Week 5 Discussion

Please respond to the following:

• Based on the discussion preparation for this week, suggest two biologically rooted approaches that instructors may use in order to facilitate learning of one particular task. Illustrate the process by which embodied learning would foster a deeper learning of the task in question.

Narrative is not only a method for fostering learning; it is
also a way to conceptualize the learning process. In this
chapter, we describe the essential features of narrative
learning and discuss why this is such an effective way to
teach adults.

Narrative Learning in Adulthood

M. Carolyn Clark, Marsha Rossiter

Narrative is on the move. Actually it’s been on the move for some time, but
education, and more specifically adult education, has only begun catching
the wave relatively recently. Of course, using stories to teach has always
been part of the practice of adult educators. What is more recent is the
theorizing of how we learn through narrative (Clark, 2001; Rossiter and
Clark, 2007), but even that has deep connections to the core elements of
adult learning theory, as we’ll see. Our task in this chapter is to examine
what narrative learning is, how it works, and how it can be used more
intentionally and effectively in the education of adults. We hope to stimulate
further conversation and thought about the possibilities inherent in
conceptualizing learning as a narrative process. We begin with an overview
of narrative theory, examine the connection between experiential and narra-
tive learning, and follow that with a description of what we mean by narrative
learning and how learning itself can be conceptualized as a narrative process.
We then look at several examples of narrative learning in practice and
conclude with some thoughts about the potential of narrative learning
theory for the field of adult education.

Fundamentals of Narrative Theory for Narrative
Learning

Human beings are the creatures who tell stories—a point Fisher (1987)
makes when he gives us the label homo narrans—and those stories serve a
function, namely to make meaning of our experience. This basic idea has
been developed by a number of theorists in recent decades (for example,

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62 THIRD UPDATE ON ADULT LEARNING THEORY

Polkinghorne, 1988; Bruner, 1990; Irwin, 1996; Sarbin, 1986) who argue
that meaning making is a narrative process. This makes sense at a very basic
level. Everyday we are bombarded by a dizzying variety of experiences and
we make sense of those by storying them, by constructing narratives that
make things cohere. Coherence creates sense out of chaos by establishing
connections between and among these experiences. Sometimes it’s a matter
of locating experiences within a particular cultural narrative, for example
recognizing that advertising is part of the cultural narrative of consumption
and is not just a bid for us to buy particular products. This recognition also
makes possible the critique of that cultural narrative and offers the possi-
bility for development of a counter narrative; with respect to advertising,
for example, a counter narrative is the anticonsumption message of the sim-
ple living movement. At other times it’s a matter of constructing a narrative
for ourselves that enables us to deal with an experience. An example here
would be responding to an illness by constructing a narrative of restoration
and hope, as opposed to a narrative of victimization, struggle, or loss. The
choice of narrative—the sense we make of an experience—determines how
we respond to and manage that experience.

Narrative is also how we craft our sense of self, our identity. Rosenwald
and Ochberg (1992, p. 1) argue, “Personal stories are not merely a way of
telling someone (or oneself) about one’s life; they are the means by which
identities may be fashioned.” McAdams (1985) works from a similar
premise in his life story model of identity in which the self is understood as
an ever-unfolding story. We story our identities in multiple and sometimes
contradictory ways; in one context we can see ourselves as the hero of
the story, while in another we are someone whose agency is limited. These
multiple narratives that constitute our identity enable us to manage the
complexity of who we are. Understanding identity as a narrative construc-
tion is another way of conceptualizing personal change. Kenyon and
Randall (1997) think of this process as restorying our lives, which is to say
that when a story of the self no longer coheres, no longer helps us make
sense of our experience, then we must change it. Randall (1996) in fact
describes transformative learning as a process of restorying.

Closely related to the understanding of identity itself as an unfolding
story is, of course, the narrative orientation to lifespan development. People
understand not only themselves but also the changes over the course of
their lives narratively. A narrative approach to development, in contrast with
other theoretical orientations, attempts to describe development from the
inside as it is experienced, rather than from the outside as it is observed
(Rossiter, 1999). The focus is on subjective meaning: how people make
sense of their experiences over the life course. In this view, construction of
an acceptable life narrative is the central process of adult development. The
life narrative is repeatedly revised and enlarged throughout one’s life to
accommodate new insights, events, and perspectives. Developmental change

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is experienced and assessed through this process of storying and restorying
one’s life. As one moves into midlife from young adulthood, for example,
one advances the plot of the life narrative accordingly, sees oneself in a new
role, and understands the developmental change in relation to the similar
passages of others in one’s social or family groups. The stories of significant
transitions throughout life, such as landing a first job, losing a parent, coping
with major illness, or retiring from a career, when considered collectively
express the meaning one makes of developmental growth throughout one’s
life. According to Cohler (1982), narrative may offer a better understanding
of the life course than stage theory because it closely parallels the storying
process that people use in making meaning of their own lives. A key feature
of narrative development is that it defines development according to the
interpretations of the developing person. Freeman (1991) describes this as
an ongoing process of “rewriting the self” and argues that it is fundamentally
retrospective. He says, “It is only after one has arrived at what is arguably
or demonstrably a better psychological place than where one has been
before that development can be said to have occurred” (p. 99).

