Narrative

Please excuse me while I post notes to myself. This idea has been on my mind and I have to get it down in text where I will find it again, but if my Erudite Readers might weigh in on the topic, that would be helpful, otherwise, I will have to email you to ask you about this. So, Erudite Reader, what do you think of the power of narrative?

It is clear that telling stories is how human beings make sense of the world. We create narratives to make sense of patterns and to remember important things about the world and about ourselves. So if narrative is a natural human way to learn, how can we use this powerful predisposition? It seems to me that we need to include the idea of narrative at several levels of learning. At the highest meta-level, there are the stories we tell about ourselves to create our identities as teachers and as students. Okay, we do that spontaneously anyway cuz we love to tell stories about ourselves. But at a more abstract level, curriculum is sort of a narrative of a discipline. Thus, the order in which we take a series of courses is a kind of narrative. Within a course, the order of topics is a kind of narrative about the course content, and then within each lecture there is a narrative that is the story of the lecture.

We hate it when a narrative is incoherent or boring. We hate it because it is confusing. When I go to a lecture that is jumping all over the place, I find it very very hard to learn that content because I have no way to make a pattern out of it. A good lecture has a narrative line to it that will hold all the details together for me. Because, as a novice, these are all new stories for me, it is really important that these stories make sense! The exam is a time for me to tell the story back to the professor to see if I learned the story. As a student, I realize that the order of the lecture is also a really important narrative line for me. In a few of my classes, there have been several different lecturers, and the topics have been unrelated to each other. I find it very confusing to identify themes and keep the narrative straight when on Wednesday we hear about 19 century dance traditions, Thursday we learn about the Irish harp tradition in the 18th century, and the following Wednesday we hear about the 20th century Irish piano tradition. I closed my notebook today after hearing about Ceili Bands and vamping pianos, and I thought to myself: I wish I had a narrative. This class feels like a bulleted list, and I would very much like to have a paragraph. I mean, I know bulleted lists are clear, but it seems that it predisposes one to memorize facts as discrete units. If the course had a narrative flow, then one could more easily make connections and create an analytical synthesis of the ideas that might create a coherent whole.

In my Folklore class, when the teacher is just lecturing off her bulleted list, there is a lot of background noise in the slightly disengaged room. However, all these apparently disengaged students are utterly silent, motionless, and utterly focused when stops to tell a story. The change in the room is tangible! I wonder very much, if one spoke to these students a year from now. if they will remember the stories or the content of the course? I'm betting on the stories.

I remember Robin Lightner said that there was a chapter in the pscyh text that she uses which seems like a bulleted list of topics. I think she said (correct me if I am remembering this wrong, Robin) that students had a hard time remembering the stuff from this chapter.

I think that when I do my next course design, and I will be redesigning every course I teach, you can bet on that, I will think very much about narrative at the curriculum level, the course level, and the lecture level. Of course, the next sticky question is, how do I assess if this makes a difference or not, but I will leave that for another package of Digestive Biscuits.