Tag: Story

“How was your day dear.” – the place of story and narrative in our lives

800px-Blind_monks_examining_an_elephant

“A number of blind men came to an elephant. Somebody told them that it was an elephant. The blind men asked, ‘What is the elephant like?’ and they began to touch its body. One of them said: ‘It is like a pillar.’ This blind man had only touched its leg. Another man said, ‘The elephant is like a husking basket.’ This person had only touched its ears. Similarly, he who touched its trunk or its belly talked of it differently. In the same way, he who has seen the Lord in a particular way limits the Lord to that alone and thinks that He is nothing else.”

This story is told in many cultures all over the world – see other versions HERE

INTRODUCTION:

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of story/narrative, both in life generally and in my SunWALK model in particular.  We are a set of stories.  We live in sets of community-stories.  We mature according to the stories to which we subscribe.  Planning is just a projected narrative.  The past we choose to have is a story adjusted.

In the SunWALK (human-centred studies) model stories are

the glue that makes of the parts a whole

the means for structuring experience in communities

bridges for the flow of culture

the primary act of mind

sources of healing and mystical at-one-ment and connective flow

sources of imagination and creativity

the means by which we come to understand who we are and what we represent

where the three forms of truth-telling can come together – the poetic, the objective and the moral

the means for constructing education cetred on being human, in the world with others

the means for creative the curriculum framework

STORY and NARRATIVE:

Stories Lives Tell; Narrative and Dialogue in Education is a study of the centrality of narrative in the work that teachers and other educators do. The three themes of the book are central to the SunWALK model. They are: that story and narrative are primary tools in the educator’s work; that education requires one to take seriously the quest for life’s meaning and the care for persons; and that narrative and dialogue can serve as teaching and learning models that transcend the boundaries of disciplines, professions, and cultures.
Witherell, Carol and Noddings, Nel, (Eds.) (1991) Stories Lives Tell; Narrative and Dialogue in Education, NY: Teachers College Press

MYTHS:

“…man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal” MacIntyre takes the view that we/humanity are in the midst of a story & that is through the story/ies that we understand each other and ourselves. MacIntyre p 201

Storytelling according to Chinua Achebe, the Ibo novelist is “the basis of our existence – who we are, what we think we are, what people say we are, what other people think we are.” John Windsor The Inde 20.8.94

Myth is where the Muse lives – it is from here we get our creativity. We need to experience life as a poem.

Through mythology we are not seeking truth we are seeking an experience of being alive in a great wholeness. Aunt Jane.

All stories consist of – Exposition:Conflict:Resolution

Narrative has been described as a primary act of mind; children construct their world through story…. This process should be an active experience, involving questioning, problem solving, hypothesising and imagining.’ Cox Report English 5-11, Nov. 1988

FIRST SITUATION Man in the World and with The World, Nature and Culture – Freire

“Through the discussion of this situation – man as a being of relationships – the participants arrive at the distinction between two worlds: that of nature and that of culture. They perceive the normal situation of man as a being in the world and with the world, as a creative and re-creative being who, through work, constantly alters reality.” – Paulo Friere, p.63, Education: The Practice of Freedom

FROM ‘HARD TIMES’ a novel by Charles Dickens

This tells everything about holism, and the three voices of being human – the Creative ‘I’ voice, the Critical ‘I’ voice and the Caring-moral ‘WE’ voice;

“Its father as calls me Sissy , sir,” returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another curtsey.

“Then he has no business to do it,” said Mr Gradgrind. “Tell him he mustn’t. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?”

“He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please sir.” Mr Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand.

“We don’t want to know about that , here. You mustn’t tell us about that, here. Very well, then. Describe your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?”

“Oh yes, sir.”

“Very well then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier and horse-breaker. Give me your definition of a horse.”

(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)

“Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!” said Mr Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little pitchers. Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some boy’s definition of a horse. Bitzer yours.”…………………..

Bitzer,” said Thomas Gradgrind. “Your definition of a horse.”

“Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-five grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.” thus (and much more) Bitzer.

“Now girl number twenty, said Mr Gradgrind. “You know what a horse is.”

SOME ADDITIONAL SOURCES

http://www.stevedenning.com/What_story.html

Ver: 8th July 2009

America stalled, the dollar and Native American Women


stalled-bonita-oil-on-photographfig. 2: Stalled, Oil paint on photograph
© Peña Bonita,1988

Joan M. Jensen, Professor Emerita, at New Mexico State University has written a fine essay on Native American Women Photographers As Storytellers. It combines about a dozen of my interests but has wider resonance, not least in her choice of the above photograph by Bonita.

She says;

As Native women have added cameras to fiber and clay, they have explored ways to combine a search for personal and public identity. Their work has formed a critique, a different story, that explicitly and implicitly critiques the “vanishing race” genre of romantic photography so popular at the turn of the century and since the 1970s revival of Edward Curtis and other photographers of American Indians. These photographers portray their cultures not as vanishing, but as part of a lively, assertive group of people confident about the importance of their cultures in the past, their importance to the present, and their influence on the future. They sometimes use images identified with Indian cultures, but these images are not used as emblems of a generic unified past. Instead the images carry specific messages or stories about how individual artists interpret family and tribal histories, how they experience the present, or what they project for the future. As women, they may employ signifiers identified with female cultures and tell stories that relate to women’s history, but their photographs may also have messages about gender relations, differences among Indian cultures, or commentary about Indian-Euro-American history. Sometimes there are no Indian signifiers at all except in written messages on the photographs or in captions. These photographers portray Native people with a wide range of physical and attitudinal characteristics. Some works are ironic or humorous, others angry, sophisticated, or reflective.

To read the essay go HERE

Great love stories of the ages; Eloise and Abelard

It would be a strange man or woman that had no joy, pleasure or instruction in the great love stories.

One ‘Emily’ has put together a list of 20 love stories.  You will almost certainly disagree with some of her choices.

One of my favourites is the story of Eloise and Abelard.

Eloise and Abelard

This is a story of a monk and a nun whose love letters became world famous. Around 1100, Peter Abelard went to Paris to study at the school of Notre Dame. He gained a reputation as an outstanding philosopher. Fulbert, the canon of Notre Dame, hired Abelard to tutor his niece, Heloise. Abelard and the scholarly Heloise fell deeply in love, conceived a child, and were secretly married. But Fulbert was furious, so Abelard sent Heloise to safety in a convent. Thinking that he intended to abandon Heloise, Fulbert had his servants castrated Abelard while he slept. Abelard became a monk and devoted his life to learning. The heartbroken Heloise became a nun. Despite their separations and tribulations, Abelard and Heloise remained in love. Their poignant love letters were later published.

You can see the rest of Emily’s choice HERE – you will certainly disagree with some of them – and will want to suggest others.

THE BENEFITS OF STORY-ING our experience – both children and adults

“Let me tell you a story…………………………”

To story = ‘to make a story of’.

Storying = the looking at,  one, several or all aspects of your life as a story.  Storying acts among other things as a ‘glue’ that makes of the parts a whole.  This is both a matter of creation and re-creation.  Stories as films, radio plays, novels, films re-create us.

This storying and re-storying seems to be natural to us as human beings.  “What was your day like dear?” elicits a story, at least a bare narrative.

In Personal & Professional Development the issue is this, ‘How can we use, in Personal & Professional Development, storying, and re-storying, to enable the learner/client to get from where they’re at to where they want to be?’

In teaching & parenting & home-schooling my SunWALK model when applied to education suggests that storying is one, or perhaps, the way to create holistic connections between subjects, between people etc.

The curriculum can be seen as a nesting of stories: each child’s story, their family story, the class story, the school story, the community story etc.

This great-looking series of books for children – click HERE lend themselves to the idea of creating story contexts for all subjects and sets of relationships,  including one that seems to work directly with this idea.  The challenge is how to keep storying going on up through the whole of education.