Personal Narrative

6 Key excerpts on "Personal Narrative"

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  Academic Biliteracies

  Multilingual Repertoires in Higher Education

  • David M. Palfreyman, Christa van der Walt(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Multilingual Matters

    (Publisher)

  6Translation Narratives: Engaging Multilingual Learners in Translingual Writing Practices Julia E. Kiernan Narrative in the Writing Classroom

  The primary purpose of this chapter is to broaden our understanding of narrative – specifically, Personal Narrative via literacy narratives, which are regular components in American writing classrooms. These assignments are often one of the first to be assigned, and require students to tell an autobiographical story about their experiences with reading and/or writing: to pick an event and connect it to their feelings about reading and/or writing; and to connect this narrative to the current class discussions of reading and/or writing. This genre aims to position students in a role of authority, allowing them to choose what elements of their literate lives to include and exclude in the creation of their personal literacy narrative. This chapter posits that assignments such as the literacy narrative need to be reassessed, reimagined, and redesigned if they are to engage the growing number of students with multilingual backgrounds and capabilities who enrol in writing courses.

  In order to reimagine the genre of narrative, however, it is important to first assess its usefulness in a writer’s development. Narrative writing helps students to organize and make sense of their own experiences, which are significant steps in the formation of academic identity and critical thinking skills. The Personal Narrative has traditionally been categorized as a genre that is expressive in scope and nature, and, therefore, an uncomplicated genre for freshman students to engage with. Danielewicz (2008) argues that because these narratives are tied to ideologies of personal voice, and thereby expressive, they are useful starting points in the writing classroom. Gere (2001) also acknowledges the expressive nature of this genre, explaining:

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  Narratives on Teaching and Teacher Education

  An International Perspective

  • A. Mattos(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  More specifically, narratives allow us to create a shared reality. Through telling the stories of our lives, we are tell- ing who we are and we are sharing our view of the world. We do not sim- ply tell what happened; we explain how and why these events occurred, how we thought and felt about them and what they mean to us. (Fivush 2006b) The area of language learning and teaching has lately been interested in using narratives as research methodology. One of the long-lasting challenges in the field of foreign language learning (FLL) has been understanding and explaining how language learning takes place. Narratives have recently been used as a way of getting access to crucial information that would, other- wise, be inaccessible to the researcher. Pavlenko (2001), for example, believes that learning memories have great potential to second language learning (SLL) research. She says that narratives are “a unique source of informa- tion about motivations, experiences, struggles, losses and gains” (Pavlenko 2001, p. 213). In the area of teacher education, Carter (1993) and Clandinin and Connelly (2000), focusing on teacher knowledge and development, are major references. This chapter reports on the results of a study that investigated a teacher of English as a foreign language (EFL) and her perceptions of her own class- room. The main objective was to better understand the foreign language classroom and the participants’ experiences from the teacher’s point of view. In order to have access to the teacher’s perceptions and interpretations, nar- ratives, collected in the form of retrospective interviews, were analyzed. Before we get into the description and discussion of this study, let us know more about the “stories” told by language teaching research.

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  A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology

  • Alessandro Duranti(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  As noted by Jerome Bruner (1991: 8–9), ‘ The telling of a story and its comprehension as a story. . . is a way of processing that, in the main, has been grossly neglected by students of mind raised either in the rationalist or in the empiricist traditions . . . But neither of these procedures, right reason or verification, suffice for explicating how a narrative is either put together by a speaker or interpreted by a hearer’ . As social activity, narratives of personal experience the world over tend to be dialogic, co-told, and even co-authored by those who engaged in the social inter-action at hand (Goodwin 1984). The narrative lessons contained in this chapter propose that personal experience may be rendered either as a coherent narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end or as an enigmatic life episode. The lessons articulate what Ochs and Capps (2001) call a ‘ dimensional approach’(see below) to analyzing these two narrative inclin-ations, wherein community-and situation-specific discursive, cognitive, and social characteristics of everyday narratives of personal experience are examined as variable realizations of universal narrative dimensions. 2 T EN N ARRATIVE L ESSONS 2.1 Narrative Lesson One: Narratives of personal experience imbue unexpected life events with a temporal and causal orderliness Narratives may be more or less aesthetically rendered, but they always depict or evoke an ordered sequence of events . Consider, for example, a narrative excerpt about a childhood swimming incident (See Appendix for explanation of transcription conventions): (1a) Meg: I remember a friend of mine who was a very (.) acCOMplished swimmer and a diver. And she took me swimming one time and (0.4 sec. pause) She said ‘ Come on let’ s jump in he:re.’ And very trustingly I di:d and it turned out to be the deep end of the po::ol.