It is also important to recognize that construction of a narrative is not
purely a personal process; it is also social in nature. We live in what Sarbin
(1993) calls “a story-shaped world” (p. 63), surrounded by narratives of all
kinds that embody our cultural values—popular movies and television
shows, myths and folklore, religious histories and traditions, social scripts
and mores, to note only a few—and that all of these provide “libraries of
plots . . . [that] help us interpret our own and other people’s experience”
(p. 59). Linde (1993) makes this point in another way, noting that we
construct our narratives by drawing on a cultural supply of normal events,
reasonable causes, and plausible explanations and that these cultural
elements confer legitimacy on our narratives. The other social aspect of
personal narratives is that they require an audience, an Other either real or
imagined that responds to the narrative in some way; in this sense these
narratives are performances of identity, played out in various ways but
always shaped by cultural norms.

Narrative learning falls under the larger category of constructivist learn-
ing theory, which understands learning as construction of meaning from
experience. The fundamental principles of narrative underlie this type
of learning because the meaning construction is done narratively. Experi-
ential learning theory also informs narrative learning; experience is the
object of the meaning making. We turn now to a discussion of this connection.

Connections Between Experiential and Narrative
Learning

Learning in adulthood is integrally related to lived experience. The rela-
tionship is understood in various ways by theorists of experiential learning

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64 THIRD UPDATE ON ADULT LEARNING THEORY

(Fenwick, 2000, 2004; Merriam, Caffarella, and Baumgartner, 2007) but has
been a theme running through the literature since the earliest conceptions
of adult learning. In the 1920s, Lindeman drew on the work of Dewey to
advocate for adult education structured around the life world of the adult
learner because this is the source of the adult’s motivation to learn. His claim
that “experience is the adult’s living textbook” (Lindeman, 1961, p. 121)
has served as a mantra for experience-based adult education for nearly a
century. Equally well-known, of course, is Knowles’s conception of andra-
gogy (1980) in which experience has a prominent role. A main assumption
of andragogy is that adults bring a store of life experience to the learning
encounter and experience can serve as a resource for learning. Knowles
called for more participatory methods that draw on the adult learners’ lived
experience in the educational setting.

In the development of adult learning theory, experience plays a central
role, but there are several ways in which experience and learners are under-
stood to be connected, and associated with conceptualizations of where the
learning is located. In constructivist learning theory, learners connect to
their experience through reflection on that experience, and learning is
located in reflection. The nature of the reflection process varies—happening
after the experience (Kolb, 1984), in the midst of the experience, as well as
afterwards (Boud and Walker (1990), and taking in not just the experience
but also underlying premises and assumptions (Mezirow, 1991; Mezirow
and Associates, 2000). Fenwick (2004) argues that constructivists presume
the person and his or her experiences exist separate from one another. In
situated learning theory, learning happens in the interaction between learners
and their contexts; reflection is not erased, but it occurs within this social and
highly contextual interaction. Lave and Wenger (1991) argue that adults
learn by working together within a community, using tools that are part of
the community. This learning is highly pragmatic and deeply embedded
within a social context, and in fact it is the form of learning most common
to our everyday experience (Hansman, 2001). In narrative learning theory,
we argue that there is an even closer connection between learners and expe-
rience. The nature of experience is always prelinguistic; it is “languaged”
after the fact, and the process of narrating it is how learners give meaning to
experience. Narrative learning is constructivist in character, but the
construction of the narrative is necessary to make the experience accessible
(that is, to language it), and how it is constructed determines what meaning
it has for the person. To help clarify these connections, we turn now to a
discussion of the nature of narrative learning.

Narrative Learning

Working from the premise that narrative is a uniquely human way of mean-
ing making, we believe narrative learning is a twofold concept: fostering

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65NARRATIVE LEARNING IN ADULTHOOD

learning through stories, and conceptualizing the learning process itself. We
consider these aspects separately.

