Human life is conducted through
story, which comes naturally to us. Sharing stories is arguably the most
important way we have of communicating with others about who we are and what we
believe; about what we are doing and have done; about our hopes and fears; about
what we value and what we don’t. We learn about and make sense of our lives by
telling the stories that we live; and we learn about other lives by listening
to the stories told by others. Sometimes, under the influence of the culture in
which we are immersed, we live our lives in ways that try to create the stories
we want to be able to tell about them.
Members of many professions,
including medicine, nursing, teaching, the law, psychotherapy and counseling,
spend a great deal of their time listening to and communicating through
stories. Story is a powerful tool for teachers, because it is a good way of
enabling students and other learners to integrate what they are learning with
what they already know, and of placing what is learned in a context that makes
it easy to recall. Story plays an important role in academic disciplines
like philosophy, theology, anthropology, archaeology, history as well as
literature Narrative methods for the collection of data are increasingly used
in research in the social sciences and humanities, where the value of getting
to know people in a more intimate and less distant way – almost as if we are
getting to know them from the inside, begins to be viewed as having some value.
Some academics have begun to realise the value of storytelling as a model for
academic writing.
