NARRATIVE UNDERSTANDING: DEVELOPMENT OF A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR SOPHISTICATED TEACHING OF LEARNERS

How Learners achieve learning? Do they learn what they must learn? Do they understand what they have learned? Educational theories have faced us with different frameworks to clarify and explain this problem. Have they been successful? Why do our teaching and learning take different paths? What is the reason of misunderstandings which troubles the teaching process? We cannot reach conceptual dominance of this problem unless we respond to the question that how people and learners achieve understanding or in more specific terms, how they create the meaning. At the starting point, we are faced with four main streams in this field: conceptual psychology that puts education in the realm of culture; dialogical psychology which formulates education in the interaction of language and formulizes it as a dialogical issue; Social-cultural and social-linguistic studies which believe that linguistic structures and social ones are intertwined in such a way that to be involved in teaching. The focus of all these issues is the narrative understanding. The narrative understanding as a linguistic issue impacts the understanding and in fact it is believed that education is formed in the framework of language. Language as a cultural element and as an element of the concrete manifestation of culture highlights its prominent role in human interaction. When language starts speaking its language is narrative language. Therefore, when enters the understanding realm, it sets the base of understanding. The narrative understanding forms the meaning-creation foundation. Language attempts with the use of metaphorical conceptualization and the narrative metaphor, collects the scattered phenomena together and in the complicated process of synchronized and desynchronized movement of language formulates the narrative understanding and constructs the meaning.