Story learning practices as innovation for life-long learning

People have through their experiences of life happened on rich learnings that form a narrative journey in ways both known and unknown. These learning experiences continue as information grows to communicate how the person sees the world and inform their current and future relationships in other life contexts, including learning environments. We can envisage these narratives as a Aboriginal Australian Dreamtime story of how we learn, the technology and skills we need in this space, and the human relations that will support our learning. In time, learning experiences might transform to become tacit knowledge, both embodied and known, while other knowings are further encoded to become story, that transmit across time and context from one generation to the next. In this context described, story is more than simple ‘data’ or ‘information’. It is also a communication of the meaning of the data in a relational context of circumstances in which it is situated.

Therefore, we pose the questions: How might ‘story’ provide a generative approach to enriching and diversifying learning environments that meaningfully connect with community, and with place? How might story enrich and hence rejuvenate learning spaces in ways that are reflexive with systems change? How does story’s encoding of information in relational context provide a generative approach to sense-making that our current learning systems designed on industrial era processes cannot? How will sharing the stories with our peers allow us to envisage a more complete picture of our learning? Finally, can story provide a deeper learning that continues to provide new insight and knowledge over time? These questions are a challenge to the educator, innovator and technologist to think differently about the learning future, and how Indigenous practices and process of storytelling provide guidance to learning differently. This includes a systems approach where ‘information in context’ and ‘information as relationships’ seeds a generative difference to learning for the future.

We therefore present some techniques from practices and experiences to emulate Indigenous storytelling and world views. This includes specific examples of Aboriginal Dreamtime stories of learning in the new environment, as we envisage how the moral, social and physical aspects of this environment could be. This will be evaluated in the context of the traditional means of knowledge sharing and the processes required in an oral culture and described in the new knowledge context and how it is perceived by staff and students, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal in technology design classes.