Browsing by Subject "Narratiivinen opetus"

Applying the narrative approach in research has had an increasing interest in the field of educational science. This approach takes into account humans’ natural tendency to produce stories as a part of structuring information. Telling stories is considered to arise from two basic human needs, which are to understand who am I? and what is the world like we live in? Narrative teaching means to organize teaching in a way that pupils may produce narratives about the subject being studied as a part of their learning process. This may lead to meaningful learning, when the theme being studied is unified into the students’ life and life story. This thesis intended to review fictional storytelling in learning an abstractive concept. As the subject has not been studied through the framework of narrative teaching, the thesis evaluated what kind of context storytelling creates for learning. This context was called story world. In addition, this research examined what perspectives the structure of the story creates related to the studied theme. Story structure was examined through the aristocratic basic structure: the beginning, the middle, and the end. This thesis was conducted as a qualitative case study. The data was gathered in November-December 2019 in a Southern Finnish school from a multidisciplinary teaching period which was handling equality. The material was formed of six fifth graders’ written film scripts which were stories about equality. In addition to these narratives, the same six students’ interviews were used in the analysis. The film scripts were analyzed with narrative analysis and plot structure analysis. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed with material-based content analysis. In this case, the “story world” appeared as a state, where it is possible to experiment and observe consequences and contemplate meanings in the protection of the fictive and imaginary environment. Secondly, it appeared as a state that supports flexible change in perspective though the created characters. Lastly, it also enabled observing matters in the students’ own experiences through the mirrored phenomena. The structure of the story seemed to produce different perspectives to review equality. In the beginning stage, equality was observed through problems that are related to it, by pondering when problems occur and why it is worthwhile to aim for change. In the middle stage, it was evaluated what can be done or needs to happen to make change. The perspective in the ending lead to observe how equality manifests itself when it is materialized. The benefit of story writing is that it creates a narrative perspective about concepts at hand, where the concept’s meaning is reviewed through everyday life situations and as a continuous phenomenon.