arts Inc., a nonprofit based in Roosevelt, has been helping teachers incorporate the use of storytelling into their classrooms since 1998.

Throughout her career as a public education teacher, Kosa wove storytelling into her classrooms. She participated in six intensive workshops with Susan Danoff, the founder and former executive director of Storytelling Arts.

When Kosa met Danoff, she already knew storytelling was a fun teaching device that helped relax her students, but she soon realized it could be used as a means to improve the quality of learning in the classroom.

Kosa found that her continued use of storytelling made presentations and lessons less boring for students of all ages. She also recognized the teaching device's effects on people's ability to process and retain information.

Stories not only help children remember because of their structure and sequencing, with a beginning, middle and end, but Kosa also believes they enhance a person's ability to create images of what they are learning in their minds, which helps with long-term memory.

To help others discover the benefits of storytelling, Storytelling Arts provides an instructional program to teachers with the help of 10 trained artists. Noting that the No. 1 fear in America is public speaking, Kosa said Storytelling Arts helps teachers overcome that fear to tell stories by finding a method of deliverance that works for them. For example, she said teachers are encouraged to use props, music and their other strong talents while using storytelling as a means to achieve the maximum amount of learning possible in any classroom.

Starting in September, Storytelling Arts will offer teachers workshops at the Cotsen Library, which is the children's library attached to Princeton University's Firestone Library in Princeton. The workshops are aligned with N.J. Core Curriculum Content Standards and provide innovative techniques for connecting storytelling to writing, movement, and visual arts literacy.

Funding from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation has provided scholarships since the program's inception and reduces program costs for interested teachers, according to Kosa.

After the training, Storytelling Arts continues to support the development of teachers/storytellers through follow-up workshops and mentoring programs.

Storytelling Arts also provides long-term projects in New Jersey for low-income children in urban schools and day care centers, teenage mothers, and young people in detention. In these programs, professional storytellers introduce students to the art of storytelling and cultivate a deep appreciation for learning and literature.

As students listen to, discuss and tell stories, they learn to connect to themselves, one another, and the world of ideas surrounding them. Storytelling Arts also believes that the stories help children cultivate their imagination, heighten their social awareness, and express themselves more clearly and articulately.

"The power of storytelling only begins by entertaining," Lisa Garwood, a music teacher at Cambridge Elementary School in South Brunswick, said. "It is also a safe, wonderful and beautiful way to explain, teach, honor, share, learn, enrich, relive, give hope and connect to others."

Since 1998, Storytelling Arts has collaborated with 50 institutions including preschools, elementary schools, junior high schools, detention centers, and schools for behaviorally disordered children. The nonprofit has worked with approximately 19,000 children in long-term programs throughout New Jersey.

In addition to institutional funding and funding from the Dodge Foundation, the nonprofit is also supported by the Epply Charitable Foundation, the Mary Owen Borden Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, and the Princeton Area Community Foundation.

In 2006, Storytelling Arts was awarded the Connie Strand Memorial Award from the New Jersey Juvenile Justice Commission for work at the Mercer County Youth Detention Center.

Although Danoff, who recently published a book for educators titled "The Golden Thread: Storytelling in Teaching and Learning," has turned the nonprofit over to Kosa, she continues working with Storytelling Arts as a consultant and freelance teaching artist.

Kosa said, "She has handed me a golden thread. Now I have to go out and tell the world how phenomenal it is. I've experienced it, and it gives me an authentic voice to represent it."

In her new position, Kosa aims to help change the perception of storytellers.

"They are not folk singers," she said. "People often associate storytelling with entertainers and folk singers."

For Kosa, storytellers are the key-holders reopening an ancient source of joy and potential.

Kosa earned her bachelor of arts in English language arts and literature from the University of Maryland at College Park, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa. She also earned her master of education in teaching from Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Currently, she is a member of the Roosevelt Public School (RPS) Board of Education and tells stories to the children at RPS, where her two children, Trevor, 8, and Annie, 3, attend school.

For more information visit www.storytellingarts.net or call Jaymie Kosa at (609) 915-0779.