NARRATIVE
In his book, Why Don't Students Like School?, Daniel Willingham argues that in order for students to learn something, it needs to be something memorable. One effective strategy for increasing memory and retention is to encourage students to think of the course as a story. The research suggests that students are much more likely to remember something if it takes the form of a narrative. Although some courses are harder to narrativize (such as math or the certain sciences), many courses already fit nicely into a narrative structure. For courses that fit this structure, Willingham suggests teachers clarify which aspects of the course are narrative in nature and which aspects undermine the narrative and make the information harder to remember. Willingham suggests that in order to tell a good story, we must utilize the “Four Cs”: causality, conflict, complication, and character (Willingham pg. 52). “Causality” requires that all the parts of a course demonstrate some sort of causal link--if not to each other, at least to one common thread that connects all parts together in the end. “Conflict” requires that we explain what the characters in our story are trying to overcome and how their motivations come into tension. “Complication” requires that we demonstrate how the elements of the story are not always immediately resolvable. Finally, “character” requires that we attach aspects and values to individuals so that we can inhabit their perspective and understand their motivations. By envisioning a course in these terms, Willingham suggests that we can present the students with a narrative which is memorable, relatable, and interesting. Rather than understanding a series of facts, students will remember interesting characters and how their individual motivations lead them towards their novel solution to some greater conflict.
Following Willingham's suggestion, I now design my courses with this narrative structure in mind. I start by envisioning the whole course as a book structured around one or two points of conflict. Each lecture is a self-contained chapter with its own minor arc which plays a bigger role within the greater conflict. I begin by presenting the greater conflict, developing my course backwards in order to ensure that every aspect of my course fits within the overall trajectory.
For example, when developing my Introduction to Philosophy course, I started with Martin Heidegger's assertion that to fully live one's life, one must come to terms with their own mortality (Heidegger, Being and Time). As it turns out, death is a valuable theme in philosophy for two major reasons. First, because all human beings die, questions concerning life and death are trans-historical and their answers are philosophically diverse. Second, views on death always presuppose an interpretation of what it means to be a living being. Consequently, the course becomes a narrative that centers around interpretations of death, what comes after it, and the way in which both of those questions shape the meaning of our lives. However, this philosophical discussion only makes sense in the greater context of Heidegger’s philosophy and the history of philosophy in general. Like a good line that falls at the end of a long movie, this Heideggerian concept is significant only because of what comes before it.
In line with Willingham’s suggestion, I establish “causality” in my story by giving a broad account of the philosophical thinking which inspired this idea in Heidegger by reading excerpts from Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, and others until a historical link from the beginning of philosophy to the present day has been established.
I present the conflict that motivates the entire course on day one in the form of a question: “How do I reconcile the meaning of my finite life when no matter what I do, I will eventually die some day?” By immediately pointing out that this is the theme of the course, my students know what to expect from the reading and know that they should be looking for the way in which each of our philosophers attempts to answer this question.
Once students understand the conflict, I focus on the way in which this question is complicated by various disagreements about the nature of human existence. Some answers seem desirable until we come to realize that they require unsavory metaphysical presuppositions. We might agree with Plato that living a good life is the highest goal but find his reasoning (that we do it to keep our soul pure) to be rather archaic.
Unsurprisingly, character is perhaps the easiest of the four aspects to identify in a philosophy course. The history of philosophy is full of interesting characters with unique motivations and perspectives. Consequently, my task was to pare down the list and only look at philosophers who inspired Heidegger in regard to the quote that serves as our theme. As the characters in the story, each philosopher offers a different way of addressing the conflict at hand. By associating the solutions to this conflict with interesting characters, students can remember these approaches with relative ease—so much so that midway through the semester, freshman students are already debating one another by evoking arguments from philosophers spanning over two thousand years of philosophy.
This is not to say that a narrative approach to course design has no downsides. In my experience, designing the course as a narrative has three major shortcomings. First, a semester can be a long period of time in which to tell only one story. Keeping the students interested in the story for so long can be challenging. Second, it is difficult to adjust or modify course material because the new material must conform to the greater narrative arc of the class. If I find an interesting new text to share with my students, I must make sure it fits thematically before introducing it to them. Otherwise, I risk overwhelming them or distracting them from our theme. Third, if the students aren't interested in this particular story, the whole course for them can be like being forced to read a book that they don’t find interesting. While I have been fortunate to have an engaged audience for the most part, occasionally there are students who push back against the course as a whole, which suggests that they would have preferred focusing on a different conflict. However, I do believe all three of these shortcomings can be mitigated in a way that makes this approach successful.
