Cross Curricular Narratives

I love when my classes relate to each other and make more sense then they did at first. Here's a reading log I wrote reflecting on "From Tourist to Storyteller: Reading and Writing Science" by Dawn Abt-Perkins & Gian Pagnucci 

The Learning Process, PED 3101, Week 4 Reading Log:

This week’s article takes us through the journey of students trying to contextualize and further understand scientific reports. This article targets the concept of learning through narrative. The idea however is not just reading stories, but rather writing, constructing, and building narrative through all subject matter. Narrative allows students to take difficult and new information and draw into a more familiar narrative understanding. Narrative is described as a human essential to learning. Humans have the need to organize and make sense of our experiences through narrative and narrative sharing. It’s a way of giving structure to new concepts. Story telling also implies immersing oneself in the text, in the experience, which essentially allows you to become actively involved in the narrative.  Stories allow you to take dull, procedural texts and insert human understanding, sequential ordering of events, as well as narrator’s perspective. In essence, narratives give meaning to abstract concepts; concepts that are sometimes far removed from your own personal experiences. I think narrative, and really any type of writing is imperative within the classroom. It is one of the few ways to get students to take information they are acquiring and analyze it, criticize it, and make meaning that is understandable to them. My only fear with writing is how often is a teacher supposed to implement it into the classroom routine? Also, how do educators overcome the anxiety that writing may cause to students, especially those in younger grades, or those with exceptionalities?


Through class discussions I also realized that narratives do not only mean stories. Narrative can be used in Math, for example, by creating a review game using a common theme your students enjoy (like a food joint everyone goes to, or a popular movie). Another way of using narrative is in Social Studies. The Social Studies curriculum often lacks primary sources. This is a great interactive way to get students to write their own. If you're discussing nature disasters, for example, have students write a personal narrative about a natural disaster their family may have gone through, or if the topic is Canadian History, have the students write a personal narrative of their own perspective of Canadian History. There are so many places where teachers can use narratives!