Congregating in the Academic Innovation Center’s Innovation Forum on November 6, Bryant University’s College of Arts and Sciences celebrated its annual Storytelling in Liberal Arts Conference. Through technology, data, and the performing arts, students illustrated how storytelling is used across disciplines to engage listeners and convey information.
“Storytelling is near and dear to my heart,” said College of Arts and Sciences Dean Veronica McComb, Ph.D., who welcomed attendees during the opening ceremony. “I appreciate this conference in the way in which it looks at the commonalities we have across storytelling and in the disciplines of the liberal arts, but that it also celebrates the differences we have in those disciplines.”
Through oral, written, visual, and digital storytelling, the November event sought to foster collaboration and a cross-pollination of ideas among subjects and assist students in enhancing their communication skills.
Emphasizing how images, words, numbers, and graphs contribute to a story’s strength, McComb challenged students to think about the ways in which the role of audience, narrative, and author weave through their story as well as others’.
Below are six takeaways from Bryant’s 2024 Storytelling in Liberal Arts Conference:
1. Data visualization offers interactive storytelling
Pie charts, bar graphs, line graphs, and maps of the United States were some of the many visual and interactive elements Ramesh Mohan Ph.D.’s students used in their data storytelling. The Mathematics and Economics professor, who spearheaded the conference, noted that the presentations focused on data-driven insights on socioeconomic issues — which included everything from the housing market to educational access to financial stability to social equity.
Highlighting various data points during their presentations, students were able to isolate data — either by region or population — in real time to help audience members understand the points they were making.
2. Storytelling influences thoughts, perceptions
Speaking about the pedagogy behind storytelling, Constanza Bartholomae, associate director of teaching support within Bryant’s Center for Teaching Excellence, shared that storytelling is how we make sense of the world, convey values, and connect with each other on a deep, emotional level. She added that storytelling can be a powerful educational tool for both faculty and students.
“For educators, storytelling is a fresh way to engage students, spark curiosity, and help them grasp complex ideas. For students, it makes learning more relatable, meaningful, and memorable by showing the real-world elements of what they’re studying,” said Bartholomae, emphasizing that storytelling is a transformative process that requires constant attention and thrives through interaction and reflection.
3. Delivery effects a listener’s response to content
Between Ashley Taylor Marin ’28 recounting the emotional process of dropping her older brother off to college and Michale Keif ’28 reflecting on connecting with his late grandfather through golf, the stories told by students in History, Literature, and the Arts Lecturer Joan Zaretti Ph.D.’s “Introduction to Arts and Creative Industries” course drew upon emotion, humor, tone, rhythm, movement, and narrative arc to connect with the audience.
“In this class specifically, we look at performing arts as something we all do daily. We all improvise, we all have conversations,” said Zaretti, who highlighted a Princeton University study, which revealed that neural pathways between a storyteller and listener mirror each other.
4. Visual tools help us structure our message
Students in Associate Professor of Legal Studies Katayoun Alidadi Ph.D.’s “Seminar in Politics and Law” course spoke to conference attendees about using situational mapping to tell stories about public policy issues regarding housing. While each student had their own topic, undergrads grouped up, mapped out their subject’s key issues on whiteboards, and found relationships between the different policies, which helped them conduct research and convey it in a digestible way.
Shaundra Hester ’25 — whose project is related to racial discrimination under the Section 8 housing program — noted that finding connections between issues helped her brainstorm different words that she could plug into research sites to locate articles related to Section 8.
5. Always keep the general reader or listener in mind
Some things in life are easy to explain, while others are not. Luckily, when it came to examining topics like international law versus transnational organized crime or using trade barriers to reduce foreign competition, students in Legal Studies Professor Andrea Boggio JSD’s “International Business Law” course used storytelling to make complex issues accessible to a lay audience.
Undergrads focused on providing background information on their topic, breaking down their subject matter into simple terms, highlighting the pros and cons related to their topic, focusing on the delivery of their data, and reiterating their main points at the end of their presentation.
6. Qualitative, quantitative research tell different — yet important — stories
Bringing five of his “Mixed Methods Research” course students to the front of Bryant’s Innovation Forum, Anthropology Professor Alex Perullo, Ph.D., shared how qualitative and quantitative research can aid the storytelling process.
Leticia Silva ’26 shared how qualitative research aims to gain an understanding of people’s experiences, perceptions, and motivations using non-numerical data; these methods include asking open-ended questions that provide deeper reflections and unexpected insights. Alternatively, Ryan Morley ’26 explained that numbers-based quantitative research can be acquired through surveys, analytical analysis, and experiments with control variables.
