This past weekend, ivoh’s Restorative Narrative Fellows met for dinner and a day-long dialogue and training workshop at the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute. We held the event at Mizzou because the fellows’ story coach, Jacqui Banaszynski, teaches there and also because the university served as a welcoming learning environment for the fellows.
Learning is at the center of the fellowship; we want the fellows to learn more about the Restorative Narrative genre and strengthen their skills as storytellers throughout the course of the fellowship. Additionally, with the fellows’ help, we want to get a better sense of the possibilities and pitfalls of this genre so that we can develop related training and curricula and offer more media practitioners the opportunity to tell these stories.
While at Mizzou, six professors joined us for lunch and shared thoughts about what it means to tell stories of resilience, renewal, and recovery. In talking with them and the fellows, we developed new insights about the key elements of Restorative Narrative.
We will continue our exploration of the Restorative Narrative genre with the fellows and will post findings on ivoh.org in the coming months. We hope you’ll join us for our annual media summit in June, where the fellows will present their work and share what they’ve learned about this genre.