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Key points
- Stories, broadly defined, facilitate all types of learning.
- Many psychologists believe that much of our daily thinking transpires in narrative form.
- The more that stories become endangered, the more we risk losing out on sophisticated learning.
by Hunter Gehlbach, Johns Hopkins University
In earlier parenting days, my family often passed car-ride time by playing One-Word Story. Each passenger sequentially contributed a single word to an evolving story. While the Pulitzer committee has yet to recognize the resultant masterpieces, the activity kept the kids entertained and off screens.
“Sea Cow,” the family’s favorite protagonist, was the invention of our then-3-year-old. Of Sea Cow’s various adventures, his final chapter was his most memorable. Rarely have I seen such delight as when Sea Cow’s creator killed off the hero, to the horror of the rest of the family. A single word—“died”—was all it took to inflict a major disequilibrium in our universe.
This year, while teaching the science of learning, I gained a new appreciation of how stories—even the one-word, collaborative variety—promote sophisticated learning. The core elements of narratives and our most famous learning theories share too much overlap to be coincidental—which begs the question: If we learn so much and so well from stories, why are stories disappearing like sea cows at a time when we need richer, more motivating learning?
Stories, broadly defined, facilitate all types of learning: abstract content, how we predict the actions of others, and even how we encode the events of our own lives. While definitions of stories vary, most entail a character who wants something and faces barriers that must be conquered to achieve their goal. Typically, a protagonist begins the narrative in the normal world, doing normal things, until a precipitating incident transports them into an alternate world. In this strange new world, they engage with a series of escalating trials leading up to a climactic test. As the story concludes, the protagonist returns to the normal world, but with a new understanding.
At first blush, a protagonist’s struggles may not sound much like learning. But we should bear in mind that we experience stories socially. Even if authors, orators, and directors rarely interact with readers, audience members, and viewers, our brains still consume stories as though we were sitting around a campfire. As we digest narratives, we ask ourselves questions. We wonder. We predict what might happen next.
Those familiar with Vygotsky’s theory—that we learn with the help of more expert guides until we can master a learning task independently—may see how protagonists can serve as our expert guides. In stories, protagonists scaffold a series of sometimes successful, sometimes unsuccessful, challenges for us to learn from vicariously. Subsidiary characters often engage in parallel or complementary challenges that illustrate different perspectives on the narrative’s key lesson.
Fans of Piaget’s approach will appreciate different key ingredients common to both learning theories and stories. For Piaget, learners rely on explanatory schemas to navigate the world. These schemas work well until learners encounter some new object or phenomenon. At this point, learners cope with the disequilibrium of the novel thing through some adaptive process. They fit the new information into an existing schema (assimilation) or rework the schema to fit the new information (accommodation). In other words, learners start out in the normal world until thrown into a new world with foreign challenges that they must address before they can return to the regular world with a new understanding.
To be sure, not all types of learning resemble how we experience stories. Bandura’s theories regarding observational learning closely mirror how we learn from protagonists; behaviorist learning theories may have fewer connections to stories. However, several of the most fundamental processes are shared across learning and narratives.
In fact, many psychologists argue that much of our daily thinking—thoughts about our own lives as well as how we understand others—transpires in narrative form. Furthermore, we have likely used stories to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next for thousands of years. If stories have weathered all these years and still dominate our daily thoughts, they must be doing something effectively.
An excellent recent review points to three mechanisms for stories’ success:
- Narratives transport us into a psychological space of deep engagement.
- They promote identification with characters we can learn from.
- They catalyze meaning-making by encouraging us to extrapolate the causal theories from stories and apply them to our own lives.
Despite these advantages, stories appear as vulnerable as sea cows in our repertoire of learning strategies. In classroom learning settings, the quest for efficient learning, pressure to meet state standards, and textbooks have sterilized students’ learning at the expense of emotion and engagement. Social media seems to be shrinking attention spans toward a vanishing point unconducive to even the shortest of stories. Without common understandings from common narratives, society’s capacity to agree upon solutions to collective issues such as climate change is severely undermined.
The more stories become endangered, the more we risk losing out on sophisticated learning. Narratives can present a full emotional spectrum that can make learning impactful, memorable, and interesting enough to carry the ideas with us and apply them to novel contexts. We reread stories and rewatch movies to get something new out of them a second time; when was the last time any of us felt excited to reread a textbook? Stories teach us to relate to and understand each other better. Through narratives, we ponder fictional cause-and-effect connections that help us understand real-world ones.
Moreover, by failing to intentionally promote learning through stories, we risk unscrupulous storytellers filling the void by propagating dynamic misinformation narratives. QAnon’s fictitious plotline that a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media was recognized as false by fewer than half of Americans surveyed.
Several miles up the road, after recovering from Sea Cow’s demise, the family story continued. A final plot twist emerged: With a single word, Sea Cow was “reincarnated.” Equilibrium was restored to our universe.
In a societal moment when our learning seems to be at risk on multiple fronts—COVID learning loss, misinformation, refusal to learn from those with opposing points of view—maybe it is the right time for stories to be reborn?
Hunter Gehlbach, Ph.D., has been a professor at Harvard and the University of California at Santa Barbara. Currently, he teaches and directs the Ph.D. program at the Johns Hopkins School of Education.
