Author/s: Peter Willis
Edition: Volume 51, Special edition, December 2011
Summary: In this paper I use a story to introduce the idea of stories in adult educational practice. Telling stories seems to be as old as human culture. MacIntyre referred to humans as ‘story-telling animals’(1981: 201). The secret is the ways in which this storytelling capacity can be used in a holistic humanistic pedagogy. Education, the process of assisting others to learn, can be pursued by seeking to pass on information (propositional pedagogy); by showing how to do something (skilling pedagogy) and by inviting learners to become different (transformative pedagogy). Many actual educational exchanges involve learners in more than one kind of learning where the educational event has elements of information and skills transfer, often combined at least tacitly with an invitation to become different.
In this paper I suggest that the telling of stories that capture the imagination and move the heart is a powerful pedagogy in inviting learning not so much to do with gaining new information, although this can often happen, nor transferring skills, which again can also occur, but with a deeper transformative form of learning, which is really more about learners changing their identity, their way of seeing and acting upon the world. .
Keywords: stories, adult learning, humanistic, pedagogy, transformative, skill transfer
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This article is part of AJAL, Volume 51_4_Special Edition. The entire volume is available in .pdf for purchase here.