Narrative pedagogy 3: Out of the blue

Teachers can learn a lot from the techniques writers use. In this short series (on what I will call 'narrative pedagogy'*) I'm exploring some of the storytelling techniques that can be adapted for use in education. The first post featured a technique called Interrupted Routine; the second discussed Red Herrings in narrative. Here's number 3 in the series: Deus ex machina (God out of the machine or 'an act of God').

The world is full of problems. We encounter them every day. You're late for work, rush out to your car, and discover that you have a flat tyre. At that very moment, a friend is passing by and pulls over to ask if you would like a lift. Of course, that kind of miracle doesn't happen in real life.... or does it?

When I was 12 years old I was in a car accident. We were living in the Shetland Islands at the time. One winter evening my father was driving my mother and I home from a shopping trip along the sea road. We found ourselves in the middle of a blizzard, and the snow was falling fast. It was dark, the temperature was dropping rapidly, and the road was icy. As my father drove us around a sharp bend in the road, he accidentally hit the brakes, we spun around several times on the ice, and ended up at a perverse angle, with the front of our car pointing downwards looking at a steep incline into the sea.

We were terrified. There was no traction in the wheels. Try as he might, my father was unable to extricate us from the danger we were in. There was no way we were going to get out of this without help. But in the middle of a blizzard, in the dark, in the middle of nowhere, where would it come from?

At that very moment, we heard voices outside, and as if by magic two large men materialised out of the snowstorm. I heard them talking to my father, and there were a few moments of silence. Then our car was literally lifted back onto the road. My father wanted to thank them, but they had disappeared. There was no-one there. Our lives had been saved in a most surprising and unexpected manner.



Popular culture is full of such interventions 'as if from above'. The use of deus ex machina can be seen in the movie Life of Brian. Toward the end of the film, the main character is falling to his death from a high tower, but is saved by a passing alien spacecraft. It's an absurd, literally out-of-the-blue resolution to the storyline, but what else do you expect from Monty Python? A more believable deus ex machina can be found in H. G. Wells' novel War of the Worlds, where the seemingly invincible alien invaders are ultimately defeated by the smallest living organism on Earth - a virus.

Discovering strange and improbable solutions to big challenges is what science is all about. It is also the basis of problem based learning (or PBL). Students are presented with a problem and limited resources (e.g. time) with which to solve them. They have to draw on their expertise, prior knowledge and ... yes, sometimes luck - to solve the problem. Sometimes they don't know how they solve the problem, or where it comes from. It seems as though the answer comes from outside of their influence. Often, in the most advanced forms of PBL, ill structured problems are given, where instructions are sparse or ambiguous, or several potential solutions to the problem might be possible. Suddenly the circle is incomplete. Several possible escape routes have been explored and choices made. In Gestalt theory, all humans are assumed to have an innate psychological need to complete the incomplete, to close the circle. They join the dots together in their heads to make sense of the world around them.

PBL calls on this specific human trait - the need to make sense. Unconscious knowledge can be drawn upon to solve most problems no matter how ill-structured they might be. Prior knowledge usually helps us to solve the seemingly intractable problem. New learning occurs when students study the problem space, and think of possible algorithms they have previously encountered that might apply or be adapted. This forms connections between the known and the unknown. Deeper learning emerges when students reflect and discuss their experience once the problem has been successfully solved.

Photo by Kabir Bakie on Wikimedia Commons

*Yes, I know that the term 'narrative pedagogy' has been used before, but in other contexts. My use signifies how storytelling devices can be applied to everyday pedagogy.


Narrative pedagogy 3: Out of the blue by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.