Jennifer Moon's book Using Story shows how story is a complex social and communicative phenomenon with multiple conditions, purposes, and effects. While explaining the use of story in higher education, she touches on the characteristics of story that I believe are useful when considering it as a professional development tool. I’ll highlight six of those characteristics and add some of my own thoughts.
One, stories are an implicit and connotative form of communication.
Certain elements of the story are difficult to put into language; they are contextual
and deal with ideas manifest in specific and concrete situation. As a result,
important elements of the story are conveyed symbolically. Description in a
story exists to make the story work, not to inform or persuade the audience.
Two, stories happen within a frame that
separates them from reality. The frame is part of what gives meaning to the
events within the story; the frame is the setting and it’s also the underlying
principles that determine which events and which characters are relevant to the
story and relevant to the lessons the story conveys.
Three, stories present representative norms and behavioral
expectations just as much as (or maybe even more than) they convey factual
information. We like to say that stories (esp. myths and folktales) tell us
what and why nature is the way it is (e.g., a story that explains the origins
of a particular mountain in the shape of a bear). But really, many stories
actually help us navigate the complexities of living in nature by showing us the moral and behavioral
alternatives we face in day-to-day living.
Four, stories are good for
studying underlying assumptions as well
as alternative actions and implications. Assumptions, implications, and actions
are not always explicit to us in the same way as clear explanation or explicit
argumentation. Because stories trade in the currency of implicit and symbolic
ideas, they anthropologically reveal our underlying beliefs about and what we
expect will result from our actions in the world here and now.
Five, stories tend to express the exceptional as opposed to
theory which expresses the commonplace. Stories are about change: unexpected
change in the status quo or needed change in the face of stagnation. Stories
reveal and give meaning to the exceptional events that interrupt the stasis of
the commonplace.
And six, stories are correlated with identity; hence, changing
a story might be correlated with changing personal and institutional identity.
Obviously stories chronicle events, but those events happen to the characters
of the story, to people. The events aren’t as important as what the events mean
to the characters; the characters’ identities are in play as a result of the
events that happen.
No comments:
Post a Comment