The Educational Power of Fiction: An Interdisciplinary Exploration

The opening chapter seeks to establish the specific attributes of fictional narratives that make them a powerful resource for developing professionals for a world in which the ability to imagine alternatives, reinvent roles, build networks and relationships, and operate within both virtual and physical environments has become critical. It does this by beginning to develop a unifying theoretical framework for the use of fiction to teach in professional contexts, drawing on literary theory, critical social theory and psychology. The framework is designed to help educators understand why and how fiction supports professional education and to provide explanatory and theoretical frameworks to justify the use of fictions in contexts in which the use of fiction might be less well understood, even dismissed as trivial.