Narrative

This morning I came across an article in InsideHigherEd that discussed the creation and use of a graphic novel in an intro to business course. The novel, Atlas Black: Managing to Succeed, follows a slacker type who goes into business for himself. The reported advantage to this character-driven approach to business basics is that students can identify real-world applications with the concepts they're studying. And given our 21st-century, visual-based culture, the graphic nature of the novel appeals to millennials.

One of the challenges reported in the article to using a novel as a textbook is the narrative arc. The arc evidently makes it difficult for instructors to "skip around"; it "confines the professor to framing a course entirely around the book." Using a novel essentially forces an instructor to create a narrative arc in structuring their course. But I will bet that students retain and more readily apply concepts as a result of using narrative, or story, in the teaching process.

I was talking with a committee member last week. We were looking at the terms that I would need to define in my dissertation, like existentialism, phenomenology, pragmatism, In my prospectus I suggested going to Sartre for existentialism, Merleau-Ponty for phenomenology, etc. He suggested to me that when Maxine Greene defines these terms in her writing, she's more likely to use Camus than Sartre. While I don't know if that indeed is the case (Sartre figures predominantly in her writing as does The Plague), it raised a question/opportunity for this dissertation. What if I were to follow Greene's model and use literature to define my terms in this dissertation?

Yowza!

I love this idea. Really using Greene as a model, really using an aesthetic approach to writing/thinking about the dissertation process, really employing an arts-based educational research practice to this work. But ohhh...the reading...yikes.

I am nowhere close to being as well-read as Maxine Greene. Her love/experience/attachment to literature is glorious and phenomenal. Studying with Maxine afforded the opportunity to widen and deepen my own literature experience. How joyful it was in graduate school to engage in Morrison and Allende and Melville while also having to tackle the Harvard Business Review and fair use court decisions. I have often chided myself for not also using literature in the courses I teach--both the critical and creative thinking courses are prime opportunities for this, as is the critical perspectives course in arts advocacy.

Maybe using literature in the dissertation will help bridge me to using literature in my teaching--which is part of my rationale. I should, I really should.

This will be a literature review to end all literature reviews...