Submitted by dmazella on Tue, 06/24/2008 - 6:41pm.
As per Paul's suggestion, I'm going to follow up on one of the points Alice and I discussed, which I began to wonder about as soon as I saw it in print:
This to me is intuitively true, as I think about my own teaching experience. The beginning student is like the stranger who is new to an area and wants to know how to get to the highway. Should you give this person a range of options and possibilities, or the single easiest or most direct route?
My gut feeling is that good storytelling exhibits the pedagogical effectiveness and memorability it does because it is hierarchical, because it lands within what Paul was calling the range of medium-range inferences, because it anticipates and responds to students' demands for answers to the essential questions (what happened? who did it? why did it happen? where did it take place? etc.)
So I know this technique works, and why it works, in terms of accommodation of the message to the audience.
But (and forgive me if this seems obvious) what I don't see is how this kind of storytelling is inherently unhierarchical or pluralistic, which is a major theme characterizing much of the posting on this site. I don't mind the stratified nature of this kind of teaching, but it seems that others here do. So how does this circle get squared? Are hierarchized stories simply the precondition for independent inquiry?
In other words, storytelling is how we as teachers translate the materials and practices of a discipline into a form whereby the beginner can take them up for herself for her own independent inquiry, but it doesn't constitute the actual practices of the discipline, since practitioners don't need such frameworks. But I think this emphasis on the mediation of storytelling takes us further away from actual disciplinary practices, the conversations that take place among experts. Am I correct?
DM
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Narrative is determined not by a desire to narrate
but by a desire to exchange. (Roland Barthes, S/Z)
Should student grasp one thing or multiple things?
As per Paul's suggestion, I'm going to follow up on one of the points Alice and I discussed, which I began to wonder about as soon as I saw it in print:
Students need to feel that they are grasping one thing before they can grasp multiple things. This is why storytelling is so important, because it sets up hierarchies and priorities that are easily intelligible to even the beginning student.
This to me is intuitively true, as I think about my own teaching experience. The beginning student is like the stranger who is new to an area and wants to know how to get to the highway. Should you give this person a range of options and possibilities, or the single easiest or most direct route?
My gut feeling is that good storytelling exhibits the pedagogical effectiveness and memorability it does because it is hierarchical, because it lands within what Paul was calling the range of medium-range inferences, because it anticipates and responds to students' demands for answers to the essential questions (what happened? who did it? why did it happen? where did it take place? etc.)
So I know this technique works, and why it works, in terms of accommodation of the message to the audience.
But (and forgive me if this seems obvious) what I don't see is how this kind of storytelling is inherently unhierarchical or pluralistic, which is a major theme characterizing much of the posting on this site. I don't mind the stratified nature of this kind of teaching, but it seems that others here do. So how does this circle get squared? Are hierarchized stories simply the precondition for independent inquiry?
In other words, storytelling is how we as teachers translate the materials and practices of a discipline into a form whereby the beginner can take them up for herself for her own independent inquiry, but it doesn't constitute the actual practices of the discipline, since practitioners don't need such frameworks. But I think this emphasis on the mediation of storytelling takes us further away from actual disciplinary practices, the conversations that take place among experts. Am I correct?
DM