Occasionally, a classroom stops feeling like a classroom.
With a cohort of business students, I enter our regular classroom, now transformed by a single visual. An image of a large aircraft is projected on to the front wall. Students dressed as airline crew guide us to our seats and calmly take us through safety procedures. Seatbelts are demonstrated and fastened. Emergency exits are indicated. We are instructed to prepare for take-off.
Suddenly the lights cut out. The aircraft on the screen lurches. The sound shifts: turbulence, alarms, cries of panic. A voice cuts through the darkness: “Brace. Brace. Brace.” The students drop into the brace position.
Only then does the story behind the simulation begin. A group of international students talk about the catastrophic consequences of leadership failure and a toxic culture for a global organisation.
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This is a postgraduate human resource (HR) management classroom focused on leadership, organisational culture, ethics and people management. When these students tell stories, something shifts in the room. Meaning rests not on language or theoretical fluency but on what is made visible through sound, image and emotion.
Why storytelling supports inclusion across diverse classrooms
The classroom exercise described here is part of an HR management assessment package. The presentation task is designed to do one thing: surface the human consequences of HR practices. Students select a real-world organisation and tell a story to illustrate the impact of leadership decisions and organisational culture, particularly where safety, dignity or inclusion has failed.
The task changes what counts as a “strong” contribution in the classroom. Students are not rewarded for language. Instead, the task requires them to make impact felt through elements such as sound, visuals and pacing.
Storytelling is powerful in diverse classrooms, and research helps explain why. Rather than focusing on individual comprehension, shared stories enable groups to make meaning together in real time. Listeners begin to align in how they interpret events, even without shared language or cultural reference points.
Meaning travels through emotion, imagery, pacing, silence and sound.
When voice emerges: belonging and participation in practice
A moment in class crystallised the value of storytelling for me. A group of students were engaged but they struggled with spoken English and were hesitant to contribute to class. As the storytelling assessment approached, the concern was not their insight but whether the format would allow that insight to emerge.
Rather than changing the assessment, I shared a simple storytelling checklist that emphasised structure – a strong opening, a clear human dilemma at the centre and a purposeful ending – alongside explicit inspiration for communicating meaning through visuals, video, metaphor, sound and pacing rather than language alone.
On presentation day, the group told a moving story grounded in a global extractive firm where one student’s family worked. What stood out was not linguistic fluency but clarity of meaning. Their story allowed a complex organisational problem of unsafe work conditions to unfold, with non-verbal elements carrying the ethical and human weight of the case.
This group delivered one of the most compelling presentations I have ever seen. The room was transfixed.
Practical steps for designing inclusive storytelling assessments
1. Start early with low-stakes storytelling
In week one, students introduce a peer using a simple drawing and one distinctive detail. This brief, relational exercise offers a low-risk entry into storytelling.
2. Break storytelling into learnable steps
A short storytelling presentation checklist supports students who feel unsure where to begin.
- Opening: use a strong hook. Students are coached to draw the audience in using rhetorical questions, compelling statistics, short quotes, news events or invitations to imagine a scene.
- Middle: use storytelling tools. For the body of their presentation, students are encouraged to use metaphor, props (such as a leaking bucket), visuals, video, sound, silence, movement, dress or analogy to carry meaning where language struggles.
- Closing: leave one idea that lingers. Students finish with a single takeaway, recommendation or quote, or return to the opening question.
3. Model what inclusive storytelling looks like
Before I had student exemplars, I used video clips that broke down presentation techniques from well-known talks – including a clip that deconstructs how Steve Jobs structured his delivery – to give students a starting point. The emphasis is on how stories can be built. These examples reassure students that storytelling is a learnable skill, not an innate talent tied to accent, grammar or confidence.
4. Encourage multiple modes of expression
Non-verbal elements make storytelling an inclusive exercise. Video, props, sound, silence, humour and visual metaphor reduce pressure on language skills for students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Multiple modes can help express insight, knowledge and emotion effectively.
5. Coach storytelling explicitly and early
Early in the semester, dedicate time to coaching storytelling explicitly. This begins with helping students to brainstorm ideas and to clarify the stakes (often human) they want to surface.
6. Build a library of student exemplars
With permission, record or archive strong student presentations. This becomes a powerful inclusion tool and a visible signal that storytelling excellence is not tied to accent, grammar or confidence.
Why empathy is the bridge to inclusion
By stimulating empathy, stories collapse distance between cultures, accents and lived experiences.
Coached in storytelling skills, students who might hesitate in traditional assessment formats find ways to connect, persuade and be understood.
Natalie Cummins is a lecturer in the Business School at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
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