Adapted from Jerome Bruner’s 10 Features of Narrative from “The Narrative Construction of Reality” 1991
When choosing examples to teach from, fictional examples should seem real, and real examples should seem extraordinary. Narrative requires the tension of the real world and the imagined.
“Great fiction proceeds by making the familiar and the ordinary strange again” - Jerome Bruner
Good characters have good reasons for the things they do. Good narrative teaching means anticipating when students will ask “why” when you or a character you introduce makes a decision. But like a good storyteller, you don’t need to reveal the answer right away, just make sure you give the audience the clues they need to figure it out for themselves.
Not all stories are true, and not all narrators are to be trusted. Give students reason to question your stories and investigate them for themselves.
“...the moment a hearer is made suspicious of the "facts" of a story or the ulterior motives of a narrator, he or she immediately becomes hermeneuticaily alert. If I may use an outrageous metaphor, automatized interpretations of narratives are comparable to the default settings of a computer: an economical, time- and effort-saving way of dealing with knowledge—or, as it has been called, a form of "mind-lessness."
Help students see the typical narrative in a new way. Use planned mistakes and common pitfalls as a way to create memorable learning experiences.
“...to be worth telling, a tale must be about how an implicit canonical script has been breached, violated, or deviated from...and this is, perhaps, what makes the innovative storyteller such a powerful figure in a culture. He may go beyond the conventional scripts, leading people to see human happenings in a fresh way, indeed, in a way they had never before "noticed" or even dreamed.”
The narrative is the primary meaning making device of human culture. Whether we plan for it or not, students will want to organize their knowledge into stories they can tell themselves. Stories offer more than one “correct” answer, and instead invite perspective taking and meaning making. Give your students opportunities to test their narratives by making arguments, weighing different perspectives, and building upon and adding to the stories that you tell.