- The document discusses curriculum and learning from a narrative perspective. - It argues that curriculum is the most important document for schools and that learning can be understood as a narrative process of constructing meanings from experiences and integrating them into stories. - A key idea is that learning happens on individual, social, and cultural levels as learners position themselves within different discourses and create narratives about themselves and the topics they are learning.

1. Narrative Perspective on
Curriculum
Eero Ropo
School of Education

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Short Summary of the Presentation
• Curriculum is the most important document for school education
• In the Finnish curriculum system schools and teachers are
responsible in designing school based curricula and their own
pedagogical approaches and solutions
• Goals of education expressed in the curricula vary from abstract
(becoming a citizen and human being) to concrete (learning specific
skills)
• I will describe school learning as a narrative process.
• The very essence of learning is the (re)construction of meanings
• Pedagogy should focus more on enhancing meaning creation in
autobiographical, social and cultural levels.
• Identity has become an important concept in understanding human
action, teaching and learning - also in schools

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Narrative Turn in Social Sciences and Education
”The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and
foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed
amongst different substances – as though any material were fit to
receive man’s stories.
Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or
moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these
substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella,
epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting ... stained glass
windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation.
Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is
present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the
very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people
without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives ...
Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature,
narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there,
like life itself.” (Barthes, 1977: 79)

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Narrative Theory in Education
• Bruner’s (1986) theory of self as a narrative is closely related to
Roland Barthes’ (1977) theorizing
• Jerome Bruner’s (born 1916) theory on paradigmatic and narrative
knowledge and thinking changed psychological and educational
conceptualizing of self and identity
• Self is a narrative, a story, constructed and reconstructed in a
situation (Bruner 1986, 1993)
• Autobiographical narratives were seen as major sources of finding
out about self and identity

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Identity - Narratives of Me
• McAdams describes identity as a story or narrative
• It is expressed in stories I construct about me and my life,
• The process starts in early childhood from images we interpret
(faces around us) or stories we hear about ourselves
• Later on we reconstruct identity narratives throughout our whole
life (discourses with each other, life experiences, reinterpretation
of memories, etc.)
• What happens to us is not important, but what we think
happened is crucial to identity narratives (interpreted meanings)

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Learning as a Narrative Process
• Phenomena -> Interpretation (Understanding)-> Experiences
(Reflection)-> Meanings -> Constructing meanings into stories (see
Yrjänäinen & Ropo 2013)
• Constructivist and socioconstructivist learning theories emphasize
that the knowledge a person creates is subjective and constructed
in the contexts and/or in social interaction with others
• From phenomenological point of view learning is a result of
interpreting our perceptions -> experiences that have
meanings(Husserl)
• Reflection and reflective thinking are processes in which we
deliberately reinterpret experiences from new perspectives and/or
subject positions and as a result construct new meanings or
reconstruct previous meanings

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• Learning can be understood as a process in which we create
meanings and encode the meanings into long-term memory
• It is innate to human learning that we collect the meanings into a
more or less coherent storiesor narratives (plot, temporality, causal
relations etc.)
• It is important to realize that we do not construct meanings only
about phenomena, but concurrently about ourselves, our social
environment and community, and the contexts we live in

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Narrative Nature of School Learning
• We argue with my colleague Sari Yrjänäinen in a recent article that
school learning is also narrative (Yrjänäinen & Ropo 2013)
• This idea applies to all school subjects
• Students create meanings and collect them to narratives concerning
the subject
• Teachers base their instruction on the narratives they have about the
subject
• Human knowledge is NOT objective, free from personal
interpretations, perspectives or positionings
• We create narratives that are contextual and situational and depend
on how we position ourselves in the learning and recall situations

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Hierarchical Nature of Narrative Knowledge
In the process of constructing meanings, we do it on at least
three levels:
• Personal, autobiographical level – what does this mean to
me personally or from autobiographical perspective
• Social level – what are the meanings the community
constructs, what does it mean socially
• Cultural level – what are the meanings related to culture,
science, global community
• Me, Us, Others (Yrjänäinen & Ropo 2013)
• This structure can be applied in the construction of curricula

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Nature of Narrative Learning Processes in Different
Levels: Examples from Teacher Education
Curriculum
levels
Instructional
goals
Learning goals
and objectives
Focus of
meaning making
Form of learning
processes
Individual
positioning in
learning
discourses
Example of
contents:
”Individual
differences”
Individual Enhancing the
formation and
reconstruction of
individual identity
"me as a person"
–
Formation of
personal identity,
construction of
personally
meaningful
knowledge
Life story
Identity – me as a
person
One's own
knowing and
actions as a
person and human
being
Intra-individual
discourses
(discourse with
oneself - who am
I),
In teacher
education:
Transforming
personally
meaning
knowledge to
teacher's
pedagogical
knowledge
Positioning
oneself in relation
to one's history,
positioning
oneself as a
person and a
teacher,
Recognizing one's
strengths and
weaknesses
- strengthening
(feedback),
-standing on one's
own feet
Gender identity,
Ethnic and
cultural identity