Learning Through Stories. As we noted at the beginning of this
chapter, using stories to foster learning is anything but new. Learning
through stories is a multifaceted process. Most simply, it involves stories heard,
stories told, and stories recognized. First, the hearing of stories implies
reception; the stories come from outside the learner and must be received
and interpreted by the learner. Stories are powerful precisely because they
engage learners at a deeply human level. Stories draw us into an experience
at more than a cognitive level; they engage our spirit, our imagination, our
heart, and this engagement is complex and holistic. Good stories transport
us away from the present moment, sometimes even to another level of
consciousness. They evoke other experiences we’ve had, and those experiences
become real again. A particularly moving example of this is stories told at a
funeral about the person who has died; the stories are powerful because they
make the person present again, and that presence is relational, speaking to
the connections all of us make with others and how significant those
connections are.

Second is the telling of stories, and now the learner is the actor rather
than the receiver. In the classroom context, this means the learner moves
from a cognitive understanding of a concept to link it to his or her own
experience. But this does not simply mean the learner has plucked an exam-
ple of this concept from a collection of personal experiences; it means the
learner has made a connection between the two, and in the making of
the connection new learning occurs. The course content now is also more
real and personal and immediate, which in turn makes the engagement
the learner has with the content more complex; more is involved than mere
cognitive understanding. The learner is more connected to the course
because of a personal contribution to it. An example here is when students
in a course on adult learning share stories of transformative learning
experiences; in the telling they not only recreate those experiences but do
so from within a theoretical framework about this type of learning. This
positioning enables them to understand their experiences of transformative
learning in a new way.

The third element, recognizing stories, is more abstract. It presumes that
learners begin to understand the fundamental narrative character of expe-
rience. As they gain understanding, they also begin to understand that they
themselves are narratively constituted and narratively positioned; this
applies to themselves personally, as well as to groups, societies, and cultures.
One example would be Americans recognizing they are positioned within a
particular cultural narrative, one that privileges the individual over the com-
munity and emphasizes rights more than responsibilities; by recognizing
this narrative situatedness, American learners could critique this larger nar-
rative, question underlying assumptions and inherent power relationships,

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66 THIRD UPDATE ON ADULT LEARNING THEORY

and identify whose interests are served and whose are exploited by this nar-
rative. This level of learning through stories connects with critical pedagogy
and its emancipatory possibilities.

So, how is this layered notion of learning through stories related to the
core tradition of experiential learning in adult education? We believe nar-
rative learning builds on this tradition and extends it. Narrative links learn-
ing to the prior experience of the learner, but at a profoundly human level.
It is constructivist, but it involves more than reflection on experience. It is
situated, but in way that differs from the practical, problem-solving charac-
ter of situated cognition. It is critical in that it enables learners to question
and critique social norms and power arrangements, but it does so by
enabling learners to see how they are located in (and their thinking is
shaped by) larger cultural narratives. We believe narrative learning opens
us as educators and as learners to greater possibilities.

Conceptualizing Learning as a Narrative Process. Narrative learning
also offers us a new way to think about how learning occurs. We said at the
beginning of this chapter that meaning making is a narrative process, and
meaning making is the constructivist definition of learning. When we’re
learning something, what we’re essentially doing is trying to make sense of
it, discern its internal logic, and figure out how it’s related to what we know
already. The way we do this is by creating a narrative about what we’re learn-
ing; in other words, we work to story it, to make the elements of what we
do not yet fully understand hang together. We work to achieve coherence.
We can do it in our heads, we can do it out loud, we can do it on paper, and
it can be done alone or with others. The process of constructing the narra-
tive, the story, is how we can see our understanding of something come
together and make sense. It’s a complex process in which we identify and
struggle with the pieces we cannot make fit together (that is, what we do
not understand yet), and we see the gaps (what we still do not know); see-
ing both helps us keep working on the construction of the narrative until
finally it begins to hold together and make sense. Those of us who have
lived abroad for any period of time experience this vividly—the shock of
the new culture gradually subsides as we learn how to make our way in this
new context. We construct a narrative of what was at first strange now
becoming familiar, of values and ways of being in the world slowly making
sense to us who are outsiders to the culture. It’s a continuous process, of
course; narratives like this are always tentative and evolving, which is appro-
priate because learning itself has no endpoint. But this narrative construction,
this storying of our growing understanding of something, is how we make
our learning visible to ourselves. What we’re arguing here is that con-
structing a coherent narrative is how, in fact, we learn.

This concept of learning is something we commonly experience in
practice. When we try to teach someone something for the first time, we
know the truth of the common saying, “To teach something is to learn

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67NARRATIVE LEARNING IN ADULTHOOD

twice.” Before we can teach anything, it must first make sense to us in some
way, but putting our understanding in words that make sense to someone
else—in other words, narrating it—furthers our own understanding of
the subject. This is illustrated by the increasingly popular strategy of peer
teaching (Brady, Holt, and Welt, 2003; Rubin and Hebert, 1998). When one
student teaches a concept to another student, not only does the peer teacher
benefit by creating the narrative but there is the further benefit that comes
from having the student learner question or challenge the narrative. Those
questions force the peer teacher to refine and develop the narrative, which
is to say that the peer teacher learns in the very act of teaching. A similar
thing happens when we write. Writing is a way of making our thinking
visible, and we believe this becomes part of the thought process itself—
thinking on paper—because we are trying to narrate our understanding of
something, trying to achieve coherence. It’s a powerful tool for learning.