In order to keep the students invested in the story, I am constantly developing the sense of conflict between the characters. For example, we start with Plato's view that the consequences we face in the afterlife shape our understanding of how we ought to behave in this lifetime. After the students have come to terms with this approach, I introduce Aristotle, who rejects the idea that death should inform our decisions in any way. Aristotle instead argues that we ought to act in such a way that we live the most fulfilled life we possibly can without regard to what comes after it. I regularly put these two views in tension by asking questions about how Plato or Aristotle might respond to various claims found in modern religion or within our cultural zeitgeist. Students enjoy taking a side and usually root for one of the philosophers and against all the rest by the end of the course.
When picking new material, I ask myself if this adds anything to the story that is not already covered. It limits what I choose, but this keeps me from boring the students with redundant or overly similar responses to the problem. For example, when I first taught Introduction to Philosophy, I included three more writings from existentialist philosophers than I currently have in the syllabus. While the students enjoyed reading them, I noticed that the course began to lose momentum and the focus on the overall narrative. Eventually I decided to eliminate some of these readings because their viewpoints were too similar for each to contribute significantly to the narrative.
Last, I work to tell the story in a way in which all students can find interest: I treat the first day of class as a general introduction to the theme of the course, giving them an outright synopsis of the course as a whole, resembling the summary found on the back of a novel. I choose material about which I am very passionate because it makes it easier for my students to pick up on that enthusiasm in my lecture. I also try to choose a story to which everyone can relate. For example, the theme of death and how it shapes our self-understanding applies universally to all mortal beings. Until science finds a solution to human mortality, this course should continue to resonate with all students. Of course, when they solve the problem of mortality, I will design a new class reflecting on the problem of living forever! (There is already great literature on the subject.)
In my experience, the advantages of teaching through narrative outweigh the costs. By designing the course as a gradually unfolding story, I am better able to keep students engaged, reading, and coming to class ready to discuss. Not only does it provide direction for the design of my course, but it also plays a big role in how I structure the classroom lecture and discussion.
At the start of each class, I ask my students to tell me the story as we currently understand it. Starting with the first day of lecture, I ask the students to rebuild what we have talked about in their own words. At the start of the semester, we spend a lot of time reviewing the finer details of the previous lectures. I ask them to tell me the major arguments and various counter arguments we read, as well as our characters and which side of the conflict they stand on. As the semester progresses, I start to ask them more complicated questions about the lectures from before. I might ask them to explain how Socrates avoided a particular charge in his trial. This requires students to take pieces of the story and put them together on their own. By demonstrating this in class and in the review, this process becomes very natural for the students to pick up. As we move further into the semester, I start to ask them broader questions about the tone or character of a dialogue rather than its content. This consistent shift to the broader context serves two purposes: It keeps the review portion of the class from completely consuming all of the lecture time. (As it stands, I still spend a good twenty minutes reviewing some days.) It also enables me to shift the focus from the finer details towards the bigger picture. To use a tried and true metaphor, we begin to see the forest rather than the trees.
Pedagogical research suggests that this process of recalling material repeatedly in the form of a narrative helps students learn the material and store it in their long-term memory. (Willingham pg. 55) By the time my students take their midterm, they have encountered the material more than five times in four different formats. First, they read the material on their own. Second, they answer pre-class reading questions on Canvas, drawing the focus towards key points in the story that I want them to re-read. Third, they hear their peers explain their views on the material in class discussion. Fourth, they hear me correct or expand what their peer has said. Fifth, they hear it again in the review starting in the subsequent class. The point may even reach their ears a sixth and seventh time if it is essential to other parts of the greater story we are telling. The goal is that for each thing I want them to learn, they have read about it, written about it, spoken about it, heard about it, and related it to the greater narrative of the course as a whole.
All in all, this approach has been well-received by my students. The positive course evaluations I have received over the last two years demonstrate how effective this narrative style can be, even with difficult material involved. Stories have a way of making the most complex concepts intelligible to us, as well as making engaging with those concepts meaningful and exciting.
The links below include an observation of my class written by a colleague, a sample midterm paper, syllabi from this semester and previous classes, and a copy of the spreadsheet discussed in the “Miscellaneous” portion of this portfolio.