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Delighted to have Paul's involvement in our conversation.  Like a lot his efforts to enage students in a variety of different ways, to get them to think through material by trying out different ways of doing it. 

The issue of whether "story" (or "explanation" or "construction") is or is not different from "facts," "concepts," etc is a point of conflict which (like all points of conflict) can be the grist for the development of new ways of thinking about things.  For an earlier exploration of this set of issues, see Science as Storytelling or Story Telling?  "Story telling" for me is what everyone does, scientists included.  It is creating stories/explanation/constructions to make sense of observations, where it is recognized that the particular one being told is one of many that could be told and is "context dependent" ie has been chosen to be told by a particular person or group of people for reasons that have to do with more than the observations (involves the "crack").  "Storytelling" for me is the deliberate transformation of a scientific story into some other form to make it more engaging for other people.  There is lots to be said for the latter as a pedagogical device but also some problems:

• It encourages people to make a sharp distinction between "reality" (or "science") and story/imagination that I don't think is  either accurate or desirable/useful.
• It encourages people to see things that may be quite different from themselves as having properties like themselves ("anthropomorphizing"). 
• It make serious trouble when one gets to studies of the brain, where it becomes clear that one cannot in fact distinguish "reality" from "construction."

How about asking people not to create "stories" that have to incorporate particular "facts" and "concepts" but instead to ask people to tell the story they have heard differently?  ie to account for the same observations in a different way?  And then to think about what difference it makes which way one tells the story?  This might provide many of the pedagogical advantages of the "storytelling" approach without some of the disadvantages?  Along these lines, I'd also be inclined not to contrast an "analytical" with a story approach.  The "analytical" is equally a story, but one that has been developed out of a preference for creating stories that can be widely shared despite personal idiosyncracies.  It is more "objective" in the sense of being motivated by "shared subjectivity."

Maybe we can all have our cake and eat it too?  Both story telling and storytelling?