Journal of Narrative and Life History - Volume 6, Issue 2, 1996

AbstractThis article explores narrative activities in academic counseling encounters. It shows that academic counselors actively initiate, solicit, narrate, and collaborate on stories so as to display knowledge and expertise, assess and articulate students' counseling problems, and problematize otherwise nonproblematic situations. It suggests that narrative discourse is a resource for shaping knowledge, role identities, and problemsolving activities specific to the counseling setting.This article considers conversational stories as deeply situated within the interactional and institutional processes. By highlighting the narrative nature of both the counselor's and the student's talk and by documenting the counselor's narrative counseling strategies, it also extends existing research on conversational stories in interview settings, which focused on responses to interview questions. Illustrative data are drawn from video- and audiotaped, one-to-one academic counseling encounters that took place in an American university. (Linguistics)

AbstractBased on fieldwork in a central bus station in Israel, this article focuses on the theme of life stories as an analytical venue into the social world of beggars. Beggars were found to have three statuses, or symbolic types: the handicapped, the prostitute, and the mad. The ethnography describes the interplay between the status and life stories of beggars, and analyzes how life stories are changed vis-a-vis a beggar's change of status. (Sociology, Anthropology)

AbstractThe stories of three adult students who completed bachelor's degrees in an intensive learning community are examined. A controlling narrative learned from families and the culture had led them to interrupted educations and lives that failed to reflect their full capacities. With the guidance of faculty mentors and the collaboration of a peer community, they each reexamined, reinterpreted, and rewrote their failure narratives. Once they understood how they and their peers had accepted society's construction of their identities, these three were able to revise those self-constructions. Further contextualizing their experiences through the lenses of history, art, and literature enabled Helen, Ben, and Millie to make dramatic personal transformations. Helen, a single mother on welfare, rejected the hypothesis that an artist must be a genius or a man. Ben, a Vietnam-era veteran, let go of the macho warrior model and adopted a different way of contributing to the human community. Millie, an African American activist, found the common experience that connected her to both White workingclass women and Cambodian refugees. (Adult Learning, Learning Comunity, Narrative, Collaboration, Mentors, Peer Learning, Personal Transformation)

AbstractThe development of competency in narrative composition is acknowledged to be a complex process of central importance in the educational enterprise. Recent work suggests that growth in story knowledge is largely dependent on finding a fit among three elements: culturally influenced story schemas, children's developmental constraints, and instruction programs. The aim of this study was to examine an instruction program carried out with five 4-year-olds and designed to facilitate growth along an identified developmental pathway through socially situated cognitive scaffolding. The framework emphasized the coordination of prior knowledge with understandings gained in the instruction context. We chose a microgenetic method of analysis in order to look beyond outcomes and examine the actual process of instruction, exposing general trends in the data and providing insight into which instructional conditions lead to which specific changes in individuals' performance. The microgenetic method not only revealed the program's successes and shortcomings but also uncovered unanticipated strategies of participants, offering insight into issues related to the ways in which narrative knowledge builds. Our findings support the notion that learning does not occur in a straightforward, linear fashion but rather follows an irregular course, dropping off when, for example, task demands exceed processing capacity and surging forward when conceptually appropriate scaffolding is provided. (Psychology, Education)