Narrative Perspective on Curriculum

Eero Ropo

School of Education

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Short Summary of the Presentation

• Curriculum is the most important document for school education• In the Finnish curriculum system schools and teachers are

responsible in designing school based curricula and their own pedagogical approaches and solutions

• Goals of education expressed in the curricula vary from abstract (becoming a citizen and human being) to concrete (learning specific skills)

• I will describe school learning as a narrative process. • The very essence of learning is the (re)construction of meanings• Pedagogy should focus more on enhancing meaning creation in

autobiographical, social and cultural levels.• Identity has become an important concept in understanding human

action, teaching and learning - also in schools

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Narrative Turn in Social Sciences and Education

”The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances – as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories.

Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting ... stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation.

Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives ... Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.” (Barthes, 1977: 79)

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Narrative Theory in Education

• Bruner’s (1986) theory of self as a narrative is closely related to Roland Barthes’ (1977) theorizing

• Jerome Bruner’s (born 1916) theory on paradigmatic and narrative knowledge and thinking changed psychological and educational conceptualizing of self and identity • Self is a narrative, a story, constructed and reconstructed in a

situation (Bruner 1986, 1993)• Autobiographical narratives were seen as major sources of finding

out about self and identity

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Identity - Narratives of Me

• McAdams describes identity as a story or narrative• It is expressed in stories I construct about me and my life, • The process starts in early childhood from images we interpret

(faces around us) or stories we hear about ourselves• Later on we reconstruct identity narratives throughout our whole

life (discourses with each other, life experiences, reinterpretation of memories, etc.)

• What happens to us is not important, but what we think happened is crucial to identity narratives (interpreted meanings)

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Learning as a Narrative Process

• Phenomena -> Interpretation (Understanding)-> Experiences (Reflection)-> Meanings -> Constructing meanings into stories (see Yrjänäinen & Ropo 2013)

• Constructivist and socioconstructivist learning theories emphasize that the knowledge a person creates is subjective and constructed in the contexts and/or in social interaction with others

• From phenomenological point of view learning is a result of interpreting our perceptions -> experiences that have meanings(Husserl)

• Reflection and reflective thinking are processes in which we deliberately reinterpret experiences from new perspectives and/or subject positions and as a result construct new meanings or reconstruct previous meanings

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• Learning can be understood as a process in which we create

meanings and encode the meanings into long-term memory• It is innate to human learning that we collect the meanings into a

more or less coherent storiesor narratives (plot, temporality, causal relations etc.)

• It is important to realize that we do not construct meanings only about phenomena, but concurrently about ourselves, our social environment and community, and the contexts we live in

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Narrative Nature of School Learning

• We argue with my colleague Sari Yrjänäinen in a recent article that school learning is also narrative (Yrjänäinen & Ropo 2013)

• This idea applies to all school subjects• Students create meanings and collect them to narratives concerning

the subject• Teachers base their instruction on the narratives they have about

the subject • Human knowledge is NOT objective, free from personal

interpretations, perspectives or positionings • We create narratives that are contextual and situational and depend

on how we position ourselves in the learning and recall situations

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Hierarchical Nature of Narrative KnowledgeIn the process of constructing meanings, we do it on at least three levels:• Personal, autobiographical level – what does this mean to

me personally or from autobiographical perspective• Social level – what are the meanings the community

constructs, what does it mean socially• Cultural level – what are the meanings related to culture,

science, global community• Me, Us, Others (Yrjänäinen & Ropo 2013)• This structure can be applied in the construction of curricula

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Nature of Narrative Learning Processes in Different Levels: Examples from Teacher Education

Curriculum levels

Instructional goals

Learning goals and objectives

Focus of meaning making

Form of learning processes

Individual positioning in learning discourses

Example of contents:”Individual differences”

Individual 

Enhancing the formation and reconstruction of individual identity"me as a person" –  

Formation of personal identity, construction of personally meaningful knowledge

Life storyIdentity – me as a personOne's own knowing and actions as a person and human being

Intra-individual discourses (discourse with oneself - who am I), In teacher education: Transforming personally meaning knowledge to teacher's pedagogical knowledge

Positioning oneself in relation to one's history, positioning oneself as a person and a teacher,Recognizing one's strengths and weaknesses- strengthening (feedback), -standing on one's own feet

