Explains pedagogical content knowledge as a narrative way of knowing. Describes how narratives serve as a means of explaining that understanding to others. Discusses two San Francisco (California) high school teachers' use of narrative in teaching. Concludes that, because teaching is like writing a story, understanding teaching is like…

A law student's narrative about experiences in law school reveals how helpful the ability to understand and tell stories has been in her success in learning and practicing constitutional law. (MSE)

Explored patterns of consistency and change in maternal reminiscing style across conversations with different young children in the same family. Found that mothers evidenced striking stylistic consistency. Mothers' use of a stylistic dimension with one child predicted her use of the same dimension with the other child, above the variance accounted…

Presents the stories of English teachers who described the complexities of the first teaching year. Their English methods lecturer had invited them to meet as part of a project investigating challenges facing beginning teachers. Their discussion highlights how they use narrative to give meaning to their experiences and to explore the possibilities…

Describes a workshop in which family members and friends of persons with dementing disorders who live in nursing homes develop stories of these residents' lives. The workshop is product-oriented, is not meant as a support group, and works best in organizations emphasizing individualized care. Stories should help staff members better understand…

Three Native Americans working in sports training, film making, and engineering discuss their thoughts on leadership. Each one defines leadership in terms of their own experiences, aspirations, and successes, but all three come to similar conclusions: community members must be willing to nurture leadership in young people by acting as role models…

Personalizing education means going beyond structural changes and changing how educators see their students. It means knowing students' stories. The personal stories of students are powerful; educators must devise ways to gather and share those stories to benefit student learning. Principals and assistant principals can help ensure that there are…

A study examined the scripts or schemata--cognitive structures that represent story prototypes--used by African-American children and how they differ from story telling patterns of White middle-class children using a Western, linear "problem solving" story schemata. Samples of oral narratives were collected from 50 African-American…

In recent years, distinctions between expository and narrative modes of thought, as between personal and academic motives for writing, have become less clear cut. Looking for ways to tap the potential of journal entries in which students tell stories about their own experience in response to literature yields useful connections between narrative…

Focusing on conversational stories of personal experience (SPEs), this paper explores the narrative skills of preschool-aged black children in a low-income, urban community. Although linguistic and anthropological work attest to a flourishing tradition of story telling among black adults, little is known about the ways in which children become…

Storyteller Monroe Brannon, although a native of Louisiana, was a long time resident of Gary, Texas. Mr. Brannon shared his fantastic memory of events and people which go back to the 1890s when he was two and half years old. He was keen observer of all that he saw and heard and forgot little. And so he was able to provide stories on a wide range…

Examination of the productive narrative competence of three five-year-olds revealed that the children routinely and regularly produced a striking variety of 14 narrative forms. Seventy percent of the narratives took anecdotal form, and original fantasy narratives occurred only rarely. (Author/CB)

Educators concerned with the preparation of adults are aware that students engage in lengthy discussions with their peers. Increasingly, this is encouraged in educational settings through formal pedagogy. However, little is known about its value to adult cognition. In a phenomenological study investigating the professional development of degree…

A study examined the narrative abilities of 28 high-functioning children (ages 8-14) with autism or Asperger syndrome and 22 controls across two different discourse contexts. Compared to controls, the subjects performed relatively well in the storybook context but exhibited difficulty imbuing their narratives of personal experience with more…

Paper reviews a collection of essays on the experiences of beginning teachers. The essays were written mainly by English and elementary school teachers after many years of successful teaching. All of the authors became effective career teachers. The authors write about the rewards of affecting and changing lives. (SM)