Questioning our ideologies about narrative and learning: Response to Egan
✍ Scribed by Christine C. Pappas
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1993
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 578 KB
- Volume
- 5
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0898-5898
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
My response to Egan's (1993) provocative article will consist of questioning his assumptions regarding narrative, on which he rested his arguments and implications for teaching practices and curriculum structure. I believe that Egan's work represents an ideology about the primacy of narrative in sense-making, and that such a belief prevents us from understanding the other ways that humansincluding children-know and mean in our culture. Thus, I will argue that curriculum and teaching practices that rely heavily on the "narrative as primary" notion, will not ultimately engender in children an appreciation of the ways in which intellectual thought is reflected by various disciplines, nor how disciplines, as cultural frames of sense-making, are realized by particular semiotic systems or linguistic genres.
My argument will be marshaled along three avenues. First, I propose that Egan's equating the concepts schemata and scripts with stories is misleading, as well as his use of a narrative thesis to interpret Hughes's work that is found in Donaldson's (1978) important book on children's intellectual development. Next, I cover the nature of sense-making as it has been examined in recent emergent literacy research on non-narrative topics. This work seriously questions common assumptions regarding the primacy of story in young children's learning to read and write. Then, using ideas from Bakhtin (1986), Geertz (1983), and Halliday and Hasan (1985), I attempt to place narrative or story within a broader social-semiotic perspective. Such a view leads to a very different voyage of implications for curriculum, teaching, and learning in the classroom.
DO 'SCHEMATA' AND 'SCRIPTS' ALWAYS MEAN STORIES?
Although the term 'schemata' has been used to talk about the prior knowledge structures that humans use to understand and remember story texts, it has, in fact, a much broader sense. In his recent account of the origin of schemata, their