Gender identity,Ethnic and cultural identity

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Nature of Narrative Learning Processes in Different Levels: Example from Teacher Education

Curriculum levels

Instructional goals

Learning goals and objectives

Focus of meaning making

Form of learning processes

Individual positioning in learning discourses

Example of contents:”Individual differences”

Social,Community

Becoming a member of a group and community, relations to peers and colleagues, students and classes – ”me as a member of profession"

Becoming a member, growth of professional identity, Acquiring knowledge that strengthens memberships.Learning socially accepted knowledge

Relations to colleagues and students,Meaning related to being a member of the community.Learning socially accepted meanings 

Inter-individual interaction and dialogues (other people, contexts and situations);Me vs. othersMe vs. environment 

Positioning oneself to colleagues, students and stakeholders;active positioning to strengthen the membership 

Genders in school,Multicultural school community,Encountering and accepting individuality in schools

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Nature of Narrative Learning Processes in Different Levels: Example from Teacher Education

Curriculum levels

Instructional goals

Learning goals and objectives

Focus of meaning making

Form of learning processes

Individual positioning in learning discourses

Example of contents:”Individual differences”

Culture, society, world: values, history and future

Understanding the general purpose of the profession, schools, education and different subjects: "me as a member of humankind, as a human being and educator  

Formation of global identity, positioning oneself towards global issues. Identity as a citizen, moral beliefs and values

One's relation to cultures, values, ideologies and their history. Being a Finnish teacher in the world

Contextual discourses (ideologies, cultures, nation-state),"Me and my cultural background, me and my values"

Positioning oneself to nation-state, ideologies and culture. Cultural, moral and ideological positioning in work, positioning oneself politically.

Individuality as a social, cultural and ideological phenomenon;gender differences, equality in Finnish school

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Schools as Places for Narrative Learning

• Problem is that there is too little time for meanings in the school education

• One model we propose is based on Paul Ricoeur’s Three-Stage Mimesis Process (Yrjänäinen & Ropo 2013):• Prenarrative stage: Students have prior knowledge

(preconceptions and preunderstandings) about phenomena to be learned (e.g gravity) (mimesis1) –

• Narrative stage: Experiences are collected into narratives having a plot (creating a story of gravity) (mimesis2)

• Reconstructive stage: Narratives become part of our perception and experiences (the created story of gravity is verified in real life) (mimesis3)

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Yrjänäinen & Ropo 2013, s. 27

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Complexity of Teaching: Discourses and Positioning in School

• Discourses (ways of talking) during the school lessons• Curriculum discourse (purposes, objectives, and goals),• Pedagogical discourse (teaching), • Scientific discourse (how science defines the phenomenon),• Student to Student discourse, Etc. (Sari Yrjänäinen 2011)

• Positioning Theory • Langenhove & Harrè (1999) described human discourse in

terms of positioning – a mentally taken ’role’ in a specific situation

• People try to reposition each other by own positioning during the discourses

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Positioning as a Personal Tool in Teaching and Learning Process

• The Mimesis Process is the key to constructing meanings: Positioning is a tool to keep it going

• Student positioning influences on what the student perceives and how experiences are interpreted

• Teachers position students by switching discourses and positioning students

• Meanings that teachers communicate become affordances to students – they can react to affordances if they like or understand the affordance

• An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action. For example, a knob affords twisting, and perhaps pushing, while a cord affords pulling. A bicycle affords driving.

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• Teachers enhance construction of hierarchically different meanings by using methods that position students to personal, social and cultural meanings related to the curriculum topic

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Conclusion

• Learning is a process that produces narrative knowledge• We construct meanings and collect them to narratives concerning

me, us and the world• Identity is a result of meaning making and narrative processes in

and outside school learning• Identity influences on positioning and on what we perceive and

what information we receive• Identity positioning relates on what kind of meanings we create

from received information and about ourselves as learners and persons

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• Narrative perspective on curriculum emphasizes the importance of positioning in the learning process

• To enhance the construction of narrative knowledge needed in life we propose designing a hierarchical curriculum in which we have personal, social and cultural levels (me, us, others)

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Thank you!

Yrjänäinen, S & Ropo, E. (2013) Narratiivisesta opetuksesta narratiiviseen oppimiseen. Teoksessa Ropo & Huttunen: Puheenvuoroja narratiivisuudesta opetuksessa ja oppimisessa. Tampere University Press. S. 17-46.