Engaging Seminars: The Impact of Storytelling in Public Safety Education

This paper examines the important role of storytelling in higher education as a technique for engaging students in course content and applies its relationship to the experiential learning theory (ELT) in which learners are actively seeking knowledge through authentic application. Storytelling can be a particularly effective method when used during live online seminars in public safety education, since this particular program of study often relies on verbally communicating realistic and credible information. Sharing various examples of actual encounters can help students better prepare for these types of situations when they face them in their future careers. Incorporating evidence to support this philosophy will include two primary sources: research in which the authors will highlight key questions, responses, and their teaching practices, and secondary research that will validate the rationale for using this form of presentation style.