Narrative Counseling in Schools

Powerful & Brief

John M. Winslade, Gerald D. Monk

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781483361932
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Counseling

Help students shed negative labels and develop healthy behaviors! This updated edition will assist students in narrating stories that "redescribe" who they are and who they can be.

CHAPTER ONE

What Is Narrative Counseling All About?

Ron, a new school counselor at Hamilton, put this sign on his door:

PROBLEM BUSTERS

Services offered include:

Lingering suspensions exterminated

Bad reputations reversed

Youth-to-adult conversions undertaken

“Boredom” alleviated

Trouble silenced

Treaties with parents or teachers drawn up

Miscellaneous problems neutralized, terminated, or otherwise gotten rid of

OUR MOTTO

The problem is the problem

The person is not the problem

Not surprisingly, conversations that students had with Ron in his office often took on a weird, yet creatively intriguing, quality. There were some curious comments about the sign. One student asked what it meant. Ron was happy to explain his preference for seeing people as struggling under the weight of problems rather than being problems in themselves. He said he saw that blaming people for their problems often immobilized them with guilt and shame and got in the way of change. He described counseling as trying to find a fresh way to talk about problems so that they started to dissolve. The sign on the door was indicative of his ideas about this fresh way of speaking. It carefully focused on the problem as the enemy and the person as separate from it.

Although he was not saying so in so many words, Ron had a passion for using narrative approaches to counseling. They fitted quite closely with his own beliefs. What stood out for him was the deep respect for people embodied in the way of speaking that narrative counseling approaches offered.

WE LIVE THROUGH STORIES

We live our lives according to the stories we tell ourselves and the stories that others tell about us.

Narrative counseling is deceptively simple. It is based on the idea that we all generate stories to make sense of ourselves and of the circumstances of our lives. However, we are not the sole authors of our stories. Many of the dominant stories that govern our lives were generated in our early experiences of childhood at home, at school, at a place of worship, and in the neighborhood. These local institutions are in turn given shape by the stories that are current in the wider social contexts in which we live. Some of these dominant stories regularly influence what we think about ourselves. Often, these stories create problems for us. Another way to say all this is that a narrative perspective locates problems in the cultural landscape, which implies that counselors who are seeking to help need to consider their own and the client’s cultural positioning. This emphasis on cultural positioning distinguishes narrative counseling from approaches that profess a scientific grounding but scarcely recognize the role that cultural worlds play in the construction of problems and in their solutions.

If we are located in a school story line as dumb, mischievous, or a bad egg, there is a tendency to live our lives according to the contours of the problem story laid out before us by such a description. These negative character descriptions often stick like glue. How does one extricate oneself from a personal description such as conduct disordered, learning disabled, or emotionally disturbed? What effect do such descriptions have on a person? How would one go about giving up identities like these, which follow a person around in files and have a life of their own in the cultural world of the school and in the minds of teachers?

Negative character descriptions often stick like glue.

In part, this book is about addressing the issue of the child who has a “problem” identity, or possesses the kind of reputation that yields few options for how to live with any sense of personal value and pride in a school community.

A NARRATIVE COUNSELING SCENARIO

As a way of introducing narrative counseling, we want to present a counseling scenario that occurred at Ron’s school while we were writing this book. It will give you a feel for what a narrative counselor attempts to do with clients. It conveys the spirit of what narrative work is about, as well as illustrating some of the techniques and skills used. In later chapters, we shall explain more fully how to develop a narrative counseling conversation. We shall also show how to apply this approach in a variety of circumstances.

But first, let us tell you a story.

Alan

Alan was a ninth-grade student. He had a reputation as a troublemaker, which followed him around the school like a shadow. By the eighth grade, he had twice been nearly suspended from school. At the beginning of his ninth-grade year, his reputation preceded him and was quickly gathering some momentum of its own. According to his history, math, and science teachers, Alan was refusing to work. He shouted, argued, and left the classroom without permission. By the third week of the new school year, Alan had nearly worn out his welcome. Troublemaker appeared to be worn on his sleeve.

At home, Alan would tease his sisters and argue a little with his mom, Judy, but he was also adored by her. Judy had attended many parent-teacher meetings and had taken particular pleasure in pointing out how Alan was a very good boy at home—a little mischievous, maybe, but not really badly behaved. She knew that Alan had really struggled at school in some of the early grades. He just didn’t seem to fit. His two younger sisters had seemed to adjust to school easily, but school had always seemed somewhat foreign to Alan.

For two straight years at school, Judy said, Alan had had trouble trying to relate to a couple of his teachers. He just couldn’t adjust to what the teachers wanted. He couldn’t work out what he needed to do to be called successful. It seemed as if he was an alien in the culture of the school.

Alan was sitting with his head down in Ron’s office, having been referred to counseling as a last resort, and wearing the same defeated expression he had been showing since the new school year had begun. A small scowl was etched into the right corner of his mouth. It threatened to occupy his whole jaw.

Ron was never one to waste words. “I don’t force counseling on anybody who doesn’t want to work with me.”

The match was a perfect one for Alan, although Ron didn’t know it yet. Before Alan had a chance to think about answering, Ron continued in the same matter-of-fact tone, “Do suspensions work for you?”

Alan shrugged and said, “I dunno.” The reply had a beaten-down, defeated, flat quality.

Ron had his work cut out for him, but he was equipped with a strong respect for young people’s right to speak about what goes on in their lives. He wanted to hear Alan’s conclusions about his own life. Usually, it is the other way around. Young people are more typically the objects of study by adults and are often excluded from examining their own purposes, reviewing the consequences of their actions, or discussing the effects these actions have on others. Adults often do this work for them and hand them ready-made conclusions. Scowling at these conclusions is often one of the few ways a young person in such a position can exercise some say in what is happening.

Because young people are given so few opportunities to reflect on and evaluate themselves and their circumstances, many of them “dunno” when asked about important things. People like Alan did know a lot, but accessing their knowledge is a challenge, even for a skillful counselor.

It wasn’t long before Ron realized that Alan hadn’t completely given up on trying to adjust to the culture of the school and its institutional demands. The school’s prescriptions of etiquette didn’t have much appeal for him, but he still objected to being thought of as...