Ethical Storytelling in Education: From Representation to Responsibility and Care

Written by Shishu Ranjan

Abstract 

This blog examines ethical storytelling in education, emphasising its role in shaping perceptions, policy, and systemic reform within India’s public education system. Drawing on ethical storytelling and values of Leadership For Equity, it critiques extractive, deficit-based, and tokenistic narratives that often marginalise the very communities they depict.

The blog highlights power dynamics in storytelling and illustrates how dominant narratives can distort complex realities, especially when we work in underdeveloped regions and with children from marginalised communities. It proposes a framework grounded in dignity, context, voice, and accountability, offering practical principles for educators and practitioners, using a decolonial perspective. Ultimately, it positions ethical storytelling as essential to advancing equity, amplifying authentic voices, and enabling meaningful system-level change.

Stories That Shape Systems

Storytelling has played a central role in human civilisation for more than a thousand years. It is part of the cultures and traditions to provide entertainment and information, whilst simultaneously fostering and disseminating cultural heritage and core values (National Geographic Society, 2025). Moreover, the majority of children in Indian society who live in joint families have grown up hearing stories from their grandparents, who used storytelling to inculcate moral, ethical, and religious values in line with their customs and traditions.

Similarly, in education, stories have a great influence on the character-building of citizens. Furthermore, storytelling often helps shape policy priorities, shapes public perception, and determines whose voices matter in conversations about reform. Across the public education system, narratives about students, teachers, and communities travel among policymakers and government systems–and sometimes, with greater impact, as Polletta (1998) suggests the role of narrative in the context of social movements in education.

For organisations working at the intersection of systems changes and equity, storytelling is not merely a communication tool. It is a form of bringing out the best practices in education and inspiring teachers and practitioners in the education sector. Moreover, it is also a form of power–like all forms of power–that demands responsibility of safeguarding the subject and presenting the complete picture of reality. Ethical storytelling, then, is not only about telling better stories; it is about telling stories in a better way.

What Is Ethical Storytelling?

Organisations, such as Resource Media, Neglected Tropical Disease NGO Network, Humanitarian Disaster Institute, Caritas, etc., have framed criteria for ethical storytelling. Based on these organisations, ethical storytelling can be interpreted as the practice of representing individuals, communities, and systems with integrity, dignity and contextual accuracy integrated with deep consent, safety, collaboration, and open-mindedness. This process involves moving beyond the surface-level narrative to the depths of reality and is a political act (Erwin, 2020). Most importantly, this process requires more than what is convenient, donor-friendly, government-pleasing, or emotionally compelling. Instead, ethical storytelling centres on stories that are truthful, respectful, and accountable to the subjects represented. The decolonial perspective on storytelling questions deep-rooted political and economic structures to deconstruct extractive and unequal social structures (González & Sánchez-Lasaballett, 2023). 

Therefore, it is fundamental to ask questions before storytellers and the stakeholders involved in producing stories.

First, who is the storyteller, what is their affiliation, and the philosophical background?

Second, whose story is being told, and who is being subjected to the story?

Third, who is benefiting out of the story, whether the storyteller, the subject or the funder, or someone else who is invisible from the larger picture?

This is similar to what Emmy Award-winning producer Lisa Valencia-Svensson raised in her keynote address to an event, with reference to documentary making. These questions are not limited to documentaries; they should be applied across forms of storytelling.

The Problem: When Stories Become Extractive

Despite good intentions, storytelling in education often takes the form of an extractive practice, when the story is produced in such a way that the subjects’ (such as students and teachers from marginalised communities) autonomy is taken away and presented as a mere passive object with no voice. Furthermore, the government school/education system is presented as a broken system, which is the only available option for marginalised communities. This erasure of autonomy has been criticised by scholars in decolonial and critical studies.

Many times, students from rural and government schools are frequently portrayed through the lens of deficit, such as a lack of resources, a lack of support, a lack of aspiration, etc., without focusing on the root cause of the prevalence of deficit (Barker, 2024). While these challenges exist as an objective reality, constant emphasis on deficits reduces individuals to problems rather than people, and is considered a ‘notion of coloniality’ (Wang et al., 2021). Additionally, constant portrayal of deficit often takes the form of biases and stereotyping (Gorski, 2012).

Tokenistic representation can be considered another form of extractive practice (Childress et al., 2024). We often see the news of success stories of someone from a marginalised community. Sometimes, these stories symbolise systemic change, risking the oversimplification of complex realities and hiding structural conditions that shape outcomes. This tokenistic representation may also lead to hero-centric framing. Because stories are often centred around an individual, in these cases, stories may position an NGO person, a leader, or a teacher as primary agents of change, while other stakeholders, such as communities, students and teachers, may be positioned as passive recipients.

