How do you get into the head of a college student? In an earlier
post I described my story. Here I make
a case for narrative writing and advocate for use of digital storytelling in
college teaching. You don’t become a “fish-head” without
working with and learning from other “fish-heads.”
“We learn not for
school but for life” Non scholae sed vitae
discimus (from the Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca the Younger’s Moral
Letters to Lucilius AD65). All
learning begins with a dream. We are all
dreamers. refers a study that found The
average daydream is ~ 14 seconds and we have about 2,000 of them per day (Gottschall
2013 p 11). Is it possible we spend 1/3
of our waking hours spinning fantasies? Our students imagine a future, perhaps murky
and unclear. And they dream about
it. How do we tap into students
imaginations with our pedagogy?
The use of narrative in our pedagogy has cognitive, social
and science literacy benefits. Story-telling engages the brain of the
listener in a way that psychologists call neural coupling. Listener makes the story their own with own
experiences. Mirroring means the
listeners experience same brain activity of the speaker… allowing them to
“predict” how this story will go.
Storytelling releases dopamine (dopamine is brain chemical responsible
for reward, pleasure, goal setting). Your
brain produces more dopamine when telling a story about yourself than when
telling a story about someone else (Tamir and Mitchell 2012). If stories have such as strong effect, we
should use them in teaching.
Student emotions need to be engaged. As Carl Jung wrote “there is no change from
darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotions.” It’s
easier for people to take on the goals, motivations, emotions, and even
physical reactions of people whom they feel even minimally connected to. You
can also use synchronous behavior -- having people do something together – to
create connectedness. Connectedness can
actually make a team work harder and perform better. It’s called “Mere
Belonging” and many interventions may affect the long term student
motivation and achievement and assist in creating a sense of belonging to the
group.
Science and
Engineering Indicators Report finds
that the primary source where Americans receive information about science and
technology is nearly tied between television (34%) and the Internet (35%), with
magazines and other print media tied for a distant third and fourth (9%). Berger and Milkman (2012) found that the
biggest predictors of sharing content with others was that which was perceived
as interesting, practical, surprising, and that evoked emotional reactions, all
factors at which narratives excel.
 |
|
A character has clear goal or need, strong conflict (inner and
outer), plan of action, and resolution of inner and outer conflict. The plot
consists of the character, a challenge and choice and outcome that leads to the
“moral of the story.” Figure from Ganz (2011).
|
This past semester I asked my students to create a digital
story “On Becoming an Ichthyologist” in order to reveal to themselves [and others] who we
are, why we are here, how we come to be what we are, what we value most, and
how we see the world. This Digital Storytelling Pedagogy in Student Development
recognizes that students need to engage deep reflection as they are struggling
to learn Ichthyology or any other technical topic. Joe Lambert in Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community defines a
digital storytelling as “art of telling stories with some mixture of digital
graphics, text, recorded audio narration, video and music.” I use a series of example stories, writing
prompts and story circle to facilitate this reflection process in my students. My goal is to have them think holistically
about the “self.”
 |
| Each step in the digital storytelling process encourages learning as the student enters a community of practice. Source. |
The following Ichthyology video stories, used with
permission, illustrate what emerged when I let students reflect and explore
their personal stories. Sasha Doss starts her story with a quote from Johann Wolfgang Goethe “He who has never seen himself
surrounded on all sides by the sea, can never possess an idea of the world and
of his own relation to it.” JacobBaker does not use photos of himself, but instead uses vivid imagery to help
tell his story. Katie Ranger compares her journey and earliest experiences
with fish to the journey of fishes. Skylar Wolf uses images from his Ichthyology Lab Notebook
and describes changes in his study habits to do better in this class.
References
Berger J,Milkman KL
(2012). What makes online content
viral? J Marketing Research 49(2):192–205.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1509/jmr.10.0353
Dahlstrom, M.F. 2014.
Using narratives and storytelling to communicate science with nonexpert
audiences. Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. 111 (Supplement 4) 13583-13584 www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1320645111
Ganz, M. (2011)
Public narrative, collective action, and power.
In S. Odugbemi & T. Lee (Eds.), Accountability through public
opinion: From inertia to public action (pp. 273-289). Washington, DC: The World Bank.
Gottshall, J. (2013) The Storytelling Animal: How Stories
Make Us Human. Boston: Mariner Books.
272 pp.
Tamir, D.I., and Mitchell, J.P. (2012) Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 109:8038-8043. Doi: 10.1073/pnas.1202129109