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  The Psychology of Personhood

  Philosophical, Historical, Social-Developmental, and Narrative Perspectives

  • Jack Martin, Mark H. Bickhard(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Part IV Narrative perspectives 11 Identity and narrative as root metaphors of personhood Amia Lieblich and Ruthellen Josselson Narrative and identity are concepts that contain the paradoxes of per- sonhood: they encompass the problem of continuity and change over the life course and the phenomena of meaning-making. Both “fuzzy” and fluid in their definitions, they denote but do not limit the ways in which people make sense of their experiences and locate themselves in society and in time. The concepts of narration and identity are used in many ways and carry a variety of meanings in current psychological literature. Narration refers to the act of producing a story, either oral or written. The relevant narration for the study of identity is narration about the self, personal accounts, life stories, or autobiographical narratives. Most psychologists use the terms narrative and story as synonyms. 1 Some equate the term narrative with any verbal utterance, talk, or text, while others limit the use of the term to verbal products that conform to a list of formal criteria. For the sake of clarity in the present chapter, we use the terms self narrative or life story for a specific genre of discourse, centered around the narrator and his or her life – not including chronicles, reports, arguments, question and answer exchanges etc. 2 What distinguishes narrative from other forms of discourse is, according to Riessman, its “sequence and consequence.” 3 A number of events are selected, organized, connected, and evaluated in a story which has a beginning and an end, carrying some meaning or a lesson for a particular audience. The kind of story or narrative which may be utilized for the study of personhood concerns accounts of events or experiences in the narrator’s life. Rather than reflection or accurate representation of the reality of 1 See T. R. Sarbin (ed.) Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct (New York: Praeger, 1986).

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  The Person

  A New Introduction to Personality Psychology

  • Dan P. McAdams, William L. Dunlop(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  In the 1980s and 1990s, writers and researchers in many different disciplines outside of psy- chology – from sociology to linguistics to gender studies – contributed to, or were strongly influ- enced by, what has been called the narrative turn in the social sciences and humanities. Simply put, scholars from around the world began to turn their attention to narrative. They began to study the nature of stories and storytelling in everything from the simplest speech act to grand political rhetoric (Bamberg & Marchman, 1990; Denzin, 1989; MacIntyre, 1984; Ricoeur, 1984; Courtesy Dan P. McAdams Silvan Tomkins (1911-1991) developed the first broad theory of personality that explicitly conceived of the person as an autobiographical storyteller. His script theory anticipated con- temporary narrative approaches to the study of self and personality. 365 Historical Context: The Narrative Turn Shotter & Gergen, 1989). A central idea running through much of this scholarship was that sto- ries shape social reality. When it comes to the world of people and relationships, stories prevail over facts, and over objective truth. Political candidates win elections not for objective reasons but by spinning tales that appeal to the voters. Certain cultural norms and belief systems prevail over others not because they are better or truer than their rivals but because they project more appealing narratives. The legal system is premised on stories that establish precedent, resolve disputes, and capture collective values (Bruner, 2002). History is evaluated not so much by its adherence to what really happened but rather by virtue of its ability to tell a story about the past that people in the present want to hear. And individual human lives garner attention not so much for their inherent worth or moral message but because they personify a good story.

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  Discourse and Cognition

  • Derek Edwards(Author)
  • 1996(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  In therapy, for instance, ind iv iduals may be helped to locate themselves within an alternative, more agentive and optimistic story of their lives -to start living a better story. But as Kevin Murray notes, 'both psychoanalysis and the cognitive school offer narrative a place in the head of an isolated ind ividual. There is no al lowance here for the actual telling of the story' (1995: 1 85 , emphasis added). Many studies of Personal Narratives do indeed study actually told stories , rather than the artif ic ial inventions used in laboratory psychology and artif ic ial intel ligence. But they general ly extract those stories from the occasions of their tel ling, or play down the importance of such occasions by collecting stories through research interviews, or in the form of written autobiographies, and examining these for how their authors 'see ', or 'make sense' of, things (Cortazzi, 1993). The more discourse-oriented studies emphasize the active nature of narratives in 'constructing ' rather than expressing identity (Harre, 1983; Shotter and Gergen, 1989), while also promoting a much more rhetorical and interaction-managing treatment of 270 Discourse and Cognition discourse as something produced in, and for, its occasions (Edwards and Potter, 1992a). The flexible and occasioned nature of discourse tends to be understated in studies of narratives, which deal largely with set-piece stories culled from written autobiograph ies or ethnographic interv iews. The risk of such studies is that of replacing the famil iar cognitiv ist trope of rational, sense-making honest Joe (or Jo) with a merely more imag inat ive, or romantic, literary ver-sion. It risks treating discourse as a kind of storied 'sense-making ', an author's or speaker's best efforts at self-exploration.

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