Narrative Pedagogy
Learning and Narrative Pedagogy
Scherto:
If I can just add to that. It also worked because from the way Jennie reflected on her own identity and her agency, there seems to emerge a ‘third voice’ which we also addressed earlier. The third voice highlights the shift in our perception and understanding through the collaborative endeavour. What emerges is the ‘fusion of horizons’ which moves beyond the singular voices of us two interlocutors. So through narrative pedagogy, a new understanding is developed which is more than the sum of the two separate parts. So my sense is that it has worked in terms of the new voice. But where hasn’t it worked to offer a flavour of the narrative pedagogy?
Scherto:
It does, however, show how our narrative encounter allowed us to immediately lock into apparently fluent narrative flows and have a very intense and thematically rich interchange on the topic of ‘academia’. They provided a rich ground for the development of the third voice. This further gave us an opportunity to arrive at a place where her abstract thinking led to her awareness of her own integrity in life and work.
Ivor:
But other narrative encounters are much more sparse and sporadic with only occasional patches of thematic intensity and richness. In these instances the collaborative progress starts from a different place and therefore develops in a different way.
Scherto:
Given the thematic intensity in my conversations with Jennie, she and I still travelled a long winding journey in the conversation. In fact, it was a deep experience for me too. A brief excerpt does not allow the reader to see the new insights that I developed in understanding my own narrative and about education. This reminds me of a colleague, Laura Formenti, who once said to me: ‘The process of helping the learners or participants arrive at their own narrative is like the process of giving birth, and narrative educators are like the midwives.’ I might go one step further to suggest that both the educator and the learner are to give ‘birth’ to new narratives.
