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Stories for Thinking

© Robert Fisher

Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to the book ‘First Stories for Thinking’ (Fisher 1999) followed by a sample story and discussion plans.

INTRODUCTION

A teacher was reading the story of Winnie the Pooh to her class and reached the point where Piglet's grandfather is said to have two names 'in case he lost one'. The teacher paused and asked 'Can you lose a name?' There was a pause for thought and a shaking of heads. Suddenly a hand went up, 'You could if you forgot it!'

One of the chief benefits of using story a stimulus for thinking in the clasroom is that a good story arouses the interest and involvement of the child. For Whitehead (in Aims of Education) this was an essential first stage in what he argued should be the 'Cycle of Learning' whose stages he identified as follows:

Stage 1: Romance - involving arousal of interest and learner involvement

Stage 2: Precision - where attention is given to the details of what is being learnt

Stage 3: Generalisation - where what is learned is applied and used

What story-starters for thinking should provide for young children is romance, an engagement of the learner in a narrative context, a motivation to be involved and to find out more. In stories there is an important link between memory, emotion and imagination. If a story is worthy then the children will be emotionally committed to it. If children are affected by the story-line their engagement will ensure a pathway to accessing its content, and its potential for thinking and learning.

Egan (1988) suggests a way in to the assessment of stories as potential vehicles for philosophical discussion. Egan advocates that teachers identify the binary opposites within a teaching topic. One way to identify what is important in a story is to find the binary opposites that are embodied in the story, for example life/death, good/evil, hope/despair etc. These can then become a focus for discussion, for generalisation from the concrete and particular elements of the story (and of our lives), to the important questions and concepts that matter to us all. These binary opposites may relate to matters of personal concern such as love/hate, friends/enemies, right/wrong; or more philosophical issues such what is real/not real, the nature of life/death, and what the origins are of differences in the world.

The fantasy element of stories allows children to reflect more clearly on real experiences through powerful imaginary experience. Donaldson (1978) observes that there exists 'a fundamental human urge to make sense of the world and bring it under deliberate control'. She argues that this urge for children to make meaning is best served in contexts not totally 'disembedded' from their world of experience. Stories, when comprehensible to children, have the advantage of being embedded in human concerns such as characters, events and binary themes, and yet offer the child the chance to 'decentre' from the immediacy of their personal lives. They become able to look at themselves through looking at and thinking about others.

We cannot argue or explore without content or subject-matter (although 'nothing' can be fascinating topic for discussion). There must be a starting point - and narrative can provide an effective stimulus for critical thinking, interpretation and argument. In this broad sense argument, seen as dialogue across differences of opinion, will be a characteristic of discussion about any complex or problematical narrative. The processes through which this is achieved can be summed up as:

  • questioning the narrative, through teacher or children asking questions about the story
  • interpretating the narrative , making meaning, giving reasons and judgements about the story
  • discussingthe narrative, to try to resolve any problems and questions that have arisen

Because stories are human constructions they require an act of translation, of critical listening or reading if they are to made meaningful by the hearer or reader. The meaning of a story must be re-constructed in the mind. There are several elements to narrative constructions that are open to reflection, interpretation and discussion.

The following are some of the problematic features of a story:

1. Temporal order

All stories express a unique pattern of events over time. Sometimes these events are chronological, but they occur in 'human time' rather than in 'clock time', that is time made significant by the human meaning of events in the plot. There are many conventions in which temporal order can be expressed, for example 'Once upon a time...', flashbacks, flash-forwards and so on. To ask children to reconstruct the temporal events of a story is to do more than merely to exercise their memory, it is to provide the challenging task of narrative reconstruction and meaning-making. And as anyone who has asked a group of children to do this with a familiar story provide a stimulus for much argument and debate. Questions to help children comprehend the temporal order of a story include:

'Who remembers what happened in the story?'

'What happened in the beginning/middle/end?'

'What does 'Once upon a time' mean?'

