About The Course

• What makes a story work?
• Can words shift the world? 
• What inner shift is asked of us to help this happen?

This full time, 12 week training in the art and craft of storytelling aims to prepare you to carry the spoken word and a lively imagination into your communities and places of work. Whether you wish through sharing stories to entertain, educate, counsel, inspire or advocate change; whether the stage, fire side, classroom, board room, or the bedside of a dying person is the context for your telling, this is our flagship training to develop a way of storytelling unique to your own voice and calling. Join us on a journey to light up your creativity and, through the surprising perspectives that this work offers, discover new aspects of who you are. This journey, both playful and profound, opens a path of development and transformation guided by humanity’s great shifters and shapers – Stories.

This course is being offered through Emerson College, led by Roi Gal-Or, co-founder of the International School Of Storytelling, and Karmit Even-Zur, together with a host of guest teachers.

We are delighted once again to be able to accept students from outside the EU onto the course.

For the 3rd year in a row, Storytelling Beyond Words is happy to offer one FULL tuition bursary spot. This bursary was made available through generous donations made on the SBW 2023 graduation weekend fundraiser.

If you are seeking to develop your storytelling skills and vision in service of your community but are not in a financial position to attend our course we encourage you to make an application,stating in the bursary forms that you are applying for the full bursary.

The full bursary will be given after a selection process to the most suitable person with priority based on:

Financial necessity – income based, underprivileged / disadvantaged background, demonstration of current community involvement to which you wish to bring the storytelling work to.

Application deadline for the full bursary – 1st December 2023.

Applicants will be notified by the 15th December.

Would you like to experience what it feels like to take part in the course?

Long before television was ever imagined storytellers and bards, prophets and poets were called upon to tell their visions and, through a live encounter, provide images that could direct, entertain, provoke, heal and reconcile the communities in which they worked. As a storyteller any story that you craft will in turn craft you to be a fit instrument for its telling. We are, in fact, made of stories, some of which serve our individual and collective endeavours, others binding us to outmoded images. Imagination, therefore, will be our key to the invisible realm from which all stories and everything new and possible can be born. Coupled with clear intention, this essential human faculty will help us connect to those creative forces which are ever available to us. The future is shaped, for good or ill, by the stories we believe and follow.

When an old story cracks and falls apart we know a new one is emerging. The story of our time calls for heightened awareness of themes such as the relationship between outer world and inner experience, and the dynamics between the feminine and masculine principles. ‘Listen to life’s movement’, it says… ‘where it wants to flow, then risk following its currents’. The oral tradition is humming with fine and foolish wisdoms, and we invite you to join our enquiry into how what is sounding there can help the birthing of the new paradigm so much needed in our times.

As the pace of modern life accelerates, luring us away from the rhythms and patterns of nature, we intend in this course to slow down and attune to the heartbeat of the earth and open our five and twenty senses to the wonder of it. From this place of presence and connection a new language can arise. The art of deep listening is the foundation for the initiation of the storyteller, and as we practice it we will begin to develop ways to ‘speak into action’ the changes we wish for when faced by 21st century challenges.

Combining contemporary social entrepreneurial principles and skills with the repertoire of stories that you collect and shape during our time together you will be invited to create a research project on a personal, social or environmental theme (whatever is close to your heart) that can be taken into the world and engage the people around you. As the search for healthy social awareness is integral to the storyteller’s role, the honing of the required perception and skills will be a part of our practice. We, facilitators of the course, will strive to create a space in which we can all work and play together in freedom, sharing responsibility with you, our fellow learning practitioners.

In our work we mean to cultivate truthful, mindful and courageous speaking, sharing our passions, questions, vulnerabilities and aspirations. Walking this path you will be encouraged to align with your inner strengths and with the quest you brought with you into the world, remembering, of course, to have fun along the way.

At the end of each course we hold a festive End of Course Celebration where our graduates share the fruits of their explorations of personal and global current themes, through storytelling and song, social happenings, discussions, and mini-workshops. 

Click on the images below to view our Graduation Day programmes.