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10] Digital Media and Storytelling in Higher Education
1.1 Narrative and Cognition
Jerome Bruner (1986) distinguishes two modes of human thinking:
paradigmatic and narrative. These two modes are two ways of organizing
memories and experiences and constructing reality. Paradigmatic thinking
is framed by rules, theoretical concepts, arguments and evidence, while
the other way of thinking is through narratives. The different nature of the
logic of the two systems is illustrated by Jerome Bruner through the logical
proposition of “if x, then y”, and so “The king died, and then the queen
died”. Paradigmatic thinking looks for factual truth in the statement, while
narrative thinking is concerned with the relationship between two events,
which, according to Bruner, can be grief, suicide or intrigue. Logical-scientific
thinking is based on the ability to match empirical truth with verifiability,
while the narrative mode is based on insight into the intentions behind the
actions, as well as the twists and consequences in the stories. In a narrative,
beyond the components of action - the world of situations, actions, actors,
and means - there is another realm: the realm of the actor’s consciousness,
through which the thoughts, emotions, motives, motivations and perspectives
of the actor are revealed to the recipient. While paradigmatic thinking tends
to abstract and embed knowledge into a general logical system, narrative
cognition is individual and personal.
In order to understand why storytelling is so effective and natural in
everyday human communication, we need to explore its general functions.
The relationship between cognition, memory and narrative is addressed by
narrative psychology. The act of storytelling involves a unity of knowledge
construction, transmission, reception and storage through narrative. The
process, while seemingly trivial, is composed of important cognitive moments:
(1) in constructing the narrative, the narrator subjectively organizes his
memories, (2) for the transfer, the narrator creates a linguistic or pictorial
representation, (3) the representation must follow a narrative logic that is
interpretable to the receiver, (4) collectively interpretable narrative schemas
help with memory retrieval.
Understanding human cognition through the telling and reception of
stories is aided by key concepts from narrative and cognitive psychology
such as representation, narrative, schema and script. The definitions for
these concepts are underpinned by cognitivist social psychological and
psycholinguistic models. In a constructivist approach to narrative psychology,
representation is an active process whereby an individual creates a substitution
of a phenomenon outside him or herself while accounting for similarities
and differences. During ‘re’ - ‘presentation’ the individual recalls the event,
concept or person, and as it were present, ‘presents it. The function of this
mental action is to create a representation of the objective cultural and
social reality that is meaningful for the individual. Individual or community
representations, however, not only define the cultural and social milieu,