The following was cached on Feb. 18, 2004, from
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page was written for a graduate course at Michigan State University:
Writings for CEP 911: Intellectual History of Educational Psychology (Fall 2002)
CEP
911
Personal
Interest Reading #2
I actually started my assigned journey of personal enlightenment
in class last Tuesday, when David showed us the web page Storytelling:
Passport to the 21st Century, which contained an
extended quote from Jerome Bruner’s Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. In this quote, Bruner
presented a dichotomy between paradigmatic and narrative thought, “two
modes of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing
distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality.” In gross terms, this is similar to a
distinction between rational (paradigmatic) and irrational (narrative)
thought, although the analogy is imperfect because it implies that
narrative lacks any rational, logical structure, a characterization
that Bruner would most probably disagree with.
Anyway, this caught my attention because I had been intrigued by
the short chapter on intuitive thought in Bruner’s The Process of
Education,
and wanted to read a fuller account of his ideas on intuition. I was also interested in reading about what
theories Bruner might have about narrative, especially ways in which a
narrative hermeneutic might play an essential role in his
constructivist vision. At the core of my
research interests is a concern with how children adopt scripts of
gender identity, and I wanted to see what Bruner's thoughts on this
might be.
Hoping to find a more recent, book-length account of Bruner's
ideas on narrative thought, I headed to the Barnes & Noble at
Lansing Mall to pick up Acts of Meaning (1990).
The binding on the only copy available at the store was in
pretty bad shape, so rather than pay full price for a poor quality
book, I set myself up at a table in the store's café and read Acts
of Meaning cover to cover (it's only
138 pages).
Bruner starts off by blasting information-processing theory's
ascension as the dominant trend in the field of cognitive science. He argues that the computer is a sterile
metaphor for the constructivist human mind, and that the computational
theory of mind errs both by focusing solely on the processing of
information and by treating all information as equal.
Finally, information-processing is a theory long on individual
cognition, but sorely lacking when it comes to accounting for culture
and human social behavior. Culture is,
according to Bruner, "the world to which we have to adapt and the
toolkit for doing so." (17) Situated in the larger culture are shared,
public norms that are created through the social behavior of the people
who constitute a given culture's body politic. Bruner
calls these norms a "folk psychology … a system governing by which
people organize their experience in, knowledge about, and transactions
with the social world," (35) in other words, a collective epistemology. Bruner contends that the chief business of the
individual mind in such a system is to make meaning out of the complex
scramble of information and sensory stimuli that continually assaults
the consciousness. The central organizing
principle that the mind uses to accomplish this task is narrative.
While Bruner rejects Jung's theory of a collective
unconsciousness filled with archetypes, he nonetheless suggests that
the human brain is hard-wired with a tendency to see the world in
narrative form (similar to the Kantian notion of causality as an
inescapable lens through which we cannot help but ascribe meaningful
connections to coincident events). Bruner
theorizes that the need to construct narrative meaning out of personal
experience is the force that fuels developments in speech, that a "push
to construct narrative … determines the order of priority in which
grammatical forms are mastered by the young child." (77) Narratives can
serve as early "interpretants" of logical propositions and operations
before children have the cognitive capacity to perform more refined
"mental calculi." We come to understand
the parameters of normality (and which transgressions are excusable)
through the "subjunctivizing transformations" of narrative that allow
us to play out possible courses of action and analyze their
consequences (this reminded me a lot of Bandura's ideas of symbolic
modeling of behavior through fiction and the media).
When we discussed
Bruner's ideas of how to teach complex ideas to children in an
"intellectually honest manner," we spent time considering metaphors and
narrative analogies to introduce such ideas. For
example, I had suggested using "The Three Little Pigs" as an
introduction to evolution. It may not be
the most precise metaphor to encompass the nuances of Darwin's
theories, but for young children, it may be the closest we can come to
putting such ideas into a meaningful schema.
And it works with adults, too. Stephen
Hawking's A Brief History of Time is filled with
interesting metaphors and analogies that bring many of the complexities
of theoretical physics within the cognitive grasp of the layperson. Hawking writes that the Judeo-Christian
account of the Creation remains a particularly compelling explanation
of the origins of the universe because it has an active, intentional
agent (God) performing temporally sequential actions that have
observable effects on direct objects. These
are the same essential elements of narrative that Bruner describes as
forming the foundation of all known human grammars
(subject-verb-object), their progressive development in early speech
providing proof of an inherent narrative sensibility.
Bruner closes Acts of Meaning with a discussion of the
self as a narrative construct. The self,
he claims, is distributed knowledge about a person, not the sole
possession of one's private consciousness, but a "product of the
situations in which it operates." (109) Our sense of self is the sum of
the narratives we construct about our past experiences and future
intentions. In this regard, the self is a
master storyteller and the clinical psychologist its editor.
This is all heady stuff. To
synthesize my understanding of Bruner's ideas in this book, I talked
through some of these issues about narrative as a primary organizing
force in the human psyche with my father, a seminarian.
He noted that such ideas have been popular in theological
circles for years, at least among those who do not take a
fundamentalist line toward the Bible as literal truth.
