Pink---Story

The ability to encapsulate, contextualize, and emotionalize has become vastly more important in the conceptual age. In order to train our mind with this ability, story should be an essential part in our curriculum.

Actually, most of our experience, our knowledge and our thinking are organized as stories. In my own experiences of study, story always play an important role. Especially when I learn knowledge of history, it is very hard to remember the times and events. But when I memorized it with a story, it will be much easier to know the whole historical events: What made it happen? What are the relationships of these people? How did this event effect on other things? We can even use stories to help us learn physics and chemistry. As Denning said: “Storytelling doesn’t replace analytical thinking. It supplements it by enabling us to imagine new perspectives and new worlds. Abstract analysis is easier to understand when see through the lens of a well-chosen story.” It reminds me of the study of philosophy. Since my husband is a philosopher, what he researches on is things that are super abstract. It cannot be presented visually, so when they what to prove something, they always use stories as examples to help readers understand the concepts.

In a time of abundance, people pay more attention to the spirit life. We are freer to seek a deeper understanding of ourselves and our purposes.  In this situation, personal narratives become more prevalent. We use stories to share with friends and identify ourselves. Story can also improve relationships by empathizing others’ feelings, since it is context enriched by emotion.

For activities, I would like to use VTS to let students make narratives to images. And I will let them tell their own stories and visualize them. Retelling a story will be a good way to train this ability as well.