GIVING BACK THROUGH STORYTELLING: STORYFEST COMMUNITY IMPACT

PEKAN, 6 August 2026 – When the Centre for Modern Languages (CML) at Universiti Malaysia Pahang Al-Sultan Abdullah (UMPSA) signed on for a second year of StoryFest, it was not just about running another storytelling competition. For CML, the programme has become one of its clearest examples of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in action, taking language and communication expertise that usually lives inside a lecture hall and putting it to work for secondary school students who might otherwise never get the chance to build those skills. Carried out under the Social Innovation and Community Knowledge Transfer Grant (CDU250134), StoryFest is CML's way of proving that a university's job does not end at its own gates.

Behind the scenes, that commitment showed up as three weeks of after-hours and weekend work from CML's own instructors: Hamizah binti Zahari, Khairul Amri bin Abdul Aziz, Farah Liyana binti Ahmad A'azmey, Nor Suhardiliana binti Sahar, Shamsul bin Harbi, Abdul Jalil bin Abdul Rahim and Wan Noor Farah binti Wan Shamsuddin. Rather than simply lecturing, the team sat with students, ran ice-breaking sessions to loosen up nervous first-timers up, and coached them one by one on voice, expression and how to hold an audience's attention. It is the kind of unglamorous, hands-on work that rarely makes headlines but is exactly where real skills transfer happens. This would not have been possible without the brilliant work of the module developers: Abdul Jalil bin Abdul Rahim, Wan Noor Farah binti Wan Shamsuddin, Nur Anisnabila binti Dianah, Nur Syafawati binti Sabuan, Marziah binti Ramli, and Arulselvi Uthayakumaran, with the support of the programme coordinators, Alia Najaa Md Noor and Aisyah Hanum Abu Bakar.

The reach of that effort is easy to underestimate until you see the numbers: 32 students from 16 secondary schools across Pekan, many of whom had never set foot on a university campus before taking part in the programme. For CML, that is the point. Community engagement only counts for something if it actually reaches the people who need it most, and rural and semi-rural secondary schools in Pekan are exactly the kind of community StoryFest was designed to serve.

Associate Professor Dr Zuraina binti Ali, Dean of CML, said the programme reflects what the Centre hopes to stand for beyond its regular academic offerings. "Our instructors do not just teach language in the classroom. They carry that expertise out into the community, and StoryFest is the proof of that," she said, adding that watching students who started out shy find the confidence to perform on stage was, for her, the clearest measure of the programme's success. Associate Professor Dr Nik Aloesnita Nik Mohd Alwi, Project Leader for the grant, echoed these sentiments, noting that the collaboration with Pekan Public Library has allowed CML to extend its knowledge transfer efforts well beyond the university's own students.

With StoryFest now in its second consecutive year, CML says it has no plans to slow down. Plans are already underway to expand the programme's reach to more schools in future editions, and the Centre is treating this year's success as a foundation rather than a finish line. For the instructors who spent their evenings coaching nervous teenagers into confident storytellers, and for the students who found their voice along the way, StoryFest has become a small but meaningful reminder of what a university can give back to the town it calls home.

Prepared by: Wan Noor Farah Wan Shamsuddin and Aisyah Hanum Abu Bakar