Creating and Advancing Storylines for Learning With Visuals

Introduction

This chapter will explore the following questions:

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  What is the most effective storytelling strategy for the target designed learning? What are the critical elements: the plot, the characters, the locations, the dialogue, the art content style, and other factors?

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    What are some effective uses of storylines for learning (and particularly learning with visuals)?

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    What are some possible storylines and story trajectories to advance the target learning? From these, which are most likely to be effective, and why?

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  What is the cowriting of stories for learning? The elicitation of stories? The co-performance of stories?

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    What are some effective learning designs for cowritten, elicited, and co-performed stories?

Figure 1.

­ A Word Cloud of Chapter 3

Some conceptualize humanity’s practice in storytelling as predominant over other features. Calling humanity “homo-narrans” (“human beings” who “tell stories”) over homo sapiens (“wise discerning humans”) suggests the centrality of storytelling among people for various purposes (“Homo narrans,” Mar. 16, 2019). People tell stories in order to make sense of their individual and social lives. They share stories socially for connecting, intercommunications, teaching and learning, strategizing, problem-solving, remembering, entertainment, and the meeting of other very human individual and collective needs. Storytelling has been used to convey warnings to others (Lugmayr, Suhonen, & Sutinen, 2015, p. 29), such as in cautionary tales. Human “experience, knowledge, and thinking” is “organized as stories” (Turner, 1994, as cited in Poplin, 2012, p. 196). Humans are “storytelling animals” (Vasquez, 1993; Vasquez & Taylor, 2001, as cited in Kent, 2015, p. 480). Stories “inform, persuade, elicit emotional responses, build support for coalitions and initiatives, and build civil society” (Kent, 2015, p. 480). Over time, researchers have converged on some common master plots shared through human storytelling, suggesting that humanity tends towards meta-patterns. There is the idea that people are responsive to particular stories (and non-responsive to others). A summary of some master plots, reduced to labels, include the following: “adventure, discovery, escape, forbidden love, love, maturation, metamorphosis, pursuit, quest, rescue, revenge, riddle/mystery, rise/fall, rivalry, sacrifice, temptation/greed, transformation, underdog, (and) wretched excess” (Tobias, 1993, as cited in Kent, 2015, pp. 485 - 486) and “ascension and descension” (Tobias, 1993).