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Construction of the Narrative as (Didactic) Game

Publication at Faculty of Education |
2012

Abstract

Communicative education traverses linguistic, literary and stylistic aspects of Czech language and literature. Communicative approach to the subject encourages the teacher to work with the text directly, and to pursue the creative aspect of the subject, both in the receptive and productive activities.

The author of this article, a didactics expert from the Department of Czech language and literature of the Faculty of Education at Charles University in Prague, proposes for discussion and contemplation one of the creative concepts, used in the communicative and literary education - a construction of a narrative that is didactically externalized in the form of a story put together through a card game. The author believes that a seemingly easy and simple game can hold significant didactic potential, if presented in the class as a sharing of authorship, and made available for the students to experience and subsequently reflect upon it.

By constructing a narrative, into which the student enters authentically and individually, he or she encounters real textual problems. These problems concern for example questions connected with storytelling (who am I as a narrator, which tense do I use, what/whom do I speak about, how do I steer my tale towards its point, what do I stress in the tale and how do I achieve this, if and how do I want to make my narrative more interesting etc.), which engage the student on individual textual layers (from the layer of narrating a story, the student is constantly transported to the layers of genre, characters, place, language and style, meaning of the text).

Furthermore, because this approach is presented to the student in the form of a game, an experiential framework is set up for his learning. During the game itself, as well as the group reflection upon it, which can be either parallel, or subsequent, the student gains knowledge primarily of an aesthetic kind.

The game can be presented to the students in various alternations.