“How can I make my teaching more effective?”
“How can I help my children to have more fun in the classroom? (Inner voice: Even I am so bored of all these topics I teach. It would be so nice to find a magic potion! )”
“How can I create a more creative, enjoyable, playful learning environment? What are the tools I can learn and apply?”
Şeyda has started her professional life as a primary school teacher and she was asking these -and more- questions already in her second year of teaching. The reality wasn’t matching her dreams. These questions and the discomfort that she was feeling were the beginning of a new story.
One day she discovered that when she tells personal stories, which are related to the curriculum, to her kids, they listen more eagerly. They learn with happy faces and most importantly they ask more questions. So she started to search more about stories and found Storytelling. Yes! There was actually a magical potion as Germanneurobiologist and author Gerald Hüther mentioned in his article!
“Imagine that there was a magic potion which gets your child to sit still and listen attentively, which at the same time gives wings to his or her imagination and extends vocabulary, which additionally develops the capacity to put oneself in another person’s place and share their feelings, which also strengthens your child’s trust and allows him or her to look into the future with courage and confidence. Such a magic potion does, indeed, exist: it is the fairy tales, which we tell or read to our children. Story lessons are the highest form of teaching.”
She took several storytelling workshops, finished a 2years program for professional storytellers and specialized in Applied Storytelling. She was a member of a storytelling group, which organized story nights for grownups. More she learned, she wanted to share this knowledge with fellow teachers, educators and parents. In 2015 she became one of the founders of Turkey’s first storytelling center - Seiba International Storytelling Center -
Since then she is working as storyteller, workshop leader and designs workshops and long-term storytelling programs for teachers. Her aim is to help other teachers who are in search like her to improve their teaching skills by the help of storytelling.
Some years ago she fell in love and moved to Athens and nowadays she is discovering herself as a mother of a toddler.
