My post last week on Improvisation was one of the open-ended questions submitted for peer review in the course – one of the three respondents gave the following response:
“This is very wordy and goes off on a tangent.”
Right, I thought – if you go back and read the post you’ll see it’s very much on the point: it’s about willingness to make mistakes and willingness to persist – two attributes of a learner who’s confident in her/his strength as a learner and I was trying to show how those two attributes are an intrinsic aspect of learning.
I replied to that fellow student (and stupidly I forgot to copy the text and paste it into TextEdit so I could have it to drop in here – the course structure won’t let me get back to what I wrote which I find very annoying – so I’ll attempt to paraphrase it here, sort of).
I pointed out I was “teaching” by storytelling – trying to SHOW not TELL about how those two concepts pervade my experience as a teacher and learner and offered one more example of making mistakes/persistence.
Last evening I got a phone call from a friend who’d received an email from Google saying there had been a suspicious attempt to access her email and recommended she change her password. She wasn’t sure how to do that so I went to her house and sat HER at the computer and we worked through the process. I thought it would also be a good idea to move her banking platform from the browser where she checks her email to another separate browser which she’d use only for her banking – so I helped her download and set up Opera and then set up the “speed dialing” for her various financial accounts. (My intention was to get the job done, but in such a way that she would start to generalize about how stuff like this is done so she can do it herself another time.) (I didn’t think about the Google email being a phishing attempt until I went to bed – I wrote my friend asking whether she’d clicked on anything in the email or whether she went directly to Google to change her password. She hadn’t clicked on anything, she wrote back. Phew!)
Then I helped her go back to the original browser (Safari) and delete the login/password information from the location where it’s stored (I had to google for help finding the exact location because although I know it’s stored, I didn’t know where precisely to find it – a strategy we discussed). While we were at it, we changed the preferences for Safari (which was stuck at full screen – which is a nuisance) and her Mail (which we reconfigured for the “Classic” version). Then we removed unwanted items from the Dock (she’s using an iMac, right?).
The above “story” is about making mistakes and persistence – illustrating (to some small extent) how I chose to interact with the “student” to help her work out generalizations which will let her solve more problems for herself.
I’m relating all of this to you because “teaching by storytelling” became an important strategy for me – to use narrative as a way of inviting people to think about the conflicts and contradictions they were dealing with as learners and teachers. No point in spelling out a person’s assumptions directly – what you get is a defensive backing away, but tell a story? The narrative allows students to be more receptive to reflecting on themselves and their beliefs and values. Doesn’t matter the age of the students, either – all you need is a story relevant to the learning situation.
Quite a while ago I wrote Interwoven Conversations: Learning and Teaching Through Critical Reflection. Rather than discuss the role of theory in building practice I told the story of a two week summer learning experience I created for teachers – I wanted to show the mess, the contingencies, the rich chaos of a complex learning/teaching situation. I invited readers of the manuscript to respond and included their responses as side-bars in the text. My thoughts as I’m teaching/learning, the reflections of the students, our conversations with published authors/researchers all play a role in the unfolding story being told. I share what I learned as a way of having readers “live the experience” with me, and to invite them to explore their professional practice and personal learning in similar ways.
As one reader said: As a full time staff development specialist, this book helped me understand how best to meet the needs of my adult learners.
The story obviously did what I hoped it would – it allowed the reader to reflect on her experience.
If you’re interested in the issue of using story to mediate understanding check this article by Ruth Shagoury Hubbard.
On Learning 