Giuliana Dettori ITD CNR, Genoa, Italy researcher of Italy’s National Research Council

1. Giuliana Dettori ITDCNR, Genoa, Italy • researcher of Italy’s National Research Council • formative studies in mathematics • initial research experience in several fields (computer graphics, GIS, artificial intelligence) • current research interests in Educational Technologies • interest for narrative arising from attention to the role of representations in education • no practical applications of narrative so far, but bibliographical research and analysis This research is carried out with colleague Tania Giannetti

2. What did we find in the literature? • Narrative is used in many application fields and in many different ways • Many, more or less different, definitions

3. From the point of view of its nature, narrative may be seen • as aphenomenon (sequence of events involving actors) • as acognitive process • as an organizing principle/method • as arepresentation • as a social expression

4. Narrative as sequence of events • A unique sequence of events, mental states, happenings involving human beings as characters or actors. These are its constituents. But these constituents do not, as it were, have a life or meaning of their own. Their meaning is given by their place in the overall configuration of the sequence as a whole - its plot or fabula (Bruner, 1992).

5. Narrative as cognitive process • Narrative is a process of both discerning and imposing structured meanings which can be shared and articulated. The result of this process is also often referred to as a narrative i.e. the product of discerning and imposing structured meanings which can be shared and articulated (Plowman et al, 2001). • Narrative is a highly complex psychological process, depending for its operation upon the integration of numerous cognitive mechanism (e.g. cause-and-effect reasoning, theory of mind, language, spatial reasoning) (Scalise Sugiyama, 2001).

6. Narrative as organizing principle • The term “narrative” is used as the kind of organizational scheme expressed in story form. Narrative can refer to the process of making a story, to the cognitive scheme of the story, or to the result of the process - also called stories, tales, histories. Here it is used narrative and its cognates to refer to both the process and the results (Polkinghorne, 1988). • Narration is a basic non-associative organizing principle of the human mind (Pléh, 2003) • Narrative thinking - storying – is a successful method of organizing perception, thought, memory and action (McEvan, 1997) • Narratives are variously described as a method, as the result o a method, as a way of making sense of life, as a phenomenon (Kvernbekk, 2003)

7. Narrative as representation • Narrative is a representation of a series of events meaningfully connected in a temporal and causal way. A “text” may be in any medium, thus encompassing the spoken word, film and pictures as well as written material. (Turner S., Turner P., 2003) • Narrative is the representation of an event or a series of events. Without an event or an action you may have a description, an exposition, an argument, a lyric (Porter Abbott, 2002) • Discourse, or an example of it, designed to represent a connected succession of happenings (Lieblich et al., 1998)

8. Narrative as social expression • By narrative we mean a certain type of artistic and social expression, where a kind o imitation of real events is involved (Szilas, 1999)

9. From the point of view of its function,narrative is used • to organize information • to make meaning (in different ways) • to share knowledge, beliefs, values

10. Features which characterize narrative are considered • Event(s) • (Human) Actor(s) • Time(s) • Casual relation • Existence of an explicit narrator No general agreement on which of these features are essential

11. Narrative does not coincide with “text in natural language” • Pictures may have a narrative, if they show the main features which characterize it • Texts in natural language can be of 5 different kinds, based on the role they play: - argumentative - descriptive - expositive - narrative - instrumental It is clear that narrative can play an important role ineducation, and in different ways

12. What role can narrative play in TELEs? Two different situations: The student is required to generate a narrative • learning to produce a narrative (e.g., constructing a story) • producing a narrative with some aim (e.g., organizing information, sharing knowledge) • developing cognitive abilities by using a narrative (e.g. making inferences) The student is given a narrative to work with • the narrative is embedded in the TELE (e.g., connecting representations in multimedia environments) • a narrative is generated automatically (e.g. intelligent agents)

13. Narrative and representations There is no overlapping Two aspects may be studied: • Micro-narrative (within a representation) • Macro-narrative (among multiple representations in a same environment, possibly using different codes) Not much bibliographical material available