Storywalks

Turning Pathways into Performances: Storywalks

A conversation between Kerri-Lee Funk and Dr. Kari-Lynn Winters

Co-authors: Julianne Burgess, Lindsay Detta, Joe Barrett and Jolanta Oko

What happens when we stop treating stories as something to sit and read, and instead step inside them?

For Drs. Kari-Lynn Winters, Joe Barrett, Julianne Burgess and their research team at Brock University, Storywalks™ are more than literacy tools. They are immersive, community-driven experiences that transform everyday spaces such as schoolyards, malls, beaches, and festivals, into living stages where students become performers, dancers, directors, and changemakers.

Instead of static pages in books, the Storywalk™ approach invites movement, drama, and dance to drive the storytelling. Students don’t just read the story, but they embody it through gesture, expression, and physical exploration of the setting. In this model, the path becomes the stage.

As Winters asks: “What happens when we treat the natural or outdoor world as a stage?”

In projects across locations like Grenada and Niagara, students design and lead Storywalks™ for younger peers; guide families and community members through interactive storytelling; and perform scenes using physical activity, drama, and dance. Older students often take on leadership roles by creating the experience, choreographing moments, and facilitating participation.

Through this process, students:

Use drama to interpret character, conflict, and emotion;
Incorporate dance and physical activities to express ideas beyond words;
Lead audiences through interactive, embodied storytelling; and
Reimagine stories in ways that reflect their identities and communities.

This isn’t just performance–it is agency! Students begin to see themselves as artists and leaders who can shape narratives, challenge perspectives, and bring people together.

Public spaces are reimagined:

A schoolyard becomes a theatre.
A festival becomes a storytelling journey.
A mall becomes a performance space.

A Cross-Curricular, Embodied Approach

Storywalks™ naturally support multiple subject areas, but what makes them unique is their embodied learning approach.

Literacy becomes active, as students interpret and physically respond to text.
Drama invites role-play, improvisation, and creative expression.
Dance offers another language for storytelling: one rooted in the body.
Physical Education is integrated through physical activity, pathways, and spatial awareness.
Visual Arts enhance the environment through design and installation.

This integration allows students to think and communicate in multiple ways: physically, verbally, visually, and creatively. It also supports cross-cultural learning and translanguaging practices, where students draw on their own languages and experiences to shape the story.

Incorporating the Voices of Marginalized Students

Here, the voices of marginalized authors are not simply included—they are encouraged and brought to life! Through the Storywalk™ experience, texts by diverse and underrepresented authors move beyond the page and into the language, bodies, voices, and imaginations of participants. As families and students move from panel to panel, they affirm identities, broaden perspectives, and explore local storytelling and movement traditions. Along the way, communities encounter stories that reflect a rich range of cultural identities, languages, and lived experiences—stories that might otherwise be overlooked in traditional literacy spaces.

Building Community Through Shared Experience

At its core, the Storywalk™ model is about connection through shared movement and collective storytelling.

In Grenada, for example, students led Storywalks™ for peers, families, and community members, guiding them through performances that unfolded along the path. Drama and dance became tools for bringing people together and also transforming passive audiences into active participants.

Students become the catalysts through inviting others into the story, creating inclusive spaces, and using performance to build empathy and understanding.

Getting Started in Your Classroom

You don’t need a formal stage to begin. A Storywalk™ can take place in a schoolyard, hallway, or community space, and it can be as simple or complex as you choose.

To center movement and creation, try:

Adding drama prompts (“Bring this page to life with your body”).
Incorporating dance elements and physical activity to represent key ideas.
Assigning students as performers, directors, or choreographers.
Inviting participants to respond physically to the story.
Encouraging students to adapt or rewrite stories to reflect their voices and languages.

As their work demonstrates, any pathway can become a site for artistic exploration and meaningful change.

Centering Respect Within Communities

Storywalks™ invite participants to step inside stories—but not to step over them. As participants move through each Storywalk™, they are encouraged to listen closely—to the story, to one another, and to the cultures and communities from which the stories emerge.

This work begins–as with all arts-based projects–by creating safe spaces and building relationships rooted in mutual respect and trust. From the outset, movement, drama, and dance are framed through the Ontario Arts Curriculum’s Critical Analysis Process (2009) as ways of representing, interpreting, and expressing meaning—not imitating identity. When engaging in dramatic play with a text whose main characters may not reflect the identities of the participants, thoughtful role choices are made to avoid appropriation of the voices or culture of the people represented in the work.

The focus remains on understanding, appreciating, and connecting—engaging deeply with stories while honouring the voices and cultures at their heart.

The Big Idea

Storywalks™ challenge the idea that reading must be quiet and stationary. Instead, they offer a dynamic, embodied alternative where stories are lived, expressed, and shared through movement.

In this space, students don’t just follow a path.
They create it, perform it, and transform it.

Contributors to the StoryWalk™ Project include Dr. Kari-Lynn Winters, Dr. Joe Barrett, Dr. Peter Vietgen, Dr. Julianne Burgess, along with graduate students Lindsay Detta and Jolanta Oko.

For more information, please visit the Storywalk™ website: https://www.kariwinters.com/story-walks

Ontario Ministry of Education. (2009). The Ontario curriculum, grades 1–8: The arts.

https://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/arts.html

Dr. Kari-Lynn Winters is a Full Professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University, an award-winning Canadian children’s author, and an accomplished playwright and performer. She teaches drama-in-education, dance-in-education, and language arts to teacher candidates, integrating arts-based and embodied approaches to literacy and learning.

Dr. Winters holds degrees from the University of British Columbia, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, Brock University, and the National Theatre School. Her interdisciplinary scholarship bridges literacy education and the arts, with research spanning playbuilding, STEAM education, refugee and immigrant education, Indigenous ways of knowing, resilience and mental wellness, equitable and inclusive education, body image, embodied pedagogies, children’s literature, drama, multimodal literacies, and community-engaged initiatives such as Storywalks™.

Joe Barrett, EdD, is a Full Professor in the Faculty of Education. His research and service duties are oriented around school health policy and health and physical education pedagogy. Dr. Barrett, an FOE Award for Teaching Excellence Recipient(2022), teaches a number of elementary and secondary B.Ed. courses focused upon physical and health education curriculum, instruction, and policy as well as graduate M.Ed. courses focused upon physical and health education policy and curricula. In service to the field, he has served as the Ontario representative on the Physical and Health Education (PHE) Canada Board of Directors, as Co-Chair and Chair of the PHE Canada Research Council, and as Co-Chair of the PHE Canada National Research Forum.

Dr. Julianne Burgess is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Education at Western University, and an Adjunct Professor of Education at Brock University in Canada. Her research interests include early literacies, arts-driven translanguaging, creative and decolonizing pedagogies and methodologies, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Before pursuing her PhD, she taught English to adult newcomers for 25 years in community and post-secondary settings.

Lindsay Detta is a recent Master of Education graduate from Brock University. Her research focuses on drama integration and Outdoor learning through outdoor arts programming . As an educator and artist, she hopes to curate resources that help educators feel confident in teaching both the Arts and in outdoor environments.