Stories as a teaching and learning tool: A pursuit to achieve compassion in adult education

Abstract

This research addresses using stories to teach and learn compassion in adult education settings in order to promote greater social cohesion and collective participation in civic and national life. The research will investigate the interaction between participants and stories in the context of one question: Are participants responsive to characters and scenarios in stories with emotional feelings associated with compassion? The research used a qualitative framework with a narrative inquiry method.   The number of participants was seven.  This is the maximum size that I could manage as a totally new researcher working on my own.  The questionnaire is a recognised subset of interviewing. The results were as following : Most participants connected their research reading with past experiences, more so on reading One Hundred Names for Love, a story of illness and loving devotion, than on reading Homecoming, a war story.  This difference is understandable: these participants are more much more familiar with the sight of illness and loving devotion to sick person than with war. The responses of all but one of the participants suggest that a process of critical reflection resembling the previously covered Kreber framework did take place: the participants might have changed their outlook by considering their assumptions or taken-for-granted beliefs.

Keywords: Stories, Teaching, Learning, Comparison, Adult, Education.