If you teach, online or in the classroom, chances are you use stories. Have you ever fabricated a story because you didn’t have a real one that made your point?
I have long been interested in the power of storytelling in education; my article, Storytelling at a Distance, was the third article published in eLearn magazine when it started in 2001. Most of what I said I agree with today. It hasn’t been impacted by advancements in technology.
However, what has changed is my attitude toward fabrication. I was a purist at the time: I did not fabricate stories when teaching. I perhaps exaggerated occasionally (the fish was this big), but that was all.
I gave a number of talks on storytelling and remember vividly how appalled I was when someone I knew confessed that he fabricated stories all the time. He said he used real people in situations that illustrated his points.
I am taking an acting workshop and learned about authenticity, which as I understand it, is more about how you feel that what you say. I have come to realize that what this teacher did was fine since it was authentic for him and was also not meant to mislead anyone.
At the time I asked him if fabricated stories could violate the trust we all work so hard to build with our students and he said no. And he might be right about that, with the new insights I gained through acting – and isn’t teaching a form of acting?
I wrote about the use of stories in health Web sites, where they serve a somewhat different purpose than in education. My launching point was a Web site that was caught using employee-generated stories and fined. The parallel to education is not the stories teachers tell, but the Web sites that portray programs in a certain way and, just like some health stories, try to entice you to become a student. I’ve never heard of a school being fined for fabricated stories, just for deceptive practices, which is another story.
I am curious if others agree with my new stance, that fabricated stories can be authentic because of the intent and the underlying authenticity.
There are different kinds of authenticity, I guess. Out of context, the normal sense of the word would be “truth” or “fact”. But we can also speak of a performance being authentic, meaning emotionally true and accurate. Passing off fiction as fact in order to sell something is ethically offensive. Myself, I’m uncomfortable letting people think a made-up story I use in teaching is true, but it depends a bit on the nature of the story. I can imagine cases where the veracity of a story is irrelevant, and the students wouldn’t care one way or the other. But I can also imagine cases where the veracity is crucial, and pretending the fiction is true is a betrayal of trust. I could invent a neat story to prove this point, of course.
I think fabricated stories could violate trust. If you do not have a story of your own…then tell one you heard…just give credit! If you make it up…then make sure your students know that it is fabricated story.
Lisa,
Interesting post and I believe there is some truth to the authenticity so I think fabricating stories to make a point is ok.
However, I think we, as educators, don’t need to represent a fabricated story as true. If it is fabricated, we need to come clean on that fabrication from the beginning.
We can use introductions such as “Here is a story I’ve created to illustrate my point…” or “Let me tell you a parable or story to highlight what I am saying” r, “Here is a fictional story of what might happen if you don’t follow the rules.”
In each of those cases, you are letting the learner’s know that the story didn’t really happen (its fabricated) but still giving yourself an opportunity to tell a compelling story. You can even say (if true), “The story I am about to tell you is based on true events…but didn’t really happen that way”
The idea is that you can incorporate that story into your toolkit and us it even though it is not your story or isn’t 100% true or real.
I even say, “As a fellow trainer once told me…” I think that in all but rare cases, the learner doesn’t have to believe the story is real only that it could happen. Even known parables provide powerful meaning.
I don’t think we should mis-lead the learner and I don’t think we need to. We can just tell a story and credit the source of the story…even if the source is our own imagination.
I think the answer is disclosure. If you do not disclose that it is fabricated then it is dishonest. Books are labeled fiction or non-fiction and some movies are based on a true story. The disclosure is there though. But, even with disclosure the storyteller could embellish a true story in a dishonest way.
Lisa, your post raises a really interesting issue and it is one that I (with my research colleagues Tom Reeves and Ron Oliver) have explored in some depth. Our work has looked at authentic learning environments and authentic tasks and whether they need to be real. Some say that the environments should be real (such as Savery and Duffy), but we argue that – while real is OK if you can manage it – they do not need to be real to be effective online or in the classroom. Our work has focused on the design of tasks that are “cognitively real”, tasks that give students the opportunity to think like professionals, using knowledge as if it were used in the real world. Designing these tasks is difficult, but that is where the pedagogy resides. And that is why you could create authentic tasks (according to our definition) that are in the future or the past, based on scenarios and problems that are realistic, rather than real. The same may be true for stories, where the important elements are pedagogical rather than actual.
I think many stories that have been told over years can be described as having some form of fabrication. Not all stories happen the way they were written.
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I think fabricated stories can have a place of their own. Although I’m strictly against using such stories, I think when the occasion is right one can give such a tale. bird spikes
Hey Lisa, I really enjoyed that article you wrote. This discussion has really peaked my interest as I am a teacher at a local high school part time
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