2. Particular events

Stories are made meaningful by particular happenings. These particular events fall into patterns that become story types and genre. Each particular event, and groups or patterns of events are open to interpretation. The usual locus of the drama of a story is trouble or conflict of some kind. And of particular relevance in any story are precipitating events, which cause as it were an imbalance or disharmony, and where the problematic nature of life becomes apparent. It is in the comprehending of particular problems through interpretation that the educative power of stories lay, and not simply an understanding of the consoling plot.

The events in a story constitute the genre, that is the loose but conventional way of representing generic aspects of the human situation. The genre of the text may be open to question, indeed any text may relate to a number of genres. A genre is not just a property of the text but is a way of interpreting and coming to understand the text. It follows that there can be different versions of any text or event. Indeed there may be competing versions of a story or any event within a narrative, and the negotiation between different narrative versions is essential in social understanding and in understanding the nature of fiction. This process of developing understanding about the nature of narrative is gradual, but it can be helped by reflecting on and interpreting the particular events that make up stories. The following are some questions that can help guide interpretation of particular events in stories:

'What kind of event/episode/story is it?' 'Why did this event happen/what caused it?'

'What exactly happened?' 'What could have happened?'

'What should have happened?' 'What could/should happen next?'

3. Intentions

Stories are about people (or animals, robots, magical beings etc.) with intentional states such as beliefs , desires, theories, values and so on. Problems arise because it is not always clear what a given character's intentional states are, and even when they are clear the intentional states do not necessarily determine events. Because the links between intentions and actions are loose, narrative accounts do not offer complete causal explanations. Human intentionality presupposes some element of choice or freedom to choose. We can only interpret by reflecting from our own experience how a character feels or what s/he perceives in a given situation and the reasons for things happening as they do in the story. In a sense every outer adventure has an inner adventure, which is represented in the hidden mental processes of the characters.

Such interpretative discussion could be informed by questions such as:

'What does x believe...?' 'What does x want?'

'What does x think..? 'What does x want others to think...?'

'What reasons would x give?' 'What does x think that y should do ...?'

'Why does x think that...?' 'What does x hope will happen...?'

4. Meanings

A successful story is a whole, it has coherence, and like any construct can be studied as a whole. Even in well-known and well-rehearsed stories there are challenges to our understanding of the whole, and ambiguous elements which we have try to make meaningful. In the most familiar of stories there is a meta-discourse relating to the intentions of the author - why the story is told, and the contextual issue of politico-social conditions - background knowledge of where and when the story was created. Questions to help children interpret the meanings of a story might include:

'What does this story tell us...?' What is the moral of the story?'

'What kind of story is it?' 'Who do you think wrote/told it first?'

'Where does the story come from?' 'Can you think of a/another title to the story?'

'What would you say the story was about?' 'Is there anything puzzling about the story?'

'What does the author/story not tell us?' 'In what ways is it like/unlike other stories?'

5. The telling

Another element of narrative analysis is the distinction between the narrative plot, and its mode of telling. A genre is not only a form of plot, but is also a style of telling. In a sense there are only a basic number of plots, but infinite ways in which they can be told. It could be argued that the function of inventive narrative is not so much to create new plots as to render previously familiar ones uncertain or problematical. The storyteller or writer's task is in a sense to make the ordinary strange, to challenge the reader into an interpretative response. Any story is heavily influenced by narrative traditions, but good stories exhibit creative innovation, goes beyond conventional scripts, leading people to see things in fresh ways. This can be in terms of the twists of a plot, or in the style of telling. This involves evaluation not only of the plot - what happened in the story, also why it was worth telling and how it was told. Some accounts are poorly told, they are not story-like and people will often see them as 'pointless'. Others involve innovation of content or style - a breach of expectations - to create something that is unique and rewarding. Questions to aid interpretation of the telling might include;

'Was there anything special about the story?' ' Was it a well-told story?'

'Have you heard other stories like this?' 'What was different about this story?'

'Could you tell this story in a different way?' Could you change the characters or events?'

'If you told the story differently would it be the same story?'

SAMPLE STORY AND DISCUSSION PLAN

The bear that spoke

One day in the cold lands of Canada two friends went out hunting. They were tracking a moose through the great pinewood forests. Snow carpeted the ground and as they trod through it they heard no sound. They did not suspect that as they followed the track of the moose there were two eyes watching them.

