Narrative Development

Six Approaches

Michael Bamberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780805820584
• eBook ISBN: 9781136491702
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Growing out of an International Society of the Study of Behavioral Development-sponsored symposium, this book discusses the basic assumptions that led the contributors to conduct research in the field of narrative development. This collection gathers their research reflections and varying approaches to narrative and its development. It illustrates each type of approach and highlights their respective motives. The book presents some of the basic motivating assumptions of each approach and provides insight into what holds each set of assumptions together, potentially transforming them into actions. This book will serve as an excellent text for courses emphasizing multiple approaches to the study of narrative.

The editor has organized this volume in accordance with the six main points of the symposium:
* Specification of the Domain--how narratives are defined in terms of textual structures, knowledge thereof, interactive moves, sociocultural conventions, and the like.
* The Individual's Involvement in the Developmental Process--the relationship between some internal or external forces and the organism's own active participation in the developmental process.
* The Course of Development--if it is continuous or discontinuous; whether it proceeds in an additive fashion or whether regressive phases occur; and what changes at different points in the developmental process signify.
* The Goal of Development--the implicit notion of a telos, a target or end-point that needs to occur in the developmental process.
* Mechanisms of Development--the forces and/or conditions that both instigate the developmental process and keep it moving toward its telos.
* Methodology--where and how to look in the establishment of a developmental framework.

This book is an indispensable text in the fields of narrative and/or discourse, linguistics, language studies, psychology, and education in general.

Introduction to Chapter 1

Stein and Albro approach narrative as part of a larger cognitive domain. In their chapter they clearly define the domain of narrative as well as the telos for narrative development, resulting in relatively clear statements with regard to the early unfoldings of narrative development and the course it takes. Methodologically, their approach operates within the well-established cognitivist paradigm, following traditional quantitative methods that attempt to map the course of the narrative schema over the age range from early to late childhood. Their chapter is an exemplary attempt—documenting and lending support to some of their basic assumptions with findings from their own studies that have been carried out for more than a decade. In the following, I first summarize some aspects of their approach regarding the domain of narrative and the telos of its development. This enables me in the latter part of these introductory comments to speculate about some implicit assumptions regarding the mechanisms of development as well as the implicit assumptions about the child.

The Domain of Inquiry and Telos of Development

Stein and Albro clearly state that narrating rests on the cognitive abilities to organize content (i.e., the relation between goals, actions, and outcomes) and structure (i.e., episodes) into a coherent whole (i.e., connecting the episodes). Stories are causally organized, goal-directed texts. As such, the ability to tell stories presupposes a theory of human intentionality and action. Consequently, Stein and Albro’s definition of a story presupposes a goal-directed action sequence as the minimal, basic criterion. In addition, adults also have at their disposal the ability to judge what counts as a good story, a competence that supposedly is equally influential when it comes to the behavioral domains of storytelling and story understanding. And stories that are told with their words, clauses, pauses, and gestures, performed by real people for others, in real places and time, can be considered surface realizations of some underlying forms of narrative knowledge, although they would not (and could not) exist without the human mind that does the basic organization of narrative and narrating. Equally irrelevant are the overt language forms used to realize the goal-outcome relationships and their episodic connection. Whereas the approach presented in chapter 3 of this book explicitly focuses on the formal linguistic devices used in storytelling performances, the cognitive approach focuses on the conceptual underpinnings of such surface realizations. It is the basic organization process that forms the domain of inquiry within the framework of this approach, and along the same lines, the achievements of this organization process form the telos of the developmental process. However, it should be clearly stated that this telos is an ability, and, therefore, it has to be viewed as a mental construct and as an ideal. This ideal, which cannot be accessed directly, can empirically be approached in different forms by investigating the comprehension or production of narratives as well as in different (experimental) contexts and conditions.

