Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life Book

RIP educational psychologist Jerome Bruner, who died yesterday at age 100. Influenced initially by Piaget, he helped shape educational development thinking and the ways school were constructed for decades. Relevance, the arts, play, things largely dismissed by education think tanks today, all were central in Bruner's thinking.

This book is one of two that were high influential to me in the late eighties and nineties, focused on the power of storytelling in life, literature, the law. He wrote this book at 90, far past when anyone would write anything lucid or influential, of course, and it is great.

The impetus for Bruner's work in narrative was in part his participation in a late eighties Harvard narrative study group including such luminaries as Clifford Geertz and Robert Coles, who also looked closely at the importance of narrative in research, in virtually every discipline, and every day life.