Why Narrative Now? Marking a Decade of Narrative Inquiry in Music Education

I've often wondered whether, in some deep sense, we have a need for narrative, for stories.... Odd that nobody has ever labeled our species Homo narrans rather than Homo sapiens! Sharing and creating common stories surely holds us together as a species as firmly, if not more so, as our shared knowledge of the world. And besides, as others have remarked, we not only know the rules of story-making but use and restrain our narrative gift in a manner that makes human culture possible.(p. 8) Bruner's distinctions between ...