Crossing Thresholds in Teaching with Narratives

Mindy ThunaJoanna SzurmakUniversity of Toronto

University of Toronto Mississauga

OCULA SpringApril 24, 2015

Tell Me a Story: Narrative in University

Level Instruction

Joanna Szurmak & Mindy Thuna University of Toronto Mississauga

Jan 31, 2013

Stories by normalityrelief on flickr at https://flic.kr/p/5UXxjw https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Story Time by Squiggle on flickr ar https://flic.kr/p/zMjJQ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

• establishes a framework / scaffold for embedding details.

• contextualizes unfamiliar information and concepts.

• activates affective motivation.

• makes abstract ideas more concrete.Toy story (with scrambled narrative) by

psyberartist on flickr at https://flic.kr/p/drsYNphttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Narrative…

“People do not deal with with the world event by event or with text sentence by sentence. They frame events and sentences in larger structures” (p. 14.)

Polkinghorne, D.E. (1995). Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis. In Hatch, J. A., & Wisniewski, R. (Eds.). Life History and Narrative. London: Routledge.

Event A

Event B

Event C

Event C

Event AEven

t B

There can be many different narratives around one set of events/one story.

Future Bangkok MRT Map by Oran Viriyincy on flickr at https://flic.kr/p/kHJk1t https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Conceptual Model

Operation by Michael Harren on flickr at https://flic.kr/p/9bmsvYhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

• help learners build mental models through words and/or diagrams

• highlight major objects, actions, as well as the causal relations among and between them

Mayer, R.E. (1989). Models for Understanding. Review of Educational Research, 59(1): 43-64.

The underlying structure and direction.

Winthrop University (n. d.). College of Education: Conceptual Frameworks. Retrieved from http://www.winthrop.edu/coe/default.aspx?id=12866

Giulia Forsythehttps://flic.kr/p/9y5X8ohttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Conceptual Framework

We started to wonder…

• Do our librarian colleagues who teach conceptualize their teaching as a story?

• And if they do, do they value it? • And what about the visual stories, the

ones we tell with slides, prezis, infographics and videos?

And so we decided to start asking these questions…

Our findings so far

Arcobaleno di porte – rainbow doors by Allessandro Comuzzi on flickr at https://flic.kr/p/8GkPXZ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

We want you!

We want you! by Pascal STINFLIN on flickr at https://flic.kr/p/oFaqiHhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Join us for an interview.Perhaps today?

Mindy Thuna mindy.thuna@utoronto.ca

Joanna Szurmak joanna.szurmak@utoronto.ca

PopTech 2010 by PopTech on flickr at https://flic.kr/p/8u1B9G https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/