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Amechanon, Vol. I / 2016-2018, ISSN: 2459-2846

During the Communities of Inquiry, the young people demonstrated by their words, the
close connection they found between the question of truth (expressed by the physical

death of the body of their relative) and the question of narrative (the perception of his
non-death body or personality). By means of this narrative, they emerge from

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philosophical wonder which has moments which are «perplexing or enigmatic» and
which shapes their truth regarding themselves and their surroundings.

Branigan claims that when people tell stories, anecdotes, and other types of narratives
involving them, these are conceptual acts that organize a base of facts into a special

pattern that represents and explains experiences exactly 206 . In the same way as the
children and adolescents presented their perspectives concerning death and the

philosophical questions that arose as a result of life vis-à-vis death, within death, and as
opposed to death as oral descriptions or explanations of the human experience according

to which we can examine the recounted representations and explanations of the
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experience .

The structuring of the narrative allows these young people to identify themselves within
the whole, and to develop empathy or emotions such as longing, love, anger, disbelief, and
sometimes suspicion. The narrative story includes sometimes a cause and effect

explanation which is often a human need permitting the strengthening of identity and

identification. During the conversations, the young people found themselves dealing with
organizing their human knowledge based on the axiom that the private human experience
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is generally told in a narrative manner and human identities are structured through it .

Philosophical discussions of the children added a dimension to Bruner’s definition which
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sees in constructivism «worldmaking» and narratives as «lifemaking» . I would like to add
another storey and argue that the Philosophical Community of Inquiry’s discussion

205 Lipman, M., Sharp, A.,M., & Oscanyan, F.,S., op.cit., p. 31.

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Branigan, E., Narrative Comprehension and Film, London: Routledge, 1992.

207 Cortazzi, M., Narrative Analysis, London: Routledge Falmer, 2002.

208 Heikkinen, L.,T.,H., «Whatever is narrative research?», in: Huttunen, R., Heikkinen, H.,L.,T. ,&
Syrjala, L., (Eds), Narrative Research: Voices of teachers and philosophers, Jyvaskyla: SoPhi, 2002, pp.
13–28.

209 Bruner, J., «Life as Narrative», Social Research, 54(1), 1987, pp. 11–32.

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