Narrative learning

Narrative (intended as stories and narrations) has been used to communicate ideas from very ancient times and is perceived as a natural expressive form by both children and adults. Scholars with diverse perspectives highlight the presence of causal and temporal interdependences among story elements, which derive from their position in the narrative sequence. This leads people dealing with both fictional stories or experience narrations to grasp not only explicit but also implicit information, and consequently to instinctively engage in a meaning-construction process. This makes narrative a powerful learning device. Moreover, stories and narrations facilitate understanding by helping to overcome the difficulty of abstraction and providing a concrete starting point for discussion and reflection. Because of the centrality given to human actions, intentions, emotions and relations, narrative-based contexts usually result engaging for learners also from the emotional/affective point of view, favoring the connection of this aspect with content knowledge and stimulating the development of intrinsic motivation. Narrative can be used in different ways and with a variety of aims to help set up constructive learning activities and environments. This lecture will discuss several examples which illustrate the variety of possibilities to set up meaningful narrative-based learning activities, considering diverse cases such as narrating a story in collaboration, taking part in a story by role-playing, jointly reconstructing a story, and sharing individual stories as a starting point to boost joint reflection.