This document discusses the importance and power of storytelling in learning and meaning making. It asserts that humans are wired to make meaning by filling in gaps and reconstructing stories from their experiences. Stories carry tacit ideas and help shape shared social understanding. The truth of a story depends not on facts but on the meanings derived. Storytelling and learning are presented as sense-making processes through which people construct knowledge and understanding.

1. Learning, teaching and other stories
Jennie Osborn
LASALLE 22 September 2013

2. 2 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/22/singapore-fairytales-warn-declining-fertility#

3. 3
Humans are primed to make meaning,
to ‘take whatever scraps they an extract
from the stimulus input, and if these
confirm to expectancy . . . read the rest
from the model in their head’ (Bruner,
1986, p.47). We reconstitute stories
from our experience, each listener
creating the story anew.

4. 4
“Upon waking, the dinosaur was still
there” (Augusto Monterroso, 1959, The
Dinosaur)

5. Stories carry tacit ideas and experiences, and contain
our social worlds and contexts. We make sense of the
scraps, we fill the gaps with our shared understandings,
reflecting and creating shared meanings.
5

6. “Set sail, great storm, all lost.” John Banville
The truth of a story is always one of many possible
truths, whispered, laying beneath the surface of
conscious thought, operating through tacit assumptions,
communicated through art and culture.
6

7. “The polar bears made me do it.” The
truth of a story is not in facts but in
meaning. “The painting reputed to make students fail exams’, 13 September
2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-29175003
7

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Shared context holds the power to create new ‘truth’.
Truthfacts.com

9. 9
Storytelling is a process, a way of encountering
and shaping the world, a way of knowing.

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We make stories, but stories also make
us.
‘The summer night was heady with the scent of
lilac. He heard the click of the garden gate; and
saw a glimmer of her dress as she left’. Philippa
Gregory
#lasallestory

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“when we teach we tell stories about the world.”
(Pagano, 1991, p.197)

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“Narrative might be considered a solution to . . . the
problem of how to translate knowing into telling”
(White, 1991, p.1)

13. storying . . . is one of the most fundamental means of
making meaning, as such, it is an activity that pervades
all aspects of learning. When storying becomes overt
and is given expression in word, the resulting stories
are one of the most effective ways of making one’s own
interpretation of events and ideas available to others’
13

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'Only 300 Words left! *5% battery* NO! SAVE!
PLUG! RUN!‘ Sehrish Khan, student,
Department of Language and Linguistics
'That inevitable split second when you take
criticism personally.' Goedele Caluwe, student,
School of Philosophy and Art History
'I turned the pages for hours and found a story.'
Chris Coates, staff, Communications and
External Relations http://www.essex.ac.uk/ldev/microfiction/

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“learning is a process of sense-making, of
adding and synthesising new information within
existing knowledge structures” (Arlidge, 2000, p.
34)

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“Learners do not acquire knowledge that is transmitted
to them; rather, they construct knowledge through their
intellectual activity and make it their own.” (Chaille and
Britain, 1991, p.11)

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A generic term for those intellectual and effective
activities in which individuals engage to explore their
experiences in order to lead to a new understanding
and appreciation. (Boud et al., 1985)

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What?
So
what?
What
next?

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“A word is its own little solar system of meanings. Yet
we are wanting it to carry some part of our meaning, of
the meaning of our experience, and the meaning of our
experience is finally unfathomable . . . “ (Ted Hughes,
1967, p.119)

20. 20
re-mix
re-make
re-map
un-map

21. Arlidge, J. 2000, Constructivism: Is anyone making meaning in New Zealand adult and vocational
education? New Zealand Journal of Adult Learning, 28 (1), 32-49.
Boud. D, Keogh, R and Walker, D 1985, Reflection: Turning experience into learning. London: Kogan
Page.
Bruner, E, 1986, ‘Ethnography as narrative’. In E.M. Bruner and V. Turner (eds), The anthropology of
experience. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Chaille, C. and Britain, L. 1991, The young child as scientist: A constructivist approach to early
childhood science education. New York: HarperCollins.
Hughes, E, 1967, Poetry in the making, London: Faber and Faber.
Pagano, J, 1991, Moral fictions: The dilemma of theory and practice. In C. Witherall and N. Noddings
(eds), Stories lives tell: Narrative and dialogue in education. New York: Teachers College Press.
Wells, B, 1986, The meaning makers, Portsmouth NH: Heinemann Educational Books.
White, J, 1991, War stories: invitiations to reflect on practice. In B. Tabachnick and K. Zeichner (eds),
Issues and practices in inquiry-orientated teacher education. London: Falmer Press.
21
References