We talked about the power of stories that are not necessarily
written with didactic intent to nonetheless carry powerful messages of
what constitutes acceptable behavior, and how some of the most
intensely faith-affirming stories, novels and films get their
theological credibility through metaphor and analogy, not through
well-reasoned argumentation. This is why
literature can be so subversive.
While mulling over the implications of Bruner's theories on the
mind's mimetic function, I recalled the research I had done into
bibliotherapy while working on my Master's degree.
Bibliotherapy is a clinical strategy that helps patients
confront personal issues by analyzing the behaviors of fictional
characters who face similar crises as the patient.
Roughly, the bibliotherapeutic process has three stages:
recognition of the parallels between real-life and fiction, catharsis,
and reorganization of the patient's understanding of the world based
upon the new insights gained from studying the fictional models. This is a clinical practice in which
psychoanalysis meets social learning and cognitive theory; old, painful
(and even subconscious) narratives/schemas/scripts are dredged up,
compared to symbolic models, then reframed.
One of the best resources for case studies of bibliotherapy is
Robert Coles' The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral
Imagination. This book had been suggested to me by Jean
Baker when I first met with her to talk about my interest in
bibliotherapy, and this seemed as good a time as any to read it. Coles is a professor of psychiatry who
incorporates the study of literature into both his psychiatric and
teaching practices. While the book is
chiefly a love letter to a number of favorite authors (among them,
William Carlos Williams, John Cheever, Tillie Olsen and Leo Tolstoy),
presenting lots of anecdotes about the ways in which various literary
works have changed his and his students' perspectives about life, the
universe and everything, there are some larger philosophical points
that reveal affinities with Jerome Bruner's brand of constructivism.
Coles writes that memories are not merely objective records of
our lives, but rather events "endowed with the subjectivity of our
imaginative life," (183) a description that dovetails nicely with
Bruner's definition of recall as a "reconstruction designed to justify
[an affect or attitude]" (58). Both
authors see the active construction and later recall of memories as
behaviors designed to align our self-understandings with our sense of
our culture's scripts for acceptable behavior. Discrepancies
between the two are resolved by looking for mitigating factors that
allow for a reinterpretation of our behavior to bring it within the
zone of acceptable deviation from the cultural norm (this sounds a lot
like the kinds of dissociative behaviors described by Bandura). Coles writes eloquently throughout his book
about how fiction can provide us with rich scripts to help us chart
courses of action and even define our identities.
As a last gasp for this assignment, I wanted to dig into the
latest and greatest that Bruner had written about narrative. Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (2002) is a slim volume
that distills and updates the essence of Bruner's theories. Bruner incorporate an in-depth appreciation of
how our justice system is built on a system of narration in which
plaintiffs and defendants compete to tell a story that best reconciles
the "dialectic between what was expected and what came to pass." (15)
He writes that culture is organized around a "dialectic of
expectation-supporting norms and possibility-evoking transgressions,"
and that narrative is the means by which individual experience is
converted into "collective coin" (16) in a culture's outward
distribution of knowledge (how situative!).
But why narrative? Bruner answers
this with reference to anthropological theories arguing that the plan
is the "elementary neuro-psychic unit of human consciousness," (28) in
other words, our ability to make plans is what separates us from the
animals. In order to make plans, we have
to have some reasonable expectations about how nature works and how
other people typically respond to various occurrences.
Narrative is what provides us with these expectations, by
bridging the gap between the declarative (what we know to be real) and
the subjunctive (what we know to be possible). "Through
narrative, we construct, reconstruct, in some way reinvent yesterday
and tomorrow. Memory and imagination fuse
in the process." (93) Bruner returns again to an exploration of the
self as a narrative construction, calling selfhood a "kind of
meta-event that gives coherence and continuity to the scramble of
experience." (73) In other words, what we call our "self" is the
story-puzzle we construct of our lives, given the pieces of experience
to be found strewn about our memory. No
more forceful a statement of narrative constructivism could be offered.
Finally, Bruner comes back to a reconsideration of the dichotomy
between paradigmatic and narrative modes of thinking that first sparked
my interest in this exploration. He writes
that perhaps in his original formulation, he put too rigid a separation
between the two modes, that they really should be seen in a state of
dynamic equilibrium. Like the yin and the
yang, paradigmatic and narrative thought operate most healthily in
conjunction. He points to a recent
development called narrative medicine as an example of the two modes
working together. Narrative medicine puts
a premium on listening to a patient's story before examining the
"objective" measures of a person's health, such as blood pressure,
heart rate, etc. A quick diagnosis based
on "the charts" is likely to be a misdiagnosis, and the consequences of
not taking seriously the subjective, lived experience of the patient as
expressed in personal narrative can be grave, indeed.
As my best friend (a soon-to-be-married doctor in Indianapolis)
is fond of saying, the most important thing for a physician to remember
at the start of an appointment is to listen.
Bruner, J. (1990). Acts
of meaning. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Bruner, J. (2002). Making
stories: Law, literature, life. New York: Farrar, Straus,
Giroux.
Coles, R. (1989). The
call of stories: Teaching and the moral imagination. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.