Narrative Insights: A Creative Space for Learning

Abstract

Through this scholarly personal narrative, the author offers insight into how student creativity can be engaged or neglected. While the narrative highlights the potential conflict between students’ lives and their schools, the hope lies in the illuminative power of stories of difficulty. By interweaving narrative and theory, the author sheds light on the conditions that inhibit creativity, and emphasizes the capacity of teachers to locate creative, compassionate spaces for themselves and their students.

“I’m hiding”: Using the Stories-Around-Poems to Explore the Role of Vulnerability in Today’s University Classrooms

“…This process has taught us to try and resist the temptation to treat writing as an act of closure, particularly when writing involves a self that is always unfinished and changing, and how we are sustained by hope, imagination, and even frustration, longing, and loss. Writing can be a way to translate silence and frustration into a creative act that provides hope and meaning within often challenging and restrictive institutional environments (Ingersoll, 2012). We can never know precisely what we are going to take from a story, since the effect of entering into another's story and hearing it depends on our own experiences and our current positioning.…”