How Narrative Structures Knowledge: The Story of Story

This oral presentation will introduce the audience to research and scholarship about narrative. Narrative plays a critical role in human thought and cognition. It provides key dimensions to information that enable humans to order, store, recall, and use that information in the form of knowledge. Narrative also provides structure, predictability, understandability and coherence to everyday experience and beyond. Narrative theory/paradigm offers an explanation of how humans think and work in the world that contrasts with the rational world paradigm so familiar to physical scientists. Understanding how these compare helps us to see how using story-telling techniques and strategies can improve the communication of science and scientific knowledge. All of this leads us to the need to embrace this approach as a means of creating the basis for better understanding of meteorological and hydrological science across a range of users and audiences.

This can easily expand into 30 or more minutes and include active audience participation.