Q: What's your learning style? A: You're wrong
And why learning about immigration law through stories makes sense
On a sunny afternoon this past July, four generations of the Madonna family gathered in a park in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, carrying huge trays of food: lasagna, fried chicken, Caesar salad, cannoli. This was my third visit to the annual reunion since marrying my husband, a Madonna through his paternal grandmother. I still hadn’t met many of his extended family members.
As my husband and I sat talking with one of his father’s cousins – a man with a personality bigger than Calabria – a woman I didn’t recognize arrived and set down a tray of olives, dolmas, and baklava on the center table. She had long, curly hair that surely scoffed at any attempts to tame it, which instantly gained her my respect. She joined our table, where we were talking about the movie Hillbilly Elegy. She shrugged. “I’m just more interested in stories with female protagonists right now,” she said. “I just can’t seem to get interested in more stories about guys.” She had me at hello.
As we chatted, I learned that she was my husband’s second cousin and that she had a background in education and the arts. I told her I was a law professor but had grown disillusioned with analytical writing, at least when it came to inviting dialogue about immigration and reform. Instead, I’d started to read and write stories about the immigration laws – who made them, and how and why. “I guess it’s not really what a law professor is supposed to do, but I just can’t seem to do it any differently,” I said.
Actually, she told me, educational theory suggested I was on exactly the right track – people do learn best through stories. “All that stuff about learning styles? That’s bunk,” she said. Stories work for everyone, she said, because they’re easy to remember, easy to relate to, and they engage us on many sensory levels. She told me to look up the work of Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist who studies education. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” she said.
What is a Story?
I did look up Daniel Willingham and I found plenty of peer-reviewed scientific support for her statements, and for my move into storytelling as a path toward immigration reform.
What is a story? Stories can be characterized by the four Cs: Characters, Conflict, Complications, and Causality. All compelling stories have the same simple format:
· A Character who we care about has a goal with a clear motive.
· The character has not yet and cannot yet attain their goal, setting up a Conflict.
· In pursuit of their goal, the character encounters new obstacles, creating Complications with risk.
· The character’s actions lead Causally to overcoming the obstacles and achieving the goal (or failing to do so, in a tragic story), which creates a new state of affairs in their life.
How Stories Work
Stories, the research tells us, work on us in a way that facts and arguments never will. First, it’s probably no surprise that stories are more engaging, but why?
This TEDx talk by storytelling researcher Kendall Haven explains a lot. Stories have existed for 150,000 years, because our brains are hard-wired to think in terms of stories. In fact, our neural networks turn information into stories even before the information reaches our conscious mind. The brain has to make story sense out of information or you won’t pay attention to it. We do all kinds of things to make stories make sense: we make assumptions, add information, ignore information, infer motives, and more.
Stories work to help us learn because they keep us engaged. To capture and sustain attention, stories hit us on an emotional level. They present characters we can relate to, creating empathy and trust. The details of a story invite us to travel into the scene of the story. And the familiar story form makes the story relevant to us.
Other researchers have discovered that stories engage us because they require us to make modest inferences, which keeps us engaged. If we’re told that a newlywed bride came home and made clam chowder for her husband, but after they at she swore she would never cook for him again, we have to infer what happened at dinner. If we’re also told that the husband didn’t appreciate her efforts and got angry about how bad the chowder was, we’re spoonfed too much (no pun intended) and we lose interest.
Why Stories Work for All of Us
My husband’s cousin was also right on when she told me that stories work for everyone, regardless of their “learning style.” Research shows she was right on two counts.
First, the popular idea that students have distinct learning styles has no scientific support. As Willingham and a colleague wrote in an article bluntly titled “The Myth of Learning Styles”,
Students do have preferences about how they learn. Many students will report preferring to study visually and others through an auditory channel. However, when these tendencies are put to the test under controlled conditions, they make no difference—learning is equivalent whether students learn in the preferred mode or not. A favorite mode of presentation (e.g., visual, auditory, or kinesthetic) often reveals itself to be instead a preference for tasks for which one has high ability and at which one feels successful.
Different teaching methods – visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and myriad others – do have their place in teaching. Everyone will learn basketball better through kinesthetic than through auditory lessons; vice versa for algebra. And if we can engage learners through multiple senses, all the better. While a basketball coach will rarely just have the team sit through endless lectures on basketball (with or without charts and graphs), the coach will give oral instructions on the court and may sometimes demonstrate the proper techniques.
And that’s another reason stories work. An effective story engages us visually by painting a picture of the characters, scenes, and actions. It engages us auditorily through the narrator’s words, sounds, and voice (or imagined voice, if reaching us in writing). And it engages us kinesthetically by triggering an emotional response that we feel in our bodies.
Low-Stakes Learning
All those reasons validated my decision to shift from writing law review articles to writing stories. But there’s one more reason stories work, and it may be the most important reason to turn to story for thinking about intractable issues like immigration policy.
Stories are low risk; they allow us to experience another reality without demanding that we abandon our own. Holding those two realities at once can help participants see outside the zero-sum game and identify new ways forward. In fact, as I’ve written about here, conflict resolution scholars often use story-based techniques to break through barriers between participants in some of the world’s toughest conflicts.
Immigration Policy as a Story
I started this post with this story about my conversation at the Madonna family reunion because research suggests you’ll remember what I learned there better than if I had just launched into a discourse on cognitive psychology and education theory.
And I continue to hope that people will think about our immigration policy through a new lens if they hear it as story about a thoughtful farm kid from Ohio who started his career as a typist at State and ended it as the U.S. minister who watched the Nazis march into Prague.
Loved this one!