Site Development
link me
mccomas, June 25, 2002 at 5:13:04 AM CEST
Organizing I
What content most dramatically embodies the binary opposites in order to provide access to the topic?
[I'm not real confident I understand what this question is asking, but I'll take a stab at it!]
While I need to re-read the reflections that the students submitted with their assignments, I suspect that the interviews provide the most dramatic representation of the binary opposites. I know when the students talked about reaching their epiphanies they used strong and vivid words (...magic...it hit me....swept across my mind...). I think, too, the interviews represent the embodiment of the binary opposites simply because I asked questions about before doing the project, during the doing of the project, and after the project. This particular binary opposite of powerlessness to powerful that teeters on the fulcrum of the epiphany naturally emerges from those kind of questions.
Because this question is asking about "access to the topic" I expect it is suggestive, in a way, that one might enter the story through the content that embodies the binary opposites...meaning that I should work through the interviews, using them as my main field texts (I'm making this up now...guessing...saying something "out loud" to see if it sounds really stupid)...or perhaps it is suggesting that the interviews might provide a natural theme around which to tell the larger story of these three smaller stories.
link me
mccomas, June 25, 2002 at 1:28:38 AM CEST
Narratives and Stories
Jon Franklin, in Structuring Stories for Meaning (Nieman Reports, Spring 2002, p. 43) reminds me that meaning is...
...not something you bring to a story. It's something you find in the story and extract from the story.
Narrative is a chronicle: this, then that, then this other thing. There's no meaning there. A story grows from narrative when it is reworked to have a different shape so that it now carries meaning. A story answers these questions:
- What does this mean?
- What does that mean?
- What does this other thing mean?
The shape of a story is this: in the beginning, there is a character; at the end of the beginning of your story, this character runs into a complication (Franklin emphatically states that this does NOT have to be conflict; complications are sufficient as they will make the character "exert an effort"); then the story develops according to the plot which involves your character's effort to deal with the complications that arose earlier.
In the development, Franklin suggests that three things happen:
- the person digs in deeper
- the person digs in deeper yet
- the person has some kind of insight (this occurs at the end of the middle/beginning of the end -- often referred to as the "point of insight")
Not long after the point of insight is revealed, the story ends.
- analysis of narrative: begins with stories told and moves toward common themes
- narrative analysis: uses stories told to construct a larger story
- protagonist/antagonist???
link me
A Map of the Brain
