Narrative Inquiry - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2001

In this article, I explore the relationship between memory and writing. In the service of such an exploration, I have employed several different writing forms: first-person narrative—including self-reflection, travelogue, eulogy in epistolary form, poetry, and social science prose. WARNING: This sort of work—specifically, this sort of writing—calls for a different sort of reader. Unlike many other academic articles, the goal of this article is not to systematically reiterate, review, inform, instruct, or critique. Rather, in this article, I respectively attempt to present an alternative approach to “doing psychology”—one that would allow for an account of the process of the unfolding of one particular subject in and through writing as she1engages with memory. By the same token, bearing witness to such a process necessitates a reader who can make sufficient space to accommodate the writer as she unfolds before her/him through an indefinite process. Such a reader should also be aware that the writer will not necessarily guide the reader as to what to think or feel. Rather, the reader is asked to do this for her/himself.

This study chronicles the “ordinary success” of 20 highly motivated, working-class minority adolescent girls. Within achievement motivation literature, success generally has been conceived as measurable performance and studied with quantitative methods. The current study instead uses narrative inquiry to investigate success as a process. The girls in this study speak of pursuing rather than achieving success, moving towards a target beyond their line of vision. Constrained by realities of their daily lives, the girls capitalize on the openness of the future to craft narratives of assured success. Paradoxically, this approach sustains their motivation but jeopardizes their prospects, since they are invested in keeping the future at a distance. Knowledge about the requirements of success is often a “dream killer,” forcing imaginative thinking to collide with realistic planning. This research suggests that ambitious but underprivileged adolescents would benefit from targeted support to help them negotiate tensions intrinsic to their understanding and pursuit of success.

Research has focused on perspective-coordination as a central mechanism and achievement of social development. Theorists have raised questions about whether and how cultural, social, and personal experiences affect such a process. Children from historically discriminated backgrounds, for example, have reasons to be especially knowledgeable about the perspectives of others, but whether and how such knowledge complicates normative developmental patterns requires further inquiry. This paper describes “narrative social wisdom,” extending cognitive-developmental notions of perspective-coordination with a discourse analysis of 224 autobiographical and fictional narratives about social conflict by 56 children identifying as African American (15), Latino (16), and White (25) in 3rd and 5th grades in urban schools. Analyses illustrate social wisdom in children’s context-sensitive representations of conflicts, in particular, via dramatic within- and across-group differences in representations of conflict resolution processes. Notable contrasts include the greater complexity of conflict strategies in autobiographical narratives by African American children compared to relatively elaborated conflict strategies in fictional narratives by White children. These and other results illustrate how children juggle resources from sociocultural histories with requirements of mainstream institutions. Conflict representations in fictional narratives were, moreover, consistent with cognitive developmental theory, but, as predicted, autobiographical narratives captured diversities that alter developmental patterns. We discuss the relevance of these results for theory and practice around social relational development and skills.

This study examined personal narratives written by 364 inner-city 4th–6th graders about an experience with interpersonal conflict. Stories were coded for three sets of variables based on Bruner’s 1990 work on narrative thought. The co-occurrences of these variables lent support to the notions that (a) establishing a moral voice involves noting what is culturally non-canonical and providing culturally recognizable explanations, (b) taking an epistemological stance that recognizes the importance of what the protagonists know and think and of what can count as a true or meaningful representation of events, and (c) making moral evaluations and positioning the self relative to what is construed as good or bad. Comparisons between children from a high-crime, high-poverty neighborhood to those from a less dangerous environment raised questions about how we bring children into the moral discourse of a culture, and how their appropriation of interpretive repertoires to explain their own experiences may contribute to cultural change.

