How is the lecture narrative?

This post is a write-up of the presentation I gave at Storyville13 - the Higher Education Academy (Arts and Humanities) conference in Brighton on 29-30 May 2013. Here's the Storify archive link for the event. The presentation was called The Role of Narrative in the Lecture: can we make lectures resonate through narrative structure?

Narrative and stories have long been used in education, including higher education and narrative is also used as a method in (educational) research – collecting personal narratives for example but narrative also has implications for the structure, content and delivery of teaching material (including the lecture) which is where the focus of this research lies.

Lecturing can involve narrative in at least three interlinked ways. First, the delivery of the teaching material in a lecture can be seen as a performance by the lecturer that has to convince the student audience by invoking a response that is beyond what might be expected from a simple statement of fact or information. Simply put, the lecturer has to move the audience in order to be effective.

Secondly, pedagogical knowledge itself can be thought of as narrative as the lecturer has chosen and crafted it themselves with the student audience in mind and so the content of the lecture itself can be thought of as narrative.

Finally, the lecture can have an overall narrative structure and may also contain various narrative devices within its duration.

So why use narrative? Why not just state the facts? Rossiter’s quote hints about the engagement that narrative affords..."leaving space in which the learner can interact with the subject".

In my research I’m using a framework developed by Nancy Duarte in her book Resonate, which focuses on the importance of stories - primarily in business presentations -  as a means of persuading an audience to engage with a product, brand, mission statement, set of values etc. Duarte developed her framework by analysing famous speeches and presentations by the likes of Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, Richard Feynmann and others. Her framework draws on literary and cinematic traditions and focuses on the importance of engaging the audience through a contrasting dramatic rhythm in presenting and a structure that makes meaning clear through impassioned contrast.

Including emotion in a lecture doesn’t mean it should be half fact and half emotion, it means introducing appeal that invokes a response in the audience. This is most easily done through the use of stories and a recognisable narrative structure.

The importance of using stories is two-fold:

1. They contain complex information, which the audience can make meaning from and that influences and inspires them.
2. They allow the audience to make connections, engage and empathise through emotion. 

 
Duarte’s presentational form is shown in the diagram below – it doesn’t suggest that all successful speeches or presentations should adhere to this format rigidly – it’s flexible.

Things to note:

• There’s a clear beginning, middle and end.
• There are two turning points in the structure to guide audience through the content and to separate the beginning from the middle and the middle from the end:
• The first one is a call to adventure showing the gap between what is and what could be – needs to be big to jolt the audience and create imbalance that they wantto be resolved; 
• The second is a call to action, which identifies what the audience need to do or how they need to change – this signifies that the presentation is drawing to its conclusion.
• The back and forth structural motion pulls and pushes the audience to feels events are unfolding and so they will stay engaged as ideas and perspectives are unwrapped frequently.
  Each presentation ends with a vivid description of the new bliss that’s created when the audience adopts the new idea but note that the form does not stop here as the presentation aims to persuade the audience to complete a subsequent action afterwards – crossing the threshold.

 

Below is a field note from one of the lectures that I have observed as part of my pilot work for my doctorate. It displays the contrasting rhythm described by Duarte but also has a planned story half-way through, which is the catalyst for a vigorous discussion amongst the class. The story is designed to create this response, rather than being a device for supporting theory or other teaching points made. I have called this type of story, Trojan Horse.

One of the clear points I noticed in observing all these lectures was the different ways that narrative was used by lecturers within their lecture. Some were designed and planned, some were spontaneous reactions, unconscious to the lecturer as stories and some had very deliberate intentions other than the story itself. So here is my typology of narrative within lectures so far.

References:

Duarte, N. (2010) Resonate – Present Visual Stories that transform Audiences. New Jersey: John Wiley& Sons
Rossiter, M. (2002) Narrative and Stories in Adult Teaching and Learning. ERIC Digest No. 241. [Online] Accessed at http://calpro-online.org/eric/docs/dig241.pdf

What's the Use of Lectures?

After a lot of thinking, discussing and soul searching I decided last year that there was a topic I was so interested in that I wanted to spend a goodly amount of time researching it seriously. Fast forward six months and I have submitted a doctorate application to a university and am awaiting a decision. I am pleased and excited for several reasons. First, because I actually managed to find the head space and time to do some reading and thinking about my topic. Second, because I went beyond my usual procrastinating to actually writing down my thoughts and creating what I think is a reasonable proposal. Third, because I was organised enough to marshall my qualification transcripts, examples of other written work, references and my CV for uploading into my online application before the deadline. In fact, I think I should get a qualification just for getting the application in. Most of all I am excited because in doing all of the above I realised how much I want to do this research. For the first time in a long time I am  interested in something for its own sake and it feels great.

My research topic is the result of being influenced by two books - yes real books! The first one is a classic research text, first published in 1972. It's by Donald Bligh and is called 'What's the Use of Lectures?'. The second book was published much later in 2010, it's by Nancy Duarte and is called 'Resonate - present visual stories that transform audiences'. These two books are the ingredients behind what I want to look at which is whether the university lecture has a narrative or story structure.

Two books that have influenced me

Bligh's book, which has been republished many times in the forty years since 1972, details the plethora of research that has been carried over many years to show that (in a nutshell) the lecture as a teaching method is only effective at the transmission of factual information, and even at this it is no better than other teaching methods. In essence, this book and many other sources describe how unfit for educational purpose the standard university lecture is.

My starting point in thinking about the lecture was a growing dismay at the poor use of presentational technologies, such as PowerPoint, by lecturers during their teaching sessions. I include my own lectures in this.  Imagine the experience of the average fresher sitting in the darkened lecture theatre on week one of their degree waiting expectantly for their lecturer to deliver the very first lecture. The average student will experience between 250-300 lectures, probably most using PowerPoint, before they emerge after three years with their qualification.

When Bligh wrote his book, PowerPoint and Keynote were a long way off. So imagine that not only are lectures not an effective method of teaching, they may have actually been made worse by the use of new technology. That's not progress.

Stories, storytelling and narrative have long had a role in education, including higher education. Stories and narrative help with meaning making of experiences. Duarte's book describes how story structures are found in many great speeches, presentations and artistic performances and how they are fundamental to communication. So if a company wants to inspire change in its employees or if a politician wants to elicit loyalty in their followers, they use narrative to connect with their audiences, create support for their vision and effect change in people.

Here she is talking about her 'Resonate' approach.

My starting point on this was wondering if Duarte's ideas could be applied in a higher educational context to the humble lecture? Surely the goal of education is to inspire, move and change people. Perhaps narrative and stories offers a way forward for the much maligned (probably PowerPoint-based) lecture.

I hope we shall see.