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Nature of Narrative Learning Processes in Different
Levels: Example from Teacher Education
Curriculum
levels
Instructional
goals
Learning goals
and objectives
Focus of
meaning making
Form of learning
processes
Individual
positioning in
learning
discourses
Example of
contents:
”Individual
differences”
Social,
Community
Becoming a
member of a
group and
community,
relations to peers
and colleagues,
students and
classes – ”me as a
member of
profession"
Becoming a
member, growth
of professional
identity,
Acquiring
knowledge that
strengthens
memberships.
Learning socially
accepted
knowledge
Relations to
colleagues and
students,
Meaning related
to being a
member of the
community.
Learning socially
accepted
meanings
Inter-individual
interaction and
dialogues (other
people, contexts
and situations);
Me vs. others
Me vs.
environment
Positioning
oneself to
colleagues,
students and
stakeholders;
active positioning
to strengthen the
membership
Genders in
school,
Multicultural
school
community,
Encountering and
accepting
individuality in
schools

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Nature of Narrative Learning Processes in Different
Levels: Example from Teacher Education
Curriculum
levels
Instructional
goals
Learning goals
and objectives
Focus of
meaning making
Form of learning
processes
Individual
positioning in
learning
discourses
Example of
contents:
”Individual
differences”
Culture, society,
world: values,
history and future
Understanding the
general purpose
of the profession,
schools, education
and different
subjects:
"me as a member
of humankind, as
a human being
and educator
Formation of
global identity,
positioning
oneself towards
global issues.
Identity as a
citizen, moral
beliefs and values
One's relation to
cultures, values,
ideologies and
their history.
Being a Finnish
teacher in the
world
Contextual
discourses
(ideologies,
cultures, nation-
state),
"Me and my
cultural
background, me
and my values"
Positioning
oneself to nation-
state, ideologies
and culture.
Cultural, moral
and ideological
positioning in
work, positioning
oneself politically.
Individuality as a
social, cultural
and ideological
phenomenon;
gender
differences,
equality in
Finnish school

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Schools as Places for Narrative Learning
• Problem is that there is too little time for meanings in the school
education
• One model we propose is based on Paul Ricoeur’s Three-Stage
Mimesis Process (Yrjänäinen & Ropo 2013):
• Prenarrative stage: Students have prior knowledge
(preconceptions and preunderstandings) about phenomena to
be learned (e.g gravity) (mimesis1) –
• Narrative stage: Experiences are collected into narratives having
a plot (creating a story of gravity) (mimesis2)
• Reconstructive stage: Narratives become part of our perception
and experiences (the created story of gravity is verified in real
life) (mimesis3)

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Yrjänäinen & Ropo 2013, s. 27

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Complexity of Teaching: Discourses and
Positioning in School
• Discourses (ways of talking) during the school lessons
• Curriculum discourse (purposes, objectives, and goals),
• Pedagogical discourse (teaching),
• Scientific discourse (how science defines the phenomenon),
• Student to Student discourse, Etc. (Sari Yrjänäinen 2011)
• Positioning Theory
• Langenhove & Harrè (1999) described human discourse in
terms of positioning – a mentally taken ’role’ in a specific
situation
• People try to reposition each other by own positioning during
the discourses

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Positioning as a Personal Tool in Teaching and
Learning Process
• The Mimesis Process is the key to constructing meanings:
Positioning is a tool to keep it going
• Student positioning influences on what the student perceives and
how experiences are interpreted
• Teachers position students by switching discourses and
positioning students
• Meanings that teachers communicate become affordances to
students – they can react to affordances if they like or
understand the affordance
• An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, which
allows an individual to perform an action. For example, a knob
affords twisting, and perhaps pushing, while a cord affords
pulling. A bicycle affords driving.

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• Teachers enhance construction of hierarchically different meanings
by using methods that position students to personal, social and
cultural meanings related to the curriculum topic

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Conclusion
• Learning is a process that produces narrative knowledge
• We construct meanings and collect them to narratives concerning
me, us and the world
• Identity is a result of meaning making and narrative processes in
and outside school learning
• Identity influences on positioning and on what we perceive and
what information we receive
• Identity positioning relates on what kind of meanings we create
from received information and about ourselves as learners and
persons

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• Narrative perspective on curriculum emphasizes the importance of
positioning in the learning process
• To enhance the construction of narrative knowledge needed in life
we propose designing a hierarchical curriculum in which we have
personal, social and cultural levels (me, us, others)

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Thank you!
Yrjänäinen, S & Ropo, E. (2013) Narratiivisesta
opetuksesta narratiiviseen oppimiseen.
Teoksessa Ropo & Huttunen: Puheenvuoroja
narratiivisuudesta opetuksessa ja oppimisessa.
Tampere University Press. S. 17-46.