This article adopts a microanalytic approach to examine storytelling as a co-construction by family members in a Cypriot-Australian family. Previous studies on family storytelling have focused on the various roles of family members in storytelling with a means of studying family socialization (Miller et al., 1990; Ochs & Taylor, 1992; Blum-Kulka, 1997). These studies used critical discourse analysis, sociocultural theories, performance and pragmatic approaches to storytelling. This article offers a distinctive approach to family storytelling by examining the discourse and social identities that family members display during the storytelling. The data originate in a study that involves interviews with three generations of Greek-Australian and Cypriot-Australian women regarding their relationships with each other. In this paper we investigate the contributions of the father and the daughters in the course of the mother’s turn at storytelling. The first part of the analysis focuses on the husband’s discourse identities as a contributor, initiator and elicitor of his wife’s storytelling. During the storytelling we also observe the production and exchange of different social identities between the husband and the mother, such as the ‘unwilling suitor’, the ‘embarrassed schoolgirl’ or the ‘forceful but teasing husband’. The second part describes how the daughters take part in their mother’s storytelling, producing a variety of identities such as the ‘impatient mother’, the ‘complaining’, ‘happy’, or ‘good’ mothers and daughters. These investigations succinctly illustrate how narratives become a resource for members’ ‘display’ and ‘play’ of identities.

The sharing of life stories is the most important social practice among members of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Close attention to autobiographic story-telling in AA provides clues as to how AA works to heal alcoholism by creating a community of recovering alcoholics. This paper examines three major ways that AA stories create community. First, in the course of the performance of autobiographic narratives, expert AA speakers allow create social structure between themselves and their audience. Second, proper AA stories are the means by which AA members acquire and maintain their identities as recovering alcoholics. In this manner, story-listening is just as important as story-telling. Third, through the invocation of strong feeling, both tragic and humorous, AA story-tellers create a kind of intimacy based on shared emotion.

Personal stories and tropes are ubiquitous in problem talk (e.g. therapy, counseling and hotline) which focuses on problem presentation, discussion and candidate solutions. Current studies of radio problem talk between troubled callers and psychologists show that certain tropes constitute the gist of callers’ narrative versions of the problems, and facilitate the negotiation of solutions (Kupferberg & Green, 1998). Adapting Bamberg’s (1997a) broad definition of positioning to institutional hotline talk, the present study further explores to what extent troubled callers position themselves figuratively, and whether figurative positioning is related to the interactional discussion of solutions. Analysis of 26 hotline calls shows that callers positioned themselves figuratively in relation to the volunteer whose help they sought, and that tropes enhanced the interactional discussion of the problem. (Personal stories, Tropes, Figurative positioning, Hotline talk)

Many developmental studies of narrative isolate resolutions as a structural element, aiming to demonstrate age-related influences on the presence or absence of this component in children’s narrative productions. This study is an ethnographic study of Turkish children’s conversationally occasioned narratives investigating the conversational occasions that lead to provision or omission of a problem-resolution structure in children’s narratives. The data come from 60 hours of naturalistically collected talk of preschool children aged 3-to-6 in two different preschools. The results indicate that Turkish preschool children often provide narratives without a problem-resolution structure but also that they can provide high-point structures, depending on the speech situation. The analyses reveal that whether children organize their narratives in terms of a problem-resolution structure is dependent on the characteristics of the recounted events and conversational factors rather than merely age-related competence.

In the past, narrative inquiry into teaching has relied mostly on written materials in the form of autobiographies, biographies and personal diaries and journals. This paper changes the focus from the written mode to the visual-verbal by examining one student-teacher’s hand drawn picture book as a representation of her becoming a teacher. The analytic aim is to produce a re-reading of one student teacher’s text that extends and critiques her “common-sense”interpretation. Rather than accepting the teacher-as-author’s intended reading as definitive, this paper seeks a different reading from a social interaction and a political perspective. The re-reading is produced by asking how and what membership categories are being constructed visually-verbally in the telling of the narrative and ultimately, whose interests are being served by the acceptance of a common-sense reading. The analytic aim is achieved by establishing a dialogue between various theories of narrative and membership categorization analysis and critical discourse analysis so as to arrive at an increasingly critical understanding of student teacher narrative reflection. (Narrative theory and analysis, Membership categorisation analysis, Critical discourse analysis, Teacher reflection, Visual narrative)