Stories Count: Narrative Approaches to Quantitative Learning
Suzie Garfield

Proceedings of Bridges 2009: Mathematics, Music, Art, Architecture, Culture
Pages 363–366
Workshop Papers

Abstract

Stories Count: Narrative Approaches to Quantitative Learning is an interdisciplinary approach to education, communication, personal development, and creativity that uses the essential kinship of verbal and mathematical/logical/quantitative systems of coding and decoding to help people think, reason, understand, communicate, and create. Stories Count workshops are anchored by original narratives (stories) having significant math and logic embedded in their structure and in their content. The result is that listeners enter into the stories, engage with the narrative form, and simultaneously “do the math.” They realize that they can master new and unfamiliar codes as readily as they manage codes in their comfort zones. This workshop program includes storytelling performance by the workshop leader, an interpretive and analytic discussion of the narrative by all the workshop participants, and an opportunity for the participants to explore how they use codes, symbolic structures, and patterns in their own work. In addition, participating in the workshop may lead them to bring Stories Count into their own classrooms, programs, and creative projects.

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