This year's conference theme, "Sharing Stories: Learning through Discovery to Build a Better World," celebrates story as the communal way of knowing which is central to the human experience. Human beings think, learn, make sense of the world, interpret and find meaning in their lives through story. Telling our stories helps us know who we are, whose we are, and what our work is.
All of life comes to us in narrative form; it’s a story we tell.
~Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander
The Art of Possibility |
While the human mind is limited in its capacity for rote learning of discrete, decontextualized information (Ausubel 1968), it is excellently equipped to construct and to derive meaning from story. Story is our most basic way of knowing, learning, and creating meaning. Story helps us connect to the subjects we study in a way that empowers us to understand, think about, and apply the subject. The natural movement of knowledge is from the particular to the universal; beginning with a particular, unique story helps us move toward recognition and understanding of universal truth.
Story allows us to bring order to experience, to find pattern in events, to discover meaning in confusion and story allows us to share the order, pattern, meaning. Through story we remember, understand, instruct, entertain, celebrate. The range of all human experience and the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual response to experience is held within story. Stories contain and reveal our beliefs, our fears, our hopes, our knowledge of how the world works.
~Donald Murray
Crafting a Life |
Our concept of self and our understandings of and explanations of our actions are embedded in a narrative context, and narrative is the most powerful tool we have for synthesizing and bringing unity to our life experiences (Johnson 1993). Story is not events but interpretation; "...a life as led is inseparable from a life as told...a life is not 'how it was' but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold..." (Bruner 1994). Archbishop Desmond Tutu, keynote speaker at Coastal Carolina University's first Celebration of Inquiry Conference in 1999, explains, "What we found with our Truth and Reconciliation Commission was that it was enormously therapeutic and cleansing for victims to tell their stories…. With full disclosure, people feel they can move on."
By listening closely to one another, we can help illuminate the true character of this nation—reminding us all just how precious each day can be and how truly great it is to be alive.
~Dave Isay, Founder, StoryCorps |
Story pervades our individual and collective experience. Here are some examples of shared story: NPR features segments from StoryCorps, a national project for recording and sharing stories which "reminds us of the importance of listening to and learning from those around us. It celebrates our shared humanity." Similarly, the stories recorded in the Waccamaw Oral History Project housed at Coastal Carolina University's Kimbel Library, help us know the stories from the past that led to our local present. Playback Theater is a form of improvisational theater in which audience or group members tell stories from their lives and watch them enacted on the spot. In medicine, witnessing the intersection of a patient's illness with his/her life story is being found to have great therapeutic potential for healing. In his award-winning dissertation Leading Where It Counts: An Investigation of the Leadership Styles and Behaviors that Define College and University Presidents as Successful Fund Raisers, Dr. Danny Nicholson (Coastal Carolina University's former Vice President for University Advancement and Executive Director of the Coastal Education Foundation) found that college presidents who were able to understand, embody, and share the story of their institution were the most successful at raising support for the institution.
Telling our stories might be the most human thing we do. By telling stories we remember our past, invent our present, and revision our future...discover compassion and create community with kindred souls.
~Sam Keen |
Sharing stories with others helps us know each other and build community. We are able to see our own story more clearly as we hear it in the context of others' stories. The shared stories help us recognize and understand our common ground. We interact with story; it helps us feel. We thrive and learn when our stories and the stories of others are heard and honored. Through the specific story, the universal humanity is revealed.
References: Ausubel, David A. Educational Psycology: A Cognitive View. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968. Bruner, Jerome. "Life as Narrative." The Need for Story: Cultural Diversity in Classroom and Community. Eds. Anne Haas Dyson and Celia Genishi. Urbana: NCTE, 1994. 28- 37. Johnson, Mark. Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1993.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Special thanks to Coastal Carolina University Professor Dr. Sara L. Sanders, Kearns Palmetto Professor, for her contribution of this Celebration of Inquiry webpage “About the 2009 Conference Theme.” As the founder of the Conference, Dr. Sanders has been a continuous supporter and contributor to the success of this event. (For more information about Sanders, visit www.coastal.edu/news/story.php?id=1561) |
"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning." --Albert Einstein
