Reply to comment

Stories in and for Life

How do we learn? Folks say that in each second of life, we receive more than eleven million pieces of information. How do we make sense of that much input? Science teachers tell us that our conscious mind is able to understand and register only about forty out of those eleven million pieces of information, and sometimes not even that much (if we are tired that day, for example). What happens to the ten million plus? They come directly into our unconscious mind. And what that information does in the unconscious part of the mind, we don’t even know – at least not until be become more conscious of what is going on in there.

Are the 10,999,960 pieces of information less important? Science teachers tell us that they are very important – too important to risk holding up the information stream by letting the conscious mind think about it and thereby slow down the process of reacting. The brain scientists tell us that the unconscious part of the brain reacts very quickly, much faster than the thinking part of the brain that we are usually more aware of. A neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio says: “The problem of how to make all this wisdom understandable, transmissible, persuasive, enforceable – in a word, of how to make it stick – was faced and a solution found. Storytelling was the solution – storytelling is something brains do, naturally and implicitly…. [I]t should be no surprise that it pervades the entire fabric of human societies and cultures.” A. Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon, 2010) 293.

What all this means is this: We think in story. We are made so that our most important mental processing occurs “in story”. “Story” is the language of experience, and it’s not limited to English, Chinese, or any other animal language. When we understand a story, we understand something about life.

I use this for teaching English as a second language. I can teach students of all ages faster when I use stories. Some of the younger students' parents, however, worry that stories are not a "scientific" way to teach. (This is because I teach in China where "scientific" method is a requirement for teaching.) So words cannot express how happy I am that serious scientists are working on the "facts" of how story words in our lives, in our brains.

When the student learns a story in English, that student’s mind connects the story with the language it was told in, and the student’s memory of the words in that story is combined with the memory of what happened in the story. In this way, the words have a context, and every time they will be used in the future, there will be a memory of the first time the student encountered that word in the story. In this way, each word has a richness to it, taken from the context of the student’s first experience with that word.

Later on, the grammar can be parsed and the grammatical terms learned, but these are explanations only, and cannot convey the real wealth of experience that a word from a story includes as part of its meaning to the student.

This is why the first thing that happens in one of our classes is a story. After the story there follows a short lesson which highlights some of the functions of the English language. The games that sometimes follow all this help the student to digest the day’s class, and eventually workbook practice helps to cement the lesson into place, available for use either in a conversation or (eventually) on an examination.

Back to the scientists – they have studied how we use stories to enable us to better understand and deal with the world around us. Harvard Professor Steven Pinker explains this process in this way: “ Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position and married my mother? If my hapless older brother got no respect in the family, are there circumstances that might lead him to betray me? What’s the worst that could happen if….” Pinker, How the Mind Works, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997/2009) 543.

Children’s stories teach children how to use a story for life, how to create mind pictures that go with and help the student remember the words of the story. The process of learning to make mind pictures is important to creativity and to building the skills for future learning. When a child gets beyond the need for pictures in a book, the creative process of imagining the whole story begins in earnest. Eventually the process sparks the fire of growing understanding of the multitude of stories of life – possibly one of the most important function of education.

This process can begin at any age, but most of us agree that it’s best to start it quite young. This is why even our youngest students start their lessons with a story, and this is also why stories are important to all of our lessons, even for quite advanced or adult students.

Yes, I know childhood development is a science, an art, and, for teaching purposes, an empirical daily test for teachers. I'm suggesting here that the function of "story" seems to be a common thread throughout the process of growing up, in much the same way that the "story" of science, scientific observations and (tentative) conclusions drawn therefrom guides so much of our modern world.

Yes, it's much more than just the simple fact that when the scientific experiment is turned into a story we begin to comprehend and possibly even use it in other aspects of our lives. It's that once anything is made into a story, it comes alive for us brain-driven human beings. And, agreed, we need to learn not to cling to stories that lead us toward anti-social behaviors or the like, and we need to appreciate that stories, like everything else on earth, change. Why even the same story means so many different things each time we read or hear it.

So I'm saying: I love your story; I love the way you're presenting it; I love what that presentation suggests for other disciplines; and I love the boldness with which you're stating your positions on learning and science. Keep it up.