NARRATIVE LEARNING/LEARNINGNARRATIVES: STORYTELLING, EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING AND EDUCATION
Patrick Ryan, PhD, FEA, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Lecture for George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling, University of Glamorgan
Thursday, 29 May 2008
Abstract:Narrative has to do with the fundamental preoccupations of
education—with words, representations, ideas, forms, structures,
quantities, qualities, and judgments. It is, among other things,
an exercise in critical thinking. Our narratives are means through
which we imagine ourselves into the persons we become.
Richard L. Hopkins, Narrative Schooling, Experiential
Learningand the Transformation of American Education, 1994
For two centuries and longer, claims have often been made for the importance and effectiveness of storytelling in learning, and recent developments in the study of the mind provide further insight to why this is so. This lecture will explore theories of cognition, neurology and liminality and how these explain the use of storytelling in both formal and informal learning, particularly with regards to experiential education. Examples from recent applied storytelling projects taking the form of storytelling residencies in schools, libraries, sports clubs and other social institutions will be presented.
Linking Oral Narrative and Cognition—Explanations of Theory In the influential 1970s publication The Cool Web, a study on children’s reading, Barbara Hardy and Margaret Meek posited that narrative is a primary act of the mind(Hardy , Meek, 1977). This has since been supported by cognitive scientists, neurologists and those endeavoring to develop artificial intelligence. Prior to scientific acknowledgment that narrative is a key to human consciousness and identity, experiential educationalists and early librarian-storytellers recognized, through common sense and experience, the role of storytelling in human development. We think in stories both consciously and subconsciously, and do so from an early age throughout childhood, our teenage years, adulthood and well into our dotage.
As Piaget observed, the young toddler learning to talk speaks a baby-talk: the dog, the chair, daddy crawling on the floor looking for his keys or playing with the child, the cow the family observe in the field might all be called ‘bow-wow’ by the infant (Piaget, 1974). This is the beginning of thinking narratively: whether through instinctive deep syntactic structures as proposed by Chomsky (Chomsky, 2000) , or through observation and experience and interaction, the child has realized that sounds can be symbols representing, relating and communicating what is seen in the real world and also what is remembered or imagined in the mind. Perhaps the child sees the dog, the chair, the father, the cow all with four limbs touching the ground and communicates ‘bow-wow’ to make this observation or understanding, crowing about this discovery. This is the essence of narrative: aspects of reality are linked with associative memories and fantasies and put together to communicate an understanding of the world or of ourselves. Aspects of narrative do not stop, however, with this meaning-making: there is an important element of play. Most adults are not sober, dreary and pedantic, responding to the child’s utterances with, ‘No, that’s your father. No, no, that’s a cow.’ Rather, they join in the baby-talk and explain, ‘That’s your da-da, that’s a moo-moo.’
This process of function and fun, or heightened emotion continues. The primary school child is in an emotional state, if one asks what is wrong, one rarely gets a simple short answer. Usually something comes out like this: ‘It was my turn on the swing and Mary pushed me off and it’s her fault I hurt my knee tell her to get off I want my turn on the swing.’ The taciturn teenager, normally answering a parent’s or teacher’s queries with responses of ‘Dunno. Nothin’. No one. No where. Dunno, and so on’ will launch a volley of anecdotes if asked to do a simple task or requested to be back at a specific time, with ‘That’s not fair, last week you said I could do this, and you let my bother/sister/friend do that, and so and so’s parents let them stay out til…’ Even as adults, we use white lies, jokes, gossip and anecdotes to explain our short comings: narratives are used to explain ourselves to others and to understand ourselves. And everyone knows of relations and colleagues who reminisce and relate the same story over and over, sometimes entertainingly, sometimes not.
To begin to see how narrative and cognition work together, consider this riddle. If you solve it, it tells a story:
Two legs sat on three legs eating no legs. When four legs came and stole no legs
from three legs. Four legs ran away with no legs. So two legs picked up three
legs and threw three legs at four legs to make four legs drop no legs. So two legs
got no legs back.
(Work out the story—two legs is a person, three legs is a stool, no legs is a fish, four legs is a cat. Once you’ve worked out it, have some one repeat it again quickly, and see if you understand it..)
Most people, when they understand this riddle and become aware of what goes on in the mind to understand it, realize a visual understanding. But the mental visualization varies—for one it might be as a video, another as a comic strip, flip book, or story board, or a mural or large painting. Others get nothing visual, but imagine the narrative in an aural, kinesthetic, symbolic, or literal format. Everyone thinks in different ways, this fact having been explored and formulated by Howard Gardner’s theories of multiple intelligences (Gardner, 2006). Narrative can and does reveal these multiple intelligences; narrative, also, can be expressed by these various intelligences, and, correspondingly, in various media and art forms. What also happens, when asked to describe specific individuals or items in detail in this riddle, one finds descriptions often come from associated memories as well as from the imagination. The latter is, however, more often based on remembered experience or an imagined reality that was read about or heard of secondhand.