Furthermore, narratives are sometimes decontextualised for impact, erasing the socio-political and cultural nuances, which may result in misrepresentation of the problem and the solution.

Power and Voice: Who Gets to Speak?

Ethical storytelling requires critical examination of power. Often, storytellers who hold power have a privileged position to create stories and the power to disseminate them. Comparably, the subject whose story is being told holds limited control in deciding what story to be told, how the story is to be narrated and how and where the story is to be disseminated. Equally, social and power relations also affect the creation and propagation of the story (Cunliffe, 2022, p. 4), not just the storyteller’s intent.

Foucault’s (1981) work reminds us that power and knowledge are deeply interlinked, where power determines what knowledge is considered legitimate and what to disseminate (p. 34). In the educational context, external agents legitimise and dominate voices and sometimes miss the lived experiences of the people whose story is being told.

In such contexts, ethical storytelling balances the approach. Ethical storytelling not just presents marginalised voices from the field, but also centres them in the story. Moreover, ethical storytelling recognises the voices of all stakeholders involved in the process of intervention. 

Towards Ethical Storytelling: Principles for Practice

Some organisations and collectives have laid down suggestions and guidelines for ethical storytelling in practice. For example, the Neglected Tropical Disease NGO Network suggests covering a story holistically by bringing diverse stories in each issue instead of just including one side of the scenario. Voluntary informed consent is non-negotiable, where the subject whose story is being covered should have the full power to decide on their story artefacts and can say ‘No’ anytime. Storytelling can also be used to deconstruct the power based on an exploitative structure, as decolonial and radical feminist scholars suggested story as a powerful tool against the colonial form of extractive research. This process engages in social and other forms of justice. Therefore, ethical storytelling is not optional; it is essential for organisations working for equity, equality, and social justice.

The Role of Practitioners and Organisations

There are great responsibilities lying with development professionals and organisations working in the education sector, as well as in other public sectors. When they engage in ethical storytelling, they should maintain a high standard, which requires multiple intentional practices such as reflecting on storytellers’ positionality, co-creating narratives with the subject and other stakeholders involved, institutionalising ethical guidelines and motivating everyone to adhere to, and most importantly, the capacity of each individual should be built for the responsible dissemination of stories.

From Stories to Ethics of Care

We consider ethical storytelling in public education to be ultimately about trust, responsibility and care of diverse voices from the field, which should be non-negotiable in order to safeguard children’s safety with utmost care and love. As the narrative influences policy and practice, it should offer a story for the purpose of advancing equity, dignity, and systemic change. It should be based on the ethics of care in the “deepest human sense”, what Noddings (1984) suggests in her book “Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education”.

References

1. Barker, A. J. (2024). Rural Education Re ducation Revitaliz vitalized: Inv ed: Investigating And Resolving Specific estigating And Resolving Specific Challenges In Rural Schools [Masters, University of Texas at El Paso]. https://scholarworks.utep.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5168&context=open_etd 

   
   

2. Childress, C., Nayyar, J., & Gibson, I. (2024). Tokenism and Its Long-Term Consequences: Evidence from the Literary Field. American Sociological Review, 89(1), 31–59. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224231214288 

   
   

3. Cunliffe, Z. (2022). Tell Me A St ell Me A Story: The Normativ y: The Normative Power of St ower of Storytelling ytelling [PhD, THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK]. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6218&context=gc_etds

   
   

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6. Foucault, M. (1981). Power / knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972 - 1977 (C. Gordon, Ed.). Pantheon Books.

   
   

7. González, Y., & Sánchez-Lasaballett, E. (2023). Storytelling, precarity and decolonizing practices. Globalizations, 22(7), 1276–1290. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2023.2248867

   
   

8. Gorski, P. C. (2012). Perceiving the Problem of Poverty and Schooling: Deconstructing the Class Stereotypes that Mis-Shape Education Practice and Policy. Equity & Excellence in Education, 45(2), 302–319. https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2012.666934

   
   

9. National Geographic Society. (2025, August 18). Storytelling and Cultural Traditions. National Geographic Society. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/storytelling-and-cultural-traditions

   
   

10. Noddings, N. (1984). Caring, a feminine approach to ethics & moral education. University of California Press.

    
    

11. Polletta, F. (1998). “It Was like a Fever ...” Narrative and Identity in Social Protest. Social Problems, 45(2), 137–159. https://doi.org/10.2307/3097241

    
    

12. Wang, S., Lang, N., Bunch, G. C., Basch, S., McHugh, S. R., Huitzilopochtli, S., & Callanan, M. (2021). Dismantling Persistent Deficit Narratives About the Language and Literacy of Culturally and Linguistically Minoritized Children and Youth: Counter-Possibilities. Frontiers in Education, 6, 641796. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.641796