How do we make sense of our lives, our experiences, and the world around us? According to the a pioneer in the field of cognition, psychologist and educator Jerome Bruner, one of the most fundamental ways humans understand the world is through narrativity or the creation and interpretation of stories.
Bruner, a pioneer in cognitive psychology and education, argued that stories are not just entertainment, they are a way of thinking, learning, and constructing meaning. Whether we are children making sense of school experiences or adults reflecting on life, narratives shape our understanding of reality.
What Is Narrativity?
Narrativity refers to the human tendency to structure experience as stories with plots, characters, conflicts, and resolutions. Bruner identified two ways of knowing:
1. The Logical-Scientific Mode: Understanding the world through cause-and-effect, facts, and logic.
2. The Narrative Mode: Understanding the world through stories, meaning, and human experience.
While the logical-scientific mode answers “How does it work?” the narrative mode answers “What does it mean?”
Why Stories Matter
Bruner emphasized that humans are storytelling creatures. Narratives help us:
• Make sense of complex experiences
• Construct personal and cultural identity
• Communicate and share understanding with others
• Reflect on the moral or emotional significance of events
Unlike pure facts, stories integrate emotion, context, and perspective, helping us retain meaning and remember lessons.
Narrativity in Learning
Bruner’s work on education highlights how narrativity fosters deep learning:
• Engagement: Stories captivate attention, making ideas memorable.
• Contextual Understanding: Learners can see concepts in real-world contexts, not just abstract formulas.
• Reflection and Self-Understanding: Students can connect stories to their own experiences, encouraging self-authorship and meaning-making.
For example, a history lesson framed as a narrative about individuals navigating challenges is far more memorable than a list of dates and events.
Narrativity and Personal Identity
Bruner also emphasized the role of narrative in identity formation. The stories we tell about ourselves, our past experiences, choices, and aspirations, shape our sense of who we are.
• Personal narratives help us integrate experiences, including mistakes and challenges.
• They guide future decisions and provide coherence to our lives.
• They allow us to understand and empathize with others by imagining their experiences.
In essence, to understand someone is to understand their story.
Practical Applications of Narrativity
1. Parenting and Education: Encourage children to tell stories about their experiences to help them process emotions and learn from events.
2. Coaching and Therapy: Narrative techniques help clients reframe experiences, integrate past events, and build coherent life stories.
3. Leadership: Leaders can use storytelling to convey vision, values, and meaning, making abstract ideas concrete and relatable.
4. Self-Reflection: Journaling personal experiences as stories strengthens insight and self-authorship.
Jerome Bruner’s work reminds us that life is best understood through the stories we tell. Narrativity is not just a tool for learning, it is a way of making sense of existence itself. He argues that the cognitive revolution, with its fixation on the mind as ‘information processor’, has led psychology away from the deeper objective of understanding mind as a creator of meanings. Here is where narrativity plays a role in the construal of meaning.
By attending to our stories, sharing them with others, and reflecting on their meaning, we deepen understanding, foster connection, and construct lives rich with purpose and insight.
Reference
Bruner, J. (1993). Acts of Meaning. Harvard University Press.
