The curricula-based school practice of the Sciences ignores the human aptitude for storytelling. FICTION AND CONTENT UNIFIED LEARNING (FACUL) employs neuroscientific insights into the conditions of successful learning and demonstrates how LabLit, a subgenre of science novels, can act as catalyst to trigger cross-curricular learning processes.
In his 2013 non-fiction bestseller, Jonathan Gottschall called homo sapiens sapiens “The Storytelling Animal“. Storytelling is enshrined in our DNA and has become one of humankind‘s major evolutionary survival strategies. Yet, while we have never ceased to narratively convey experience and knowledge across the campfire, our strictly curricula-ridden classrooms confine narratives to the modern languages; whereas non-language subjects, above all the Sciences, base their teaching and research solely on non-fictional materials. Rubrical thinking of this type runs counter to recent neuroscientific insights into the parameters of successful and sustainable learning in the realm of secondary school education. Worse even, educators forfeit a catalyst that can open the doors to the world of science for those that are less inclined to step over its threshold. Anglophone literature, in particular, features numerous science novels and examples of LabLit (Laboratory Literature), i.e. fictional narratives that expose a prominent extraliterary reference to scientific concepts, practices as well their socioeconomic and political implications. Simon Mawer’s science novel Mendel’s Dwarf will be used to demonstrate the potential that the concept of Fiction and Content Unified Learning (FACUL) has for triggering cross-curricular learning processes and engage those learners in scientific discourse who are less scientifically minded. FACUL takes advantage of the narrative embeddedness of scientific references in literary texts and the synergies this embeddedness can release in order to empower students with scientific knowledge and with cognitive academic language proficiency in English as the lingua franca of the modern Sciences.
