Today we will be exploring the use of story for learning and teaching and we are very interested in finding out how you currently use story and what difference this makes to the student experience and their learning - particularly in the context of threshold concepts. Stories and narratives are very important to me and my educational work. They offer me a way of exploring and developing my own threshold concepts and I show the evolution of my thinking through my blogs which are an account of my unfolding story. My understandings of lifewide learning, learning ecologies, personal creativity, personal pedagogy and brokerage have all been grown from the stories of my own life, and the lives of family, friends, colleagues and students. I find it hard to believe in a theory of learning if I cannot apply it to my own life and circumstances. These are all threshold concepts for me - a teacher must first master a threshold concept for himself before he can explain and demonstrate it to others. They contain within them all the features of a threshold concept summarised on the right. I use my stories to communicate my understandings and the meanings I have developed to others - mostly other higher education teachers. I believe in open social learning which is based on the idea that 'we are the curriculum'. The #creativeHE course provides a good example of a socially constructed curriculum composed of stories, personal perspectives and created artefacts of those who are participantating. Similarly, Creative Academic Magazine is rich in the stories of the lives, experiences, insights and practices of the contributors | ‘Threshold Concepts’ may be considered to be “akin to passing through a.... “conceptual gateway” that opens up “previously inaccessible way[s] of thinking about something”(Meyer and Land). Transformative: Once understood, a threshold concept changes the way in which the student views the discipline. More ... Troublesome: Threshold concepts are likely to be troublesome for the student. Perkins [1999, 2006] has suggested that knowledge can be troublesome e.g. when it is counter-intuitive, alien or seemingly incoherent. More ... Irreversible: Given their transformative potential, threshold concepts are also likely to be irreversible, i.e. they are difficult to unlearn. More ... Integrative: Threshold concepts, once learned, are likely to bring together different aspects of the subject that previously did not appear, to the student, to be related. More ... Bounded: A threshold concept will probably delineate a particular conceptual space, serving a specific ......purpose. More ... Discursive: Meyer and Land [2] suggest that the crossing of a threshold will incorporate an enhanced and extended use of language. More ... Reconstitutive: "Understanding a threshold concept may entail a shift in learner subjectivity, which is implied through the transformative and discursive aspects already noted. Such reconstitution is, perhaps, more likely to be recognised initially by others, and also to take place over time (Smith)". More ... Liminality: Meyer and Land [4] have likened the crossing of the pedagogic threshold to a ‘rite of passage’ (drawing on the ethnographical studies of Gennep and of Turner in which a transitional or liminal space has to be traversed; “in short, there is no simple passage in learning from ‘easy’ to ‘difficult’; mastery of a threshold concept often involves messy journeys back, forth and across conceptual terrain. (Cousin [15])”. More ... SOURCE: http://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/~mflanaga/thresholds.html |
I remember reading the work of Maurice Boisot many years ago and for the first time appreciating that telling stories was an important way in which we made sense of complex situations and communicated our sense making to others. Narrative is rich in personal doings, and contextual and situated understandings, but the actual doings and other people's responses to those doings have been reflected upon and pieced together and related in a way that I know see as 'ecological thinking'. When we tell stories about our work as teachers we are creating a bridge between our hidden, tacit embodied knowledge and beliefs, and knowledge that we might find in a book describing principles and theories of the 'how and why' of teaching. Narratives reveal a lot about who we are and who we want to become. Personal narratives are the means we make greater sense of our lives - how the moments add up to something bigger and more significant than just a string of moments.
