THE KEY TO MEANING?
Pedro Afonso wants to bring back meaning to learning and suggests that finding the right narrative is the way to do it.
The paradox of the modern classroom
A quiet paradox is unfolding. Never before have students had such access to resources, stability, and educational opportunities that can foster strong academic engagement. But what happens inside the classroom tells a different story. Motivation often feels fragile and learning can sometimes appear superficial. Students complete tasks, meet expectations, and move forward, but when asked about the purpose of what they are doing, the response can be disarmingly simple: “I don’t see why this matters.” The comment all teachers have been faced with.
Disengagement and its cause
Disengagement has been associated with difficulty, lack of support or low motivation. I believe what is missing is not ability, but connection. Learning is becoming industrialized, something to complete rather than something to experience. It is approached as a checklist rather than as a meaningful human experience.
In an environment increasingly shaped by visibility and digital presence, value is often attached to identity rather than action. And these pressures do not discriminate — they shape the relationship between students and learning across all schools, regardless of context. Academic work (and to be fair, any type of good work), which requires time, effort, and sustained attention, struggles to compete with faster and more immediately rewarding forms of recognition. As a result, the relationship between students and learning becomes instrumental. Tasks are completed efficiently, but without deeper investment.
If students do not feel that learning is necessary, then the central challenge for education becomes clear: how can we make learning meaningful again?
One possibility lies in rethinking not the content of education, but its form. More specifically, it lies in rebuilding storytelling as a central element of the classroom experience.
Human beings make sense of the world through stories: it’s in our DNA. Stories connect ideas to meaning and allow individuals to locate themselves within a broader framework. When learning is detached from any narrative, it risks becoming fragmented and abstract. Students need the scaffolding storytelling provides to present ideas that are received and processed while also leaving a lasting imprint.
Narration and community
This phenomenon is approached in the work of the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who argues that contemporary society is marked by a “crisis of narration”, in which shared stories that once provided meaning and continuity are being replaced by fragmented, short-lived expressions which often have a commercial objective. As he suggests, “narration creates community, while information isolates” (Han, 2024). This not only describes our experience of the modern world but also suggests that storytelling is key to education and the construction of meaning.
Learning is often structured around outcomes and assessments, conditioned by the lack of time. This often means lessons lack a shared sense of purpose. Students move from one task to another without a clear understanding of how these tasks connect to a personal journey of the now and the future.
Social media also encourages forms of expression that value immediacy over reflection. The result is not silence, but an echo of disconnect, a constant but ephemeral engagement with the world.
Reintroducing storytelling into the classroom could offer a response to what has become a shallow and frustrating experience of life. This of course does not mean simply telling more stories, but framing learning itself as a narrative process with the students. It means creating a sense of continuity between lessons, connecting knowledge to students’ experiences and preparing them for the world itself.
Seeing learning as a story
When students begin to see their learning as part of an unfolding story, they are no longer passive participants completing meaningless tasks. Concepts are no longer isolated pieces of information, but elements within a larger structure that they can understand and inhabit.
This approach could also reposition error and difficulty, which become integral parts of the narrative. Learning regains its dynamic character, where uncertainty and effort are not obstacles, but necessary components of growth.
Maybe this shift does not sound too difficult to implement, but the challenges are very real, and in some ways even goes against the educational status quo of ‘effectiveness’ and grades. We are shaping students who are accustomed to efficiency and outcome-driven learning, who may initially resist practices that require reflection or sustained engagement; they were never trained for this.
The idea in action
Consider, for instance, the study of Orwell’s 1984. Rather than moving through the novel chapter by chapter, the teacher might frame the entire unit as a narrative inquiry, a story on top of a story, inviting students to trace Winston’s own story (how it forms, what threatens it, what its destruction reveals about the relationship between identity and fear) and how each student ultimately learns to question power. Each lesson becomes a chapter in a larger story as a narrative of meaning is built while exploring the story of the book.
Restoring significance
Institutional constraints like (lack of) time, bureaucracy, assessment pressures, also limit the extent to which narrative approaches can be fully developed. Yet, the alternative — continuing with a model that produces completion without meaning — is increasingly difficult to justify and sustain.”
Storytelling is not an addition to teaching, but a way of rethinking its foundation. It offers a path toward reconnecting students with learning, not by increasing demands, but by restoring significance, and maybe rebuild a world where teachers are less preoccupied with teaching and more dedicated to learning, one in which students care more about a critical spirit and a curious mind and are less inclined to accept the time-wasting reality of our modern world.
Pedro M. Afonso is an IB DP teacher of English at Cambridge College, Lima.