Methodology

Whereas the cognitive approach traditionally privileges comprehension data, Stein and Albro draw on a wealth of production data as well. The use of story stems (with familiar characters), given to children in the study that is reported in detail in their chapter, strikes as a methodologically ideal exemplar to bring out children’s optimal narrative abilities.¹ It documents clearly that children’s (or adults’ for that matter) narrative production data are never taken to speak for themselves. They always are considered, in one way or another, to reveal some form of competence. Relating findings from this study to a range of other studies that use other methodological tools, Stein and Albro outline a rather robust picture of when children are first able to make systematic use of the different knowledge components that define this approach.

The Course of Development

In terms of the onset of narrative competence, children as young as 3 years can be credited with the rudimentary knowledge relevant for storytelling abilities. The origin of the different knowledges is not further explored in Stein and Albro’s chapter. However, from these early narrative abilities, young children’s subsequent developmental course is one of refinement, integrating the more complex aspects of narratives. Thus, developmental changes in the story concept are not of a qualitative nature. The only difference is the emergence of the “goodness judgment”, which seems to develop relatively late, in early adulthood. Obviously, narrative abilities as part of other cognitive achievements develop in parallel with achievements in other cognitive domains, such as memory, language, and (logical) reasoning abilities. However, these achievements are necessarily outside the scope of the chapter. Of possible interest here could be Stein and Albro’s assumption that some base of memory and narrative abilities needs to be in place for children to construct hypothetical narratives, because Nicolopoulou (chap. 5) places a quite different developmental emphasis on the ability to produce hypothetical and fantasy narratives.

Mechanisms of Development

Turning next to the examination of the developmental mechanisms are at work in the cognitive approach as represented by Stein and Albro, we find no mention of any behavioral reinforcements, nor of any interactive parental support, the way it is highlighted for instance by McCabe (chap. 4). Although not elaborated in their chapter, Stein and Albro refer repeatedly to other cognitive domains (e.g., the development of theories of human intentionality and goal-directed actions) that have an impact on the emergence of narrative development. These knowledge domains, however, seem to unfold somewhat naturally rather than being shaped by actions of others and conditions of use. Thus, it may be argued that within this approach learning to tell stories is more like acquiring the knowledge of rules to be followed so that narratives, and later good narratives, can be understood, produced, and appreciated.

The Concept of Person

The child who acquires the knowledge domain necessary to understand and produce narratives is traditionally viewed as an active seeker and organizer of information, an organizer, however, who is universally endowed with the cognitive equipment that sorts of incoming information into the relevant schemata that organize and categorize so that decisions can be made in the behavioral domain. In line with the overall cognitive orientation that led to the stipulations regarding the domain of narrative and the telos of narrative development, human activities such as storytelling are generally understood as resulting from the flow of information and the way it has been sorted into relevant schemata. It should be clear that this approach is governed by the basic assumption that the person (here, the child) is basically rational and logical and that this is a feature that holds universally, before it becomes specified culturally and socially in particular historical contexts.

¹The use of story stems resembles in many ways Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, inasmuch as it represents a condition that assists children in coming to grips with certain aspects of storytelling ability, such as creating connections between episodes.

1

Building Complexity and Coherence: Children’s Use of Goal-Structured Knowledge in Telling Stories

Nancy L. Stein
Elizabeth R. Albro
University of Chicago

This chapter focuses on children’s understanding of human intentionality and goal-directed action and the ways in which children use this knowledge to regulate the content, structure, and coherence of the stories they generate. We examine three aspects of children’s knowledge about goal-directed action. First we discuss children’s concept of a good story. Exactly what aspects of a theory of human intentionality and action do children use to formulate their concept of a good story, and does this concept change as a function of development?

We then focus on those dimensions of goal-directed action children use in telling a story with more than one episode. Adult storytellers typically design their narratives so that the first episode ends with an outcome that either blocks the attainment of important goals (Botvin & Sutton-Smith, 1977; Propp, 1958; Stein, 1988; Stein & Goldman, 1981) or results in the presence of unexpected circumstances. Few adults leave their protagonists in this initial set of negative circumstances. Rather, they add two or more episodes to their story (Stein, 1988), either enabling their protagonist to attain an important goal (Stein & Policastro, 1984) or explaining why their protagonist failed in the given set of circumstances.

