Narrative Pedagogy
Learning and Narrative Pedagogy
Relationship is an interplay involving giving and taking (Hayden, 1980). In facilitating narrative learning, the teacher and the learner both share their understanding, knowledge, worldviews, values and personal experiences. Through such giving and sharing, the teacher and the learners themselves mutually enrich each other’s humanity (Hayden, 1995).
Relationship and reciprocity in pedagogy does not necessarily require equal treatment or consistency because individuals respond to each other and their narratives differently. However, it does require the teacher undertaking to reach out to the learners in a caring and sensitive way. By caring, the pedagogue can identify the opportunity when it arises for the learners to reflect on their narrative and to use it as basis to develop their individual qualities and to direct their lives.
Narrative pedagogy is an invitation to enter another individual’s mind, emotions and spirit as well as values, worldviews, traditions, and moral and personal dilemmas. Narrative pedagogy is about showing respect and appreciation for an individual’s nature, disposition, talents and aspiration. It also depends on the teacher’s ability to identify with the learners as persons and fellow human beings, and to be open to the learners’ self-knowledge, current needs, narrative capacities and characters, lived experience of the past and present, and their capacities for consolidating, modifying and transforming their narratives towards their wellbeing and flourishing.
Some scholars have linked relationship, care and respect to the notion of love in its broadest sense, which is the giving of self, not only arising from compassion, but also coming from higher sources. This places pedagogy within the realm of a profoundly ethical endeavour which ultimately concerns enabling the individuals to live life fully and meaningfully and to achieve what we have called ‘integrity’.
