`Incident on a Train´: How Storytelling in Higher Education Can Foster a Critical Discourse on the Inclusive and Exclusive Forces of Society

This text is about what happened to a teacher traveling by train with his class to the North Sea island of Sylt, in Germany, where the group intends to spend a week in a school camp. During the journey, various incidents and upsets also involving the other passengers take place that escalate to the uncoupling of a train car. This real episode was used productively for several years in special education university courses, such as inclusive education, for the purpose of storytelling as a pedagogical tool in higher education. Each time, this story had the effect of stimulating the start of a critical scholarly discourse on the inclusive and exclusive forces of society that are manifest in it. There are many indications that just such an emotionally jolting story from real pedagogical life can lead the students to tap into the subject´s complexity. Observations also suggest that examining the story `Incident on a train´ seems to strengthen students´ own pedagogical engagement for more social cohesion and that this story helps them formulate their action-oriented values more clearly.