Conference Notes on Narration

Friday of the conference offered a three-part series of workshops on narration - six full hours, and we still could have gone longer. Laurie Bestvater did the first couple of hours, Dr. Carroll Smith did two hours, and the laast session was looking at samples and narrating ourselves. These are the notes I took that day.

Narration is a subset of literacy. It seems too simple to work. But it does work. L.B.'s son used primarily narration throughout his school years and went to college on a scholarship. [My son used narration but with even less creative direction, and also went to college on a scholarship; it does work.]

Definition: Narration is a process of taking information. It's more than mere recall. It requires the internalization of ideas.

Why narrate? CM said, "in the act of narrating every power of his mind comes into play, that points and bearings which he had not observed are brought out; that the whole is visualized and brought into relief in an extraordinary way; in fact, that scene or argument has become a part of his personal experience; he knows, he has assimilated what he has read." (vol 6) Narration is not the same as memory work. When you narrate, you re-create and internalize in your own mind. It's a way of knowing, not of memorizing.

G.F. Husband wrote, "Properly dealt with, it produces a mental transfiguration." ("Some Notes on Narration," Parents' Review, 1924) It requires attention/engagement of the mind. Being able to answer a teacher's questions doesn't guarantee that the student really knows.

Narration is an all-purpose, extremely powerful activity. Transformation occurs that physically changes the brain. "The Power of Retelling: Developmental Steps for Building Comprehension," and "Read and Retell" by Hazel Brown and Brian Cambourne encapsulate all the principles of the wholistic/natural learning model.

Narration has linguistic spillovers: meaning, phraseology, vocabulary, punctuation, spelling. Children can retain phrases, styles, etc. that they pick up from narrating even after a year.

Narration enables learners to "own" their learning. "Learning that is not accompanied by transformation is shallow and transitory." (Cambourne) "Reader-Response" by Louise Rosenblatt. The learner "reproduces such Knowledge touched by his own personality; thus his reproduction becomes original." (CM vol 6)

Narration enables students to:
- write better sentences
- better solve math word problems
- increase vocabulary
- have a much higher level of comprehension

Narration improves concept of story, critical thinking, oral language development.

Critical thinking requires background knowledge and concepts to think critically about.

Narration reveals what a child remembers and what he thinks is important. It shows whether his organization matches the text - and more.

Narration in History: For generations and throughout centuries, history has been passed on through oral narration. People who are forced to increase their oral mind have better mental capacity than those who rely on printed text, note-taking, etc. Jewish Rabbis used oral tradition to relay God's truth to generations. See "The Singer of Tales" by Albert Lord for studies. Oral tradition is as literary as printed text. The art forms of literature/story-telling were already set and styled before any of the tales were ever written down. Songs, stories and poems can be kept in people's minds for centuries - intact - with no notes! The more you rely on notes, the less you use your mind.

Emotion drives learning because emotion is what transforms and engages. When the "amygdala" part of the brain is activated by fear or emotion, learning can enter long-term memory instead of short-term memory. Stories, not dry facts, engage our emotions.

Research on Narration

Olaffson and [Nietfeld?] (1999) said that a child's memory at age two predicts his later reading ability.

Zimmerman, Christakis, Metcalf (2007) found that television and DVD/video viewing in children younger than 2 years hinders later vocabulary.

Wise, Savelli ? -- found that oral language skills relate to later reading skills. Children only know vocabulary they have used - not what they have only heard.

Early listening/comprehension skills help with word recognition later.

When Adam named the animals, language was used as intellectual capacity to order his world; it wasn't just to communicate. "Giving a name is more than labeling. It is, as Gerhard von Rad puts it, "'an act of appropriate ordering, by which man intellectually objectifies the creatures for himself.'" Man conceives and orders his environment through words. He needs language in order for his mind to make things real. Internally, the mind forms the concept and imagines it after he has a word to frame it on.

