Why Fiction and Professional Education?
Fiction provides a powerful vehicle for exploring the human condition, experiencing different lives, places and perspectives, and reflecting on choices, ethics and relationships. It can take the form of novels and poetry, radio and television shows, live theatre or film and may be mediated by artists such as actors or storytellers. Whilst fictional stories are often enjoyed as entertainment or leisure, this book scrutinises how they can also be a valuable educational resource for enhancing professional education. It explores how narrative fictions may be taken up in a variety of teaching and learning contexts to support the education of professionals working in diverse occupations. By featuring case studies and analyses in which individuals teaching professional subjects discuss adopting a variety of approaches to teaching professionals, it showcases how fiction can be used in the education of professionals including the nursing, health, adult education, science, further education, podiatry, legal, teaching, and social work fields. Although these examples may be unique to a particular teaching or professional context, many of the ideas and teaching practices could be transferred or modified to suit different educational settings and various types of professional studies.
Professional work is changing almost beyond recognition. Rapid advances in technology, the effects of globalisation and migration, and exponential increases in information create both opportunities and challenges by redefining professional work. Professionals need not only to demonstrate capabilities in their area of expertise at the beginning of their career, they need to become lifelong learners, capable of adapting to rapid, unpredictable change. The complexity of professional work is intensifying, so that preparation for professional work is about creating learning capacities as well as covering specialist content. Educators who work with professionals need imaginative strategies for teaching to foster innovation amongst learners. Most educators of professionals are highly skilled in their specialist fields, but may have limited exposure to educational theory and to arts-based teaching practices. The examples that Patricia Gouthro and I came across in our previous survey of the field (Jarvis and Gouthro 2015) demonstrated that educators of professionals who use arts-based approaches are a disparate group, often working within disciplinary silos. This book offers insights and ideas for educators working across just such a wide range of contexts.
Professional education can be defined in different ways. Some professional programmes lead to licences to practice: to professional recognition as a lawyer, doctor, nurse or teacher for example. However, there are also general programmes of study which explore professional subjects, such as degrees in education, community studies, engineering, health studies, business ethics and law, which engage in discussion of the ethical, social and political challenges which face those working in these areas. This book looks at teaching strategies suitable for professionally qualifying courses and for courses that address professional issues more generally.
The collection also aims to provide the beginnings of a unifying theoretical framework for using fiction to teach in professional contexts. This may help educators to understand why and how fiction supports professional education, in order to plan how they might use it in a more targeted and specific way. It can also be valuable to have strong explanatory and theoretical frameworks to justify the use of fictions in contexts in which such work might be less well understood and received, perhaps even dismissed as trivial. Therefore, this chapter seeks to establish the specific attributes of fictional narratives that make them a powerful resource for developing professionals for a world in which the ability to imagine alternatives, reinvent roles, build networks and relationships, and operate within both virtual and physical environments has become critical.
The concept of narrative has been extensively explored by linguists and by social scientists (Cobley 2014; Rimmon-Kenan 2002). Adult educators and within that group, educators of professionals (Alheit 2005; Clark and Rossiter 2008; Karpiak 2010; Reid and West 2015; West 2014) draw on the broader social sciences, such as Bruner’s consideration of the construction of social realities through narrative (1991), Riessman’s (1993, 2008) and Polkinghorne’s (1988) work on using narrative analysis in social research, and Maynes et al.’s (2008) discussions of the relationship between personal narrative and wider social structures. Such adult educators build on this underpinning theoretical work to explore the implications of autobiographical narrative and narrative research for important questions such as identity, consciousness and the way individuals and groups understand, interact with, and represent the world. This work is well developed and expanding. In this collection, however, Patricia and I set out to explore the implications for professional education of a particular type of narrative, fictional narrative.
By fiction, we mean narrative art which deals with the imaginary. This can include novels, short stories, narrative poetry and song, film, television drama, theatre, or graphic novel, and can incorporate the use of various media, both digital and traditional. Literary theorists generally define narrative fictions as those which are expressed in verbal form and exclude visual narratives. Whilst we recognise the distinctions of form, technique and audience that characterise these different forms of fiction, our interest is in the capacity of imagined stories to stimulate professional learning, and we do not want to exclude important sources of learning opportunities by defining narrative fiction too narrowly.
The Need for an Interdisciplinary Approach
There is a substantial literature on arts-based adult education (Clover 2015; Clover and Sandford 2013; Hudson 2016; Thompson 2007). It has varying foci and nuances, although themes relating to finding a voice, developing self and social awareness, and exposing, examining and resisting social injustice recur. A subset of this examines the potential of arts work in professional education (Jarvis and Gouthro 2015; MacDonnell and Macdonald 2011; Vettraino et al. 2013) and some focuses specifically on the use of narrative fictions therein (Holley 2016; Shapiro and Stein 2005; Turner 2013). Some of this literature can be found within the adult education and lifelong learning literature (Eastman 2014), some in the literature on higher or professional education (Persson and Persson 2008). However, a substantial proportion is located within discipline specific journals, which focus on the education of defined professions such as teachers, lawyers, management or health professionals (Kinsella and Bidinosti 2016). Patricia and I found that research and accounts of practice that explored the use of artistic approaches in teaching within professional studies are found across a wide range of journals and publication types (Jarvis and Gouthro 2015). This diffusion may explain why there is relatively little published that seeks to tease out commonalities that could illuminate the specific contribution that narrative fictions bring to professional education.
Some adult educators have examined the place of narrative fictions in the education of professionals. Hoggan and Cranton (2015) discuss fiction’s transformative potential in work with educational leaders; Tisdell and Thompson (2007) discuss the impact of popular narratives on adult educators’ understanding of diversity; Jubas and Knutson (2013) discussing using a television series to support medical students in understanding their own internship experiences; and McGregor’s (2012) work in leadership education examines how narrative fictions can encourage participants to explore issues such as inequality and agency. Nancy Taber’s (2018) innovative approach to disseminating her research on militarism and gender employs the production of historical fiction to increase the impact of her insights for professionals and for the wider public.
More pragmatically, Jennifer Moon (2010) offers a range of practical suggestions for using fictions in the education of professionals and Christine Eastman (2014) shows how they can be used to improve writing and critical reflection in students preparing for work in retail management. Overall, though, the role of narrative fictions in professional education has had less systematic attention than auto/biographical work in these contexts and is less extensively theorised. The boundaries between different kinds of narrative are blurred; biography and autobiography often intersect with fiction and may be considered to be fictional in that they are constructed and shaped by authors, but in selecting contributions for this book, Patricia and I distinguished between work which purports to recount factual and historical events, however much they are shaped by the consciousness of the writer, and narrative fictions that deliberately and overtly embrace the imaginary. One of the primary purposes of this book is to tease out the distinctive properties of these ...