To allow a story protagonist to achieve a successful outcome in the face of an obstacle, storytellers must acknowledge their protagonists’ feelings and appraisals of consequences that result from goal failure, allow their protagonists to activate and use knowledge about conditions blocking goal success, and enable their protagonists to construct a plan for overcoming goal failure or for coping with unexpected outcomes. Thus, our discussion of children’s skill in telling multiple episode stories focuses on how they describe their protagonists’ responses to goal success and failure.

Finally we focus on strategies children use to tell a coherent story. A primary goal of storytelling is to communicate an understandable account of events experienced by a protagonist with respect to the ways in which the protagonist’s world changed as a result of experiencing certain events (e.g., the problems and opportunities that arose because of precipitating events), the ways in which the protagonist evaluated and appraised these events, and the goals, plans, and actions the protagonist activated in response to these precipitating events.

Maintaining causal connections among these elements in the unfolding of a story is essential in ensuring that a story be perceived as coherent and understandable (Stein, 1988; Stein & Albro, 1994; Stein & Glenn, 1979; Stein & Policastro, 1984; Trabasso, Secco, & van den Broek, 1984; Trabasso & Stein, 1994; Trabasso &van den Broek, 1985). Listeners look for and expect explicit connections between events at the beginning, the middle, and the end of a story (Stein & Albro, 1994; Stein &Policastro, 1984). In the study we describe here we examine the overall coherence of children’s stories in terms of connecting one episode to another and in terms of creating connections between episodes that are not adjacent to one another in the temporal unfolding of the story.

USING GOAL-ACTION-OUTCOME KNOWLEDGE TO TELL A GOOD STORY

Stories, by nature and definition, reflect the social values, beliefs, dilemmas, and goals that underlie and motivate human interaction. Even when cultural variations in knowledge and storytelling are considered, stories almost always chronicle some aspect of a dilemma or conflict encountered in everyday life, with a focus on the appraisal of the dilemma and the solutions that are used to resolve the conflict. Storytellers describe exactly what goals are at stake in a conflict, the consequences that result (or will result) when goals cannot be pursued, the reasons these goals are important, obstacles to goal attainment, and possible solutions to overcome these obstacles.

Storytelling also forces a reevaluation of desired goals, especially in the face of repeated failure or irreparable loss (Folkman & Stein, 1997; Stein, 1983, 1988). In fact, a primary function of telling stories to children during the early preschool years is to teach, in explicit fashion, the disastrous or beneficial consequences of adopting or avoiding certain values and specific courses of action. To this end, story characters often engage in reasoning processes that evaluate the relative benefits of maintaining or abandoning different goals, and they often provide explicit reasons for abandoning one goal and adopting another. Given that such a powerful link can be created between storytelling and the appraisal of specific goals, values, and moral principles, it is important to determine what children understand about goal-directed human action and whether they use this knowledge as they attempt to generate a story.

Children’s Understanding of Human Intentionality

A review of the current literature shows that by the age of 2½ years (and probably earlier), children have acquired a rich working knowledge of human intentionality and goal-directed action. They understand and talk about reasons for wanting to carry out certain actions (Bloom & Capatides, 1986; Capatides, 1990), they recognize and discriminate among situations in which they or other people act to attain specific goals (Huttenlocher & Smiley, 1990), they generate the causes and consequences of feeling different emotions (Liwag & Stein, 1995; Stein & Levine, 1989; Trabasso, Stein, & Johnson, 1981), they spontaneously engage in conversations about events to which they have experienced emotional reactions (Liwag & Stein, 1995; Miller & Sperry, 1987; Stein & Levine, 1989; Stein, Trabasso, & Liwag, 1994), they talk about their goals and the beliefs that lead to their plans and actions (Stein, Liwag, & Wade, 1994), and they understand and respond to situations in which their own goals are being blocked or threatened (Lewis, 1990; Willatts, 1990). Two-year-old children also demonstrate a developing ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Introduction to Chapter 1
• Introduction to Chapter 2
• Introduction to Chapter 3
• Introduction to Chapter 4
• Introduction to Chapter 5
• Introduction to Chapter 6
• Author Index
• Subject Index