The two hunters stopped, hoping to spot the flash of antlers through the trees. Behind them a dark shadow moved across the snow. Closer and closer it came. One of the hunters glanced round. 'It's a bear!' he shouted.

The huge grizzly bear, a mass of brown fur and claws, was almost upon them. Without a second's thought the two men ran. They knew that their only hope was to find a place of refuge. One of them pointed to a nearby pine tree, and ran towards it. As soon as he reached it he began to climb faster than he had ever climbed before. His friend however tripped over a root in the snow. He fell with a crash into the snow.

'Help! I think I've sprained my ankle!' he shouted.

The man in the tree looked round. He could see that the bear was still some way off. But what could he do? What should he do? He decided to carry on climbing.

The man on the ground lay quite still and held his breath. The nerves in his body tingled with fear as he could hear the 'scrunch, scrunch' of paws on snow coming nearer and nearer. The bear lumbered up to him, and began snuffle suspiciously round his head. The man could feel the bear's hot breath on his face. He didn't move a muscle. The bears claws scratched at thesnow. Then there was a soft padding sound as the bear ambled slowly away.

'He's left me alone,' thought the man. 'he must have thought I was dead.' At once he felt a surge of pain in his sprained ankle.

High in the tree his friend saw the bear disappear into the bushes. He waited a few minutes until he was sure it was quite safe, then carefully climbed down. He ran quickly to his friend who was still lying flat in the snow. He helped the man sit up, and soon had helped him to bandage up his ankle.

Seeing his friend was none the worse for his meeting with the bear, the hunter who had climbed the tree said, 'I knew you'd be all right. I guess you were safer down there than I was up that tree.' Trying to cheer his friend, who still looked hurt, he added, 'Hey, that bear was so close he seemed to be whispering something in your ear. Come on, tell me, did he say something to you?'

'Well' the other replied, 'what the bear said was I should never trust a friend who deserts you when things get difficult.'

(Canadian folktale, a variation of one of Aesop's fables)

Thinking about the story

Key question: What does the story mean?

1. What were the friends hunting? Where were they hunting? What was it like there?

2. Why had they gone out hunting? What reasons might they have had?

3. Why were they so scared of the bear? Were they right to feel scared?

4. What happened when they saw the bear? What might have happened next?

5. Do you think the man in the tree should have left the man who had fallen in the snow?

6. What could the man in the tree have done? What should he have done? What would you

have done?

7. Why did the bear come close to the man and sniff him?

8. Why did the man say the bear had whispered something to him?

9. Can animals speak, or communicate in any way, with other animals or humans?

10. This story is based on one of Aesop's fables. What do you think the moral of the story

should be?

Thinking about friendship

Key question : What is a friend?

1. What is a friend? Can you give a definition?

2. Can you be a friend to someone you do not like?

3. Can you be a friend to someone you hardly talk to?

4. Can people fight and still be friends? Can people never fight and be friends?

5. Can someone have no friends? What would it be like to have no friends?

6. Can everybody be a friend? Could you be friends with everyone?

7. What makes a friend a special person? Is it someone with whom you are always honest?

8. Who are your friends - classmates, animals, teachers, your neighbours, your family?

9. Are the friends of a friend always your friend?

10. How do you make friends?

Further activities

  • Write a list of the qualities of a friend e.g. 'A friend is someone who ...'
  • Make up a play about a quarrel between friends, and show how the quarrel is resolved
  • Draw or paint your best friend.
  • Listen and respond to: Elgar's portrait of friends in music - Enigma Variations e.g. Nimrod, or With a Little Help from My Friends by the Beatles ('Sergeant Pepper' album).
  • Share some letters from pen-friends,. Investigate making a pen-friend of someone living in another country.

About this book

The reference for this book is: Fisher R. (1996), ‘Stories for Thinking’, Oxford: Nash Pollock.

For an introduction to the theory and practice of Philosophy for Children see Teaching Thinking: Philosophical Enquiry in the Classroom and the website www.sapere.org.uk For ways of using poems with children see Poems for Thinking and for using stories with younger children see First Stories for Thinking.

© Robert Fisher