Narratives in Teaching, Learning and Research

Narratives are a basic fundamental human capacity and the role of narratives in education clearly merits our attention.  Narrative is an extended language configured in a way that embodies life.  It has a rhythm springing from the patterns of human life and interaction. There is a structural symmetry between the content and human existence. It helps to remember, that knowledge has been gained within the context of someone’s life and as a product of that person’s inquiry.  In focusing on narratives in the framework of education we can explore on how to build it into the curriculum and make it an integral part of the teaching and learning experience (McEwan, 1995).
 

There are two types of narrative structures.  The first is a summation of human consciousness, which relates to the growth of knowledge or the discovery of ideas gathered through the deployment of human projects and practices.  The other is an individual consciousness, which are stories of an individual’s educational growth and development.  Throughout our lives we tend to naturally create narratives to give coherence and meaning to the whole lived experience (Bruner, 1990).  These narratives of lived experiences represent constructed knowledge, not just the conveyance of information.  Narratives allow us to put ideas into our own words, so we can make meaning of them.  As we begin to learn we are forming our own unique narratives. 

 

Narratives give us a way of expressing our ways of knowing by helping to organize and communicate our own personal experiences. If we start to understand that the central focus of narrative is to create human meaning making and formation of identity, then we can grasp the significance of narrative in education.  With this in mind, narratives can play a vital role in helping to construct the future of the curriculum, the process of learning and ways to inform the practice of teaching (McEwan, 1995).

 

Narrative Pedagogy

The work of Richard Hopkins (1994) is a good starting place to when considering narrative pedagogy.   In Hopkins’s book, Narrative schooling: Experiential learning and the transformation of American education, he proposes a narrative schooling grounded in the philosophy of John Dewey.  Dewey stated the that education is a continuing restructuring of the learner’s experience with the process taking into account personal meaning and social context.  Basically, the content being presented needs to connect with the learner’s prior experience and the learner must have opportunities to actively engage with the content based on their own personal lived experience (Dewey, 1938).  Hopkins enhances Dewey’s ideas by adding the narrative process through which the learner demonstrates meaning of their experiences and content.  He writes, “Narrative is the indispensable process through which emplotment and meaning attribution flow…” (p. 10).

 

One educational arena that has explored narrative pedagogy is the field of nursing.  Diekelmann (2003) discovered over the course of a 15-year study with teachers, students and clinicians that how nursing practice is being learned is as important as what is being learned.  She found the use of narrative pedagogy, in which teachers and students share and interpret their lived experiences to gather collective wisdom in order to address existing challenges, was an effective practice.  Bringing together both teachers and students to learn from each other’s perspectives was useful in this educational environment.  She found when multi-perspective thinking is enacted, new possibilities for teaching and learning happen in both the classroom and in clinical situations.

 

There were two themes that emerged from this study, the first is “Thinking as Questioning: Preserving Perspectival Openness” and, the second is “Practicing Thinking: Preserving Fallibility and Uncertainty.” In the first theme, students were not asked to specifically answer questions, but to persistently explore the meaning and significance of the practice.  They were to explore and expose the underlying assumptions embedded in the experience.  Through this exploration the teachers and students collaborate in new ways that preserve perspectival openness.  In the second theme, thinking shifts from being a means to an end into cycles of interpretation.  In this situation, uncertainty and fallibility are preserved.  Students are not “told”, but “guided” into thinking and learning difference content and practices.  Through sharing of various viewpoints about how to solve a problem, students think through a situation and go beyond the problem to become deeper thinkers.  This helps students learn the importance of generating many perspectives in order to understand a situation and see the complexity and uncertainty of each situation.  By using narrative pedagogy to help students think differently, profoundly, and perhaps collaboratively they create a deeper meaning and understanding of the situation. This assists them in being able to tell their story or achieve the learning outcomes of the experience.

 

Traditional storytelling and narratives have proven to be a fundamental structure of human meaning making.  The narrative gives use an epistemological perspective that we can understand and relate to on many levels.  As an example, which is easier to remember a list of facts or those facts woven into a story that ties them together for deep meaning? To go even further, which is more intriguing or engaging for the listener or learner, the list or the story?

 

To continue along this line of thinking, the next section discusses the use of digital storytelling for academic and personal growth in learners.