Physical, social and cultural environments affect and shape cognition—how and what we think---which in turn affects storytelling. In reciprocal fashion, the storytelling that we practice and/or experience affects how we think of, view, remember and experience those environments and all discourse. Cognitive science tries to locate mental processes such as linguistic patterns, memory, and comprehension. These cognitive processes, according to Monica Fludernik, ‘relate to human embodiedness in a natural environment and are essentially motivated by metaphors of embodiment…. Much of what happens cognitively when humans try to come to terms with new situations can be explained as relying on extrapolation from known situations’ (Fludernik, 1996, 17). This has bearing upon storytelling because, as Crane points out, ‘just as surely as discourse shapes bodily experience and social interactions shape the material structures of the brain, the embodied brain shapes discourse’ (Crane, 2001, 7).
Cognitive science recognizes that abstract, immaterial concepts such as thoughts and stories are metaphorical representations of material objects and processes, both in the world and in the brain. (Think here, again, of our toddler forming baby talk.) Mary Crane says
Cognitivist mental concepts seem to be ‘material’ in three ways: (1) they emerge
from and consist of neural matter of the brain; (2) they are shaped by perceptions
in the physical ‘reality’ and by the experience of living in the body; and (3) they
use metaphor to extend concepts derived from material experiences to immaterial
abstractions (Crane, 2001, 17)
According to novelist and philosopher Gianni Celati, the storyteller must be embedded in a socio-cultural physical reality, a context providing causality, not a reality especially constructed just for storytelling. Similarly, teaching and learning can only happen in a similarly embedded, physical, causal context. Causality initiates reasons for telling, and with understanding for the actions narrated in the story related to that socio-cultural, physical context. ‘Causality is the basis of storytelling, but it’s not a scheme; causality is something incredibly subtle in normal language. …..(W)hat you find is that there are people who are incredible story-tellers exactly because of their way of manipulating causality and what is called “reality”’ (Lumley, 1990, 45).
Consciously or subconsciously, awareness of causes for human actions and emotions in stories inform the act of telling, as does the event or reason for telling inform the teller’s comments, descriptions and expressions. They also inform or allow the listeners’ understanding. In cognitive terms, these causes arise from a combination of real and imagined experiences, both present in the current moment and held in memory. The storytelling triggers multiple associative memories that make, consciously and subconsciously a complexnexus of thoughts in which storytelling/listening experience resides, both in abstract terms but also in physical reality that is concurrently social, cultural and corporal.
Metacognition is necessary for all storytelling, since storytelling and the listener’s understanding of a story both require participants to think about their thinking, and because stories and storytelling consists of thoughts. Bruner stressed that
(i)t can never be a case that there is a ‘self’ independent of one’s cultural-historical
existence. It is usually claimed… that the self arises out of our capacity to reflect upon
our own acts, by the operation of ‘metacognition’. But what is strikingly plain in the
promising research on metacognition that has appeared in recent years…is that
metacognitive activity (self-monitoring and self-correction) is very unevenly distributed [and] varies according to cultural background….(Bruner, 1986, 67)
In understanding metacognition in storytelling, and, consequently, in learning and teaching, it helps to consider artificial intelligence theories looking to understand narratives and acts of narrating. Schema are stored memories, derived from actual experience or knowledge from experienced narratives (imagined works—oral, literary, and mediated) and other art forms (Rubins, 1995. 21-37). Schema structure thought as we respond to new situations and environments, helping to store these in memory through accommodation then assimilation as new schema. Schank refers to mental narrative structures assembled from various schema as ‘scripts’.
A script is a set of expectations about what will happen next in a well-understood
situation. In a sense, many situations in life have the people who participate in them
seemingly reading their roles in a kind of play… Life experience means quite often
knowing how to act and how others will act in given stereotypical situations. That
knowledge is called a script (Schank, 2000, 7)
Dawkins’s hypothesized memes, a concept which Zipes took to examine and reinterpret how fairy tales and other folklore enter both our culture and our individual persona, and memes could be considered a specialist type of script genre. These scripts are not only guiding our physical and social actions and reactions, but our emotional, imaginative and intellectual responses and actions, too. These are what provide our catalogue of building blocks for metaphor, simile and so on in our thinking (narrative and otherwise).
