Learning Narrative Therapy Backwards: Exemplary Tales as an Alternative Pedagogy for Learning Practice

This article provides an account of our experience trying out exemplary tales as an alternative pedagogy for learning narrative therapy. The laboratory for this experiment was a semester-long graduate course on narrative therapy taught at North Dakota State University. Rather than following a traditional structure of first teaching the theoretical concepts through readings, we instead started in sort of a backwards manner by introducing students to the practice of narrative therapy through exemplary tales. We developed a pedagogy that required students to set aside the use of professionalized understandings or accounts of practice and instead relay on their own knowings and words to learn how to name and map the practices that were highlighted in the stories. Our hope was that through this engaged learning process students would come to an experience near learning of narrative therapy that was informed by the spirit and ethics of the practice itself.