Narrative Learning in Practice

Here we present three modes of narrative learning: learning journals,
concept-focused autobiographical writing, and instructional case studies. In
each case we examine how the learning is accomplished narratively.

Learning Journals. All the characteristics of narrative learning are
caught up in the writing of learning journals. In this assignment, students
are asked to articulate what they are learning in a course and to do so in a
sustained, regular way. It is this sustained element of journaling that creates
the opportunity for students to watch their understanding of the topic grow
over time. Because the journal is a personal learning tool for the student,
the structure is usually open, allowing the student to craft it in a way that
works best. In it the students create a conversation between themselves and
the material they’re learning, and they construct a text which itself becomes
an object of reflection that enables them to examine their own learning
process. The openness of the journal encourages students to engage with
the material not only cognitively but also affectively. It becomes an iterative
process of construction in which students weave old and new ideas together,
connect what they’re learning to prior experience and with personal beliefs
and assumptions, and through all this generate new questions that stimulate
further learning.

Concept-Focused Autobiographical Writing. Apart from formal
autobiographies intended for publication, autobiographical writing is
typically associated with the private realm, with self-reflection directed
toward greater self-understanding. But it can also be a teaching strategy.
Concept-focused autobiographical writing is used to examine a topic in a
course from a personal perspective and thus develop an inductive
understanding of that topic. It can take many forms. Karpiak (2000) had
students in an adult development course write five short chapters of their

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68 THIRD UPDATE ON ADULT LEARNING THEORY

life story as a final paper, making their own development a focus of study.
Dominicé (2000) has developed a structured seminar in which students
write about their educational journey in order to examine “the way they
have learned what they know” (p. 35); the concept being studied here is
their own learning process. We ourselves have written about educational
life histories and autobiographical learning portfolios (Rossiter and Clark,
2007). The purpose of an educational life history is to examine the experience
of schooling in a person’s life and is especially useful in exploring gender-based
personal and structural inequities in educational institutions. The purpose
of the autobiographical learning portfolio is to enable students to tell the
story of their own learning in adulthood and in the process reflect on what
they’ve learned in higher education, to understand themselves as lifelong
learners, and to envision the role learning will play in the rest of their lives.
In all cases of concept-focused autobiographical writing, students construct
a narrative of their life experience, which must cohere in terms of a given
concept and illuminate that concept. This brings together their life experience
and an abstract concept to create a new narrative from which they learn.

Instructional Case Studies. This method is probably the most common
mode of narrative learning and has been used extensively in professional
education, particularly medicine, law, business, and public administration
(Lynn, 1999; Tomey, 2003). A case is a story of professional practice, real or
fictional, and it has the usual elements of story: characters, setting, and plot.
It presents a problem that must be solved or an issue that must be
addressed, and this is the location of the learning because the problem or
issue is complex, reflecting real-world practice. The challenge to students
is less to find the solution and more to figure out how to decide what to do.
At one level, the narrative learning here is straightforward because students
engage a problem that’s in the form of a story. Their engagement is complex,
however, because the story is not finished and multiple endings are possible.
This open structure brings students in and makes them part of the story;
they’re both reader and writer. Any ending they write is by definition open
and carries them deeper into the complexities of practice. They are learning
to think like practitioners, which involves putting theoretical concepts in
conversation with prior experience to come up with new insights and inter-
pretations. The narrative learning here is multilayered.

Where to from Here?

In this chapter, we’ve laid out what we hope is a persuasive argument for
narrative learning as an effective educational approach and as a valuable way
to conceptualize the learning process. The question remaining is, What is
the promise of this perspective? We think the concept of narrative learning
opens a number of doors. For one, it should constitute a theoretical means
to connect lived experience to learning at a more complex and profoundly

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69NARRATIVE LEARNING IN ADULTHOOD

human level. For another, it offers a different and potentially richer way to
conceptualize transformational learning. We believe it can enrich adult
education practice by enabling us to use stories more intentionally and
effectively because narrative learning theory helps us understand how this
learning works. Those are some of our ideas, at least. But, believing in
narrative, we must also believe that the story is not finished, that there are
other possibilities, and that other voices will enrich and expand it. We look
forward to this further development.

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M. CAROLYN CLARK is associate professor of adult education at Texas A&M Uni-
versity.

MARSHA ROSSITER is a member of the faculty of the College of Education and
Human Services at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

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