Traditional stories, oral or literary, as well as mediated narratives from classic or contemporary forms such as cinema and theatre, and those aspects of narrative conveyed in other arts, are considered in our society as sources of wisdom or, at the least, of culture as opposed to barbarism. ‘We take standard stories of our culture and interpret what happens to us in terms of such stories. In other words, often the stories we rely upon to help us reason are not even out own’ (Schank, 2000, 149). Successful storytellers are adept at choosing correct stories and para-performance elements to tell effectively and appropriately in the context. Managing scripts successfully suggests ‘wisdom often ascribed to those who can tell just the right story at the right moment and who often have a large number of stories to tell’ (Schank, 2000, 149).
Substitute the words ‘teacher’ or ‘learner’ for storyteller here and one can see that the ability to develop, maintain and use a wide variety of scripts and schema in an effective manner (that is, one arising from causality) would describe an effective, inspirational teacher—that is, a wise mentor—or a learner who is motivated, engaged, imaginative, and comprehending. To see further how cognitive and neurological theories link storytelling and stories with teaching and learning, one must consider physiological aspects of mind and body.
Demonstrations of Cognition in Oral Narrative Cognitive and neurological theories regarding schema and scripts rely on understanding these physiological aspects of mind and body relating to liminality or altered mental states. Associative thoughts are intrinsic in narrative thinking, and associative thoughts are integral to liminal states. The unconscious mind plays an enormous role in any storytelling, as well as any teaching and learning, since
it is unbelievably perceptive, and prodigal in supplying us with impressions and
associations. Certain peculiarities of the unconscious processes facilitate speed and
prodigality. The unconscious does not have to work out anything in detail either to
reach or express understanding. Unconscious understanding is immediate, intuitive.
In expressing understanding, the unconscious employs with words or images, whichever are more suitable for its purpose, without regard for consistency. Sometimes it eschews both, so that the only trace of its activity lies in the alteration of our feelings (Lesser, 1957, 196).
This action of the unconscious when listening to stories often takes place in an altered mental or, more precisely, liminal state. Liminality in story telling and listening has been referred to in various ways: as the storytelling experience by Wischner, as flow by Csikszentmihalyi, as a mild trance state or hypnogogic/storytelling trance state by Stallings. Sobol says this altered state is where ‘in the telling, the moment itself is expanded to encompass the imaginary time-space of the narrative (Sobol, 1999, 36).
As a subjective, psychological, physical, cultural and social experience liminality transforms ‘thisness’ into ‘thatness’. The inner world of the story happening within the imagination and mind become more real (‘that’ becomes ‘this’) than the outer world, the physical and socio-cultural reality of the teller and listeners (‘this’ becomes ‘that’). We have all experienced this: when lost in a book, not noticing the light fading or some one calling our name, or when so engrossed with a film that we are startled if some one gets up and walks in front of us or taps us on the shoulder. Liminality is an integrative, vital part of cognition, as through it chaos is ordered, schema and scripts applied, reordered, accommodated, and assimilated. Liminality thus ‘provides a charter for individual behavior and, by extension, for communal, social behavior’ (Masuyama, 1997, 181-2).
The unconscious mind consists of an inner language of metaphors, mental images and dream states, but is also a physical organ connected to a physical body and world: all physiological functions operate through and upon subconscious and conscious cognitive processes. So something intangible and abstract, such as narrative and para-performance elements, create and are created by physical, physiological expressions as well as socio-cultural and psychological ones. When listening to or reading a story in a liminal state, the listener’s heart rate slows down, temperature lowers and breathing slows (though these can be raised and brought down again through content and performance elements). Conversely, the teller’s physiology sees a raised heart rate, temperature, and breathing pattern. ‘A storyteller…obviously performs with great animation, but the meaning here is more specific. The animated state of performance is always a physiological and psychological reality’ (Stahl, 1980, 43). This can create an adrenalin buzz in the teller that lasts for a while after a performance and then results in a sharp and sudden drop in physiological symptoms, almost like a sudden drop in blood sugar.
I wish to make clear that for brevity and simplicity I am conflating these liminality terms for this paper—there are certainly nuances of difference between these, and, indeed, there is no one kind of liminal state. I have been asked how liminality relates to alpha and beta waves as expressed by drummers and those who meditate, and I don’t believe the storytelling trance is quite the same thing. These liminal states, what causes them, and what happens in them are complexities that practitioners, scholars and scientists are only beginning to explore and understand. Such physiological and psychological states, the conditions causing them, and the transitions and variances causing listeners or tellers to enter into and go out of liminal states, are also extent in the classroom situation. From lesson to lesson, day to day and season to season different mild altered mental states exist naturally or there is potential to make them happen, and it is up to the teacher to be aware of them, to provide opportunities for such states and to be receptive to them when they occur unexpectedly, and to understand that not all individuals (children or adults, learners or teachers) always enter liminal states at the same time or in the same way, if at all.