What about a child who isn't used to narrating? There are ways to engage his active mind before reading:
- Build on prior knowledge by having the child look at the picture on the cover of the book, or maps inside, to et them interested. Go over two or three words they'll come across in the text that they might not know.
- Have the child mentally put himself somewhere in the setting, like in a corner of the room, and watch the story unfold in front of his eyes. Show the child how people in the story would have dressed so their mental image is accurate.
- Have the child describe in detail how he lines up at school to go to lunch. This forces him to sequence events and tell them.
- Read a paragraph at a time for narrating rather than a whole chapter.
- Ask the child to predict how the story will go.
- Before the next reading, ask the the child to re-create the scene read previously.

Oral language is contextual: we say what's going on. But written language is removed from our personal here-and-now reality.

Narration should be done immediately after the reading, before it dissipates. At the high school level, students might be able to narrate later than immediately after reading - perhaps during the next period, or the next day.

Narration is "the act of knowing." (CM vol 6, pg 99)

Information is not the same as knowledge.

"Because knowledge is power, the child who has got knowledge will certainly show power in dealing with it. He will recast, condense, illustrate, or narrate with vividness and with freedom the arrangement of his words. The child who has got only information will write and speak in the stereotyped phrases of his text-book, or will mangle in his notes the words of his teacher." (CM Vol 3 pg 225)

Ours is not to train. "ample ground for discussion not for lectures or for oral lessons, but for following for a few minutes any opening suggested by 'current events,' a feature in the children's programme of work. But they must follow arguments and detect fallacies for themselves. Reason like the other powers of the mind, requires material to work upon whether embalmed in history and literature, or afloat with the news of a strike or uprising. It is madness to let children face a debatable world with only, say, a mathematical preparation. If our business were to train their power of reasoning, such a training would no doubt be of service; but the power is there already, and only wants material to work upon." (CM Vol 6 pg 147)

Critical thinking matures from within. "Therefore children should be taught as they become mature enough to understand such teaching that the chief responsibility which rests upon then: as persons is the acceptance or rejection of ideas presented to them. To help them in this choice we should afford them principles of conduct and a wide range of fitting knowledge." (CM vol 6 pg 139)

Scaffolds vs Bridges: Many a teacher "believes that children cannot understand well-written books and that he must make of himself a bridge between the pupil and the real teacher, the man who has written the book." (CM vol 6, pg 260) But in a CM education, the teacher is not the bridge between the child and information. "Let the boy read and he knows, that is, if he must tell again what he has read. This, of telling again, sounds very simple but it is really a magical creative process by means of which the narrator sees what he has conceived, so definite and so impressive is the act of narrating that which has been read only once." (vol 6 pg 261)

It sounds simple. "All the acts of generalization, analysis, comparison, judgment, and so on, the mind performs for itself in the act of knowing. If we doubt this, we have only to try the effect of putting ourselves to sleep by relating silently and carefully, say, a chapter of Jane Austen or a chapter of the Bible, read once before going to bed. The degree of insight, the visualization, that comes with this sort of mental exercise is surprising." (CM vol 6 pg 304)

As students mature, their narrations become more abstract. "they will respond to such a question as,––"Write twelve lines (which must scan) on 'Sir Henry Lee,' or 'Cordelia,' or Pericles, or Livingstone," or, to take a question from the early days of the War, "Discuss Lord Derby's Scheme. How is it working?"; or, (IV) an essay on "The new army in the making, shewing what some of the difficulties have been and what has been achieved." (CM vol 6 pg 193)

A student's ability to narrate develops over time. And there are many ways to narrate: "But this is only one way to use books: others are to enumerate the statements in a given paragraph or chapter; to analyse a chapter, to divide it into paragraphs under proper headings, to tabulate and classify series; to trace cause to consequence and consequence to cause; to discern character and perceive how character and circumstance interact..." (CM vol 3 pg 180)

Narration is relational: "The teacher's part is, in the first place, to see what is to be done, to look over the of the day in advance and see what mental discipline, as well as what vital knowledge, this and that lesson afford; and then to set such questions and such tasks as shall give full scope to his pupils' mental activity." (CM vol 3 pg 180)

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Samples of one student's narrations over the course of twelve years were shared, and we were given the opportunity to narrate ourselves either by writing, telling or acting out a chapter we read in a book.