ABSTRACT
As noted by Maxine Greene in her Foreword to the book Stories Lives Tell: Narrative and Dialogue in Education (Witherell and Noddings, 1991), we can hear “the sounds of storytelling … everywhere today. Narratives of many kinds are being opened and explored. Journal keeping goes on apace on all levels of learning: people write autobiographies, shape family histories, become authors of their own lives” (p. ix). Relating narratives specifically to women's ways of knowing (Belenky et al., 1986), Greene situates them in classrooms and counselling centres alike. The word education derives from the Latin educare that means to lead out as well as to bring out something that is hiding within. The word therapy derives from the Greek therapeia – human service to those who need it. Carol Witherell (1991) notices that, ideally, each professional activity “furthers another's capacity to find meaning and integrity” (p. 84) in lived experience. Education and counselling alike involve either implicit or explicit inquiry into the nature of the self and self–other relations. Importantly, both practices are “designed to change or guide human lives” (p. 84). It is a story, a narrative that unites a teacher in a classroom with a “counselor or analyst – in the therapeutic dialogue” (Witherell and Noddings, 1991: 1) and can bridge the gap between the cognitive, moral and emotional dimensions in education.