We can tell a story in a picture like the one I've created to animate this story. I use these sort of narrative pictures a lot in my 'teaching' as they turn words only into actions and doings that people can more readily relate to. They are an important feature of my teaching and a medium for my creativity. Over the years I have collaborated with illustrators and graphic facilitators to turn concepts and theories into visual stories. The drawings in this picture were made by Andres Ayerbe - who was at that time a talented graphic design student. I honour his talent by remixing his sketches and reusing them over and over again in different contexts and stories.(see my previous post)
We can tell a story in a picture like the one I've created to animate this story. I use these sort of narrative pictures a lot in my 'teaching' as they turn words only into actions and doings that people can more readily relate to. They are an important feature of my teaching and a medium for my creativity. Over the years I have collaborated with illustrators and graphic facilitators to turn concepts and theories into visual stories. The drawings in this picture were made by Andres Ayerbe - who was at that time a talented graphic design student. I honour his talent by remixing his sketches and reusing them over and over again in different contexts and stories.(see my previous post)
In my educational work with higher education faculty or students I try to involve people in telling their stories. I see my facilitation role as one of trying to make the invisible visible as this is the starting point for deeper and more meaningful conversations about learning that has personal significance. The work we did to develop the idea of lifewide learning in the SCEPTrE Centre at the University of Surrey, was all about encouraging and helping students tell their stories of what they had done and what they had learnt and achieved in all aspects of their life. By narrating their stories and reflecting on their experiences and what they had learnt they were able to draw out extraordinary insights into their development as a person. Through this process we were able to recognise their development and show them that the university cared about their learning and achievements beyond the academic curriculum. Students developed scrapbooks to document the artefacts of their informal experiences of learning and then told their stories - their storytelling was a powerful and effective way for them to reveal the meanings in their experiences. In some cases they made a short film to explain the meaning of their experiences.
I am currently exploring the idea of personal pedagogies with HE teachers. I tell my story of how I have come to be the teacher I am - it's a story of my life as this is our input to who we are. I then invite them to create a timeline and on it to reveal the situations and incidents in their life that have significantly influenced their beliefs, values and knowledge that underpins their pedagogical thinking. In this way I encourage them to tell their stories about how they have come to hold the views they have that influences their pedagogical practices. From this process we can appreciate better how we have come to be the person we are. Here are some examples from a recent staff development event I facilitated.
Two related themes that have emerged for me this week are caring and honouring. In telling a story about ourselves we are caring and honouring our own life experience. By providing a framework - like a timeline and a prompt like 'what has influenced your beliefs?' a person has enough of a scaffold to use their imagination and memories to make sense of their life and their beliefs and their practices as a teacher. In revealing these stories to each other we create the opportunity to appreciate, respect and care about colleagues in ways that we did not know before.
This is social learning at its best. This is 'teaching' through the sharing of stories that have powerful personal and collective meaning. They move us from the theory of how something might be accomplished, towards how practice is acually achieved in a particular context and more importantly 'WHY?' it is achieved by a particular person in a particular way in a particular context. Personal stories and how they shape our perceptions are at the heart of our ecologies for learning, creating and achieving. They are also the way we recognise and share our personal ecologies retrospectively.
This is social learning at its best. This is 'teaching' through the sharing of stories that have powerful personal and collective meaning. They move us from the theory of how something might be accomplished, towards how practice is acually achieved in a particular context and more importantly 'WHY?' it is achieved by a particular person in a particular way in a particular context. Personal stories and how they shape our perceptions are at the heart of our ecologies for learning, creating and achieving. They are also the way we recognise and share our personal ecologies retrospectively.
A RECENT STORY
Periodically, someone new comes into your life, and they start sharing their stories and suddenly new affordances open up. One such person is Gillian Judson who has been an active contributor during this weeks #creativeHE conversation. I invited Gillian to write an article for Creative Academic Magazine which she kindly did and in the article she drew my attention to
'Dance Your PhD'. I clicked the link and spent a whole evening watching many video clips on YouTube. Here is a playful idea for creating new meanings about quite abstract often scientific ideas using a medium for creative expression that involves story telling, dance, music and visual performance. They are also social creative artefacts in that the owners of the PhD involve others in their dance intepretations. I can't think of a better way of demonstrating the power of story telling in higher education learning. Here are a couple of examples.
Periodically, someone new comes into your life, and they start sharing their stories and suddenly new affordances open up. One such person is Gillian Judson who has been an active contributor during this weeks #creativeHE conversation. I invited Gillian to write an article for Creative Academic Magazine which she kindly did and in the article she drew my attention to
'Dance Your PhD'. I clicked the link and spent a whole evening watching many video clips on YouTube. Here is a playful idea for creating new meanings about quite abstract often scientific ideas using a medium for creative expression that involves story telling, dance, music and visual performance. They are also social creative artefacts in that the owners of the PhD involve others in their dance intepretations. I can't think of a better way of demonstrating the power of story telling in higher education learning. Here are a couple of examples.