In this theoretical paper we explore the use of narrative as a learning tool in informal science settings. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to ex-plore how narrative can be applied to exhibits in the context of science centers to scaffold visitors science learning. In exploring this idea, we analyze the theoretical, structural and epistemological properties of narrative. In the pages that follow, we first discuss the advantages and possibilities for learning that science centers offer alongside challenges and limitations. Next, we discuss the role of narrative in sci-ence, as a tool for supporting science learning. We then continue with an analysis of the structural and epistemological properties of narrative and discuss how those can serve to establish narrative as a learning tool.

Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film

Narrative as a learning tool in science centers

In this paper, Locative Inversion (hence LI) is analysed as the linear realization of a predication devoid of speaker’s commitment. First, we show that the syntactic constraints and modal restrictions already debated in the linguistic literature, form a coherent set of properties and are evidence of a non-speaker-based predication. Some examples of these properties are: LI’s incompatibility with negation or epistemic modalization, strong aspectual and temporal restrictions such as its incompatibility with BE+ING or generic interpretations.In the second part of this paper, we provide a discursive analyse of LI in two actual literary contexts: i) first, when it occurs at the beginning of folktales; there, its predicative use is compared to there-sentences, the latter, we argue, being typically speaker-based predications; ii) then, when it occurs in narrative’s descriptions (for instance in crime-scene description); there, LI appears in a context of internal focalization, with the make-belief effect of referring directly to the situation described as if it was perceptible by everyone.In both cases, it appears that LI occurs in contexts where the speaker is pragmatically determined. Its use depends on the need to resort to a "universal" commitment for the predication.

https://journals.openedition.org/discours/pdf/7355

Locative Inversion In Discourse: a strategy of non-commitment

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background

Interactive storytelling in mixed reality

Abstract Unacknowledged by its practitioners, narratology has often been revisionary rather than descriptive when categorizing narratives. This is because definitions, expert judgment and personal intuition, traditionally the main tools for categorization, are vulnerable to media blindness and to being theory loaded. I argue that to avoid revisionary accounts of ordinary everyday practices such as narrative or gameplay of which non-experts have a firm understanding, expert categorizations have to be tested against folk intuitions as they become apparent in ordinary language. Pictorial narrative in single pictures is introduced as a specific case of categorization dispute and an experiment laid out in which non-experts assess if different pictures tell stories. As the chosen pictures correspond to different criteria of narrative to varying degrees, the experiment also serves as an implicit test of these criteria. Its results confirm monochrony compatibilism, the position that single monochronic pictures can autonomously convey stories. While the pictures rated high in narrativity correspond to traditional criteria of narrative, I argue that the way in which these criteria are usually interpreted by narratologists is problematic because they exclude these pictures from the realm of narratives. It is argued that the way marginal phenomena are categorized is essential for a sound understanding of even the most paradigmatic objects of a domain because categorizations influence definitions and definitions ultimately guide interpretations.

Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film

Citations

Narrative as a learning tool in science centers

Locative Inversion In Discourse: a strategy of non-commitment

Interactive storytelling in mixed reality

What narrative is

The stories of social entrepreneurship : narrative discourse and social enterprise resource acquisition

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