JCNT - May 2025 Release - Full Release - Flipbook - Page 71
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(1) Lived Throughness/Nearness (2) Intensification, (3) Appeal, and (4) Epiphany.
If our writing is, indeed, intended to be evocative and to bring out a more
aesthetic and inspirited learning on the part of learners, then it should produce in
the readers of our stories something similar to what van Manen proposes above.
And if narrative therapy, as it was proposed by David Epston and Michael White
(1990), is intended to be a literary means to therapeutic ends, then perhaps it
makes sense that narrative teaching and training use literary means to
pedagogical ends with express literary effects on learners. Perhaps, through the
evocative writing and reading of narrative practice stories, learners might come to
a more experience-near understanding of the ethics and spirit from which
narrative therapy practices are centered.
Given our interest in the literary effects of our pedagogy on the lives and work of
learners, we engaged in a retrospective reading of the comments from those who
participated in learning narrative therapy by way of practice stories, in an attempt
to see if they might fit with van Manen9s four vocabularies. In what follows, we
provide a summary of each of van Manen9s aesthetic categories, along with
learner accounts that fit within them.
Aesthetic category #1: Lived throughness/nearness
Van Manen9s first vocabulary is
