Storytelling As Pedagogy
By: Austin Dannhaus
Tags: Story, Education, Course

Storytelling As Pedagogy

What’s missing in educational content

It’s no secret that most educational content is pretty boring, especially when compared to all of the other information vying for learners’ attention.

High-quality digital content for the formal education sector is expensive to make considering the size of the addressable market, and it’s unclear that the educational benefits justify the current cost. In recent years, folks in the education community have pushed for greater investment in the creation of better educational videos, creative learning games and digital platforms with award-winning user experiences. The educational benefits of these investments, however, appear to be marginal at best.

Despite the murky ROI, these investments are not misguided. Early perhaps, but not misguided. Students at every level will benefit from quality educational material that provides an engaging and informative learning experience. It just may take some time for the economics to work out and the pedagogical frameworks of these tools to be more clear. I look forward to the day when we have West Wing-esque government lessons, Halo-quality learning games, and Slack-style learning platforms.

Even if we arrive at this utopian future full of high-quality learning content, we may not get the outcomes we hope for. Why? In my experience, educational content tends to be very modular. You might have a series of high-quality lessons to use for a given unit, but they don’t necessarily “fit” with the content for the rest of the course. Semesters don’t have through lines outside of the broadly defined subject matter.

What’s missing then?

Stitching it together with story

A small first step in the direction of (far) more compelling courses for students involves tapping into the power of story. Humans have always used narrative to make meaning, form identity and explain the world around us. In the context of learning, stories can stitch together information and place knowledge in the context of our experiences — using the all-important “real world applications” of learning to answer the question of “why does this matter to me?” in a way that feels natural.

To illustrate what I mean, let me tell you a quick story.

My senior year as a finance undergraduate began on the heels of the financial crisis in the summer of 2008. One of my professors threw out the textbook so to speak — getting away from the tightly-scoped-and-sequenced approach to explaining financial concepts — and asked us to read the Wall Street Journal before class. He told us to pay close attention to news about what was happening in domestic and global financial markets as a result of the housing collapse. The story of the Great Recession was unfolding right before our eyes, and that real-time narrative became the backbone of our course.

The news of the day became the story of finance for our class. There was an endless string of turns and twists, with heroes and villains entering the plot everyday. We used this driving narrative as the jumping off point for in-depth discussions and assignments related to the principles of finance at work. Our class explored the complexity of the mortgage-backed securities at the heart of the story, the rapidly fluctuating valuations of the companies involved, and the larger macroeconomic trends at play.

Just a few weeks ago, I went to see The Big Short and was reminded of this course. The movie was a course itself, first engaging the audience through story and pausing at key moments to explain what was happening from a financial perspective. It’s an illustrative example of what courses could be.

Some of you reading this will be quick to point out that it’s common practice for professors to use stories to supplement a course. I remember reading A Civil Action in a Business Law class. My point, though, is that we should consider elevating the role of story in our courses — from grade school through college — and make story more than just a feature.

A few useful stories-as-courses

As I thought about the importance of story as a framework for future course development, I racked my brain for similar examples that would be useful. Here are a few examples of books that offer a similar approach for mathematics, literature, and the social sciences: