A thousand conversations

I was labelled a 'radical' yesterday by one of my colleagues. Well, bless. I hadn't thought about myself in those terms before, because what I do is instinctive and what I write about seems to be absolutely normal to me. But standing back from me and trying to look in from the outside, I suppose some might think I was slightly out of left field, or that some of my ideas were idealistic. Whatever.

What I would like to know is, what does 'radical' actually mean in the context of education? A post on my blog last year, entitled Outrageous Alternatives outlined a brief history of what are considered to be radical approaches to schooling. Others have also written recently about radical ideas about how to effect the transformation of education many of us wish to see.

If you're into 'radical' thought, one set of resources I can highly recommend is by Beth Davies-Stofka. She curates an excellent Scoop.it site called Radical Education which is crammed full of great blog posts written to get us all thinking about how we can transform education and create more effective learning environments. In a post on digital storytelling, Aleks Krotoski writes:

"Human experience is a series of never-ending, overlapping stories bumping into one another in expected and unexpected ways. Our days are made up of personal narratives of good and evil, joy and conflict, magic potions and angry gnomes."

I can subscribe to this. The magic potion in this part of the world would be cider of course. Even the angry gnomes part can be a little too close to the truth, in this neck of the woods. Krotoski goes on to elaborate about why storytelling is so important:

"They are naturally co-creations based on a push and pull of projection and interpretation. We interpret, analyse and synthesise the characters and events in our lives to help us make sense of the world, and these have been translated by professionals into folk tales, myths, legends, pantomime, bestsellers, soap operas and Hollywood blockbusters. Storytellers are simply curators of information who finesse the elements of a yarn into a beginning, middle and end."

Story telling is important to all of us. It goes beyond a mere collection of events. We tell the story of our lives when we meet. We make sense of the world around us as we relate our histories. We establish norms and decide what is important for our community. Krotoski again: "Stories are memory aids, instruction manuals and moral compasses. When enlisted by charismatic leaders and turned into manifestos, dogmas and social policy, they've been the foundations for religions and political systems. When a storyteller has held an audience captive around a campfire, a cinema screen or on the page of a bestseller, they've reinforced local and universal norms about where we've been and where we're going. And when they've been shared in the corner shop, at the pub or over dinner they've helped us define who we are and how we fit in."

In short, story telling can be very powerful. It's powerful because it is a route through to making sense of our worlds - one of our prime motivators in life. It is our common search for the tacit knowledge that will enable us to survive. If something doesn't make sense, or if there is a clash of principles in our heads (cognitive dissonance), we go all out to try to resolve the conflict. That is how tacit learning happens. According to Thomas and Seely-Brown (2011), you can't teach tacit knowledge. Unlike explicit knowledge, which is peddled every day in our schools in the form of lessons full of facts, this deeper 'tacit' knowldge has to be experienced personally by each individual before it becomes theirs to own and to use. Storytelling takes each participant on a personal journey through a sometimes bewildering landscape of opportunities to acquire this kind of learning.

Digital storytelling can take our personal narratives up to a new plane of experience. The tools available to us today enable us to take companions on our journey through this terrain. We can co-create content, tell the story to each other regardless of location, and rework it so that it has common meaning and purpose. Our stories can be told time and time again, each time differently, with each version taking on a greater richness than its predecessor.

Is digital storytelling a radical departure from traditional education practices? I don't think so. We have been telling each other stories since the day we could string a sentence together. Children tell jokes in the playground. They write essays about what they did during their holidays. Children read Harry Potter and watch Eastenders on evening TV. It's something they are habituated into. Yet there is something new in the way our own stories can be generated, shared, repurposed and retold. The digital tools we now have at our disposal enable what Rose (2010) calls "multi-way conversation." For Rose, storytelling has reached a new pitch, has opened up space into a new social dimension: "It's very different when you have a medium that forces you to engage with other people," he says. "You don't know if you're going to have to tell a story for one hour, two hours or 10 years."

Telling your story is an age-old cultural practice. Digital storytelling takes it to another level, involving global conversations, multiple versions, and a cast of thousands. The radical part is where our understanding of the world around us can be transformed through these conversations. You don't need school for that.

References
Rose, F. (2010) The Art of Immersion: How the digital generation is remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the way we tell stories. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.
Thomas, D. and Seely-Brown, J (2011) A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. USA: Create Space.

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A thousand conversations by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.