As spring break approaches even in the wake of 5-10" of snow expected in the Baltimore/DC region, I am feeling that a slightly more personal message is warranted. I have been thinking about the many ways my students are being assailed on all sides by midterms, papers, presentations, and projects, and what this all means for their learning and long-term personal development. [That is what education is about, right?] I feel the key to this is storytelling. All of us have learned our most important lessons through stories, but then we come to university and the stories stop. Some of this is appropriate, I guess, as part of the point of university is to figure out how to tell your own story. But in trying to teach fundamental truths about the way things work--these ideas should be framed in stories. So often, we fail to do so. I'm not sure what the penalty will be for us as a society, but I have some hint of why this alienates so many trainees. Consider this excerpt from my personal blog this week:
Consider the nonfiction you have read recently. Very likely, the author was appealing to your reason with facts you could objectively verify. Although your interpretation was free for you to shape, you were probably looking at things as an outsider or a judge. Now, think about a fiction book you have read. Although the author may or may not have been doing the same thing-appealing to your reason-you were probably much more likely to see yourself as a character in the story. At the very least, you could empathize with the characters and take on their perspectives as they developed. As a result, what happened in the story also feels like it happens to you as well.
Perhaps this also happens to some extent in biography. But the point I’m trying to make is that the fiction method of teaching, if you will, is much more effective because fiction is processed by the heart first, while nonfiction is processed by the mind. Thus, you will have forgotten the story well before the lesson stops working in your soul. To remember important truths communicated as stories is much simpler because you can remember the feeling. Whereas facts require you to master the prose.
And this is the challenge in teaching or studying engineering, mathematics, and science. Most people who engage these ideas as beginners can't find themselves in the story. They don't view the equations they're memorizing or struggling with as the conversation that it is.
Nothing is working in their soul.
And the problems they are asked to solved aren't compelling because those problems don't affect them. In fiction, everything that happens to the characters happens to you: in engineering training, what happens at best happens to an object-at worst, to some abstract variable appearing in some equation the student didn't create.
So, why am I writing this? Why am I bringing up fiction on my research/teaching page? Because we need to find out how to make everything in the university a story when students and researchers first interact with it. Our trainees will "remember" their instruction, because they can "remember the feeling." And since everything that happens will have happened to them, they will be in a much better place to move the conversation forward.