Suggests that narrative discourse helped a management team resolve conflict, influence corporate decisions, and unify the group. Argues managers' preference for collectively constructed narrative reasoning reflected their beliefs that narrative conveyed contextual complexities and helped interpret other types of evidence. Shows how through…

Students received a personalized or nonpersonalized version of a narrated animation explaining how the human respiratory system works. The narration for the nonpersonalized version was in formal style, whereas the narration for the personalized version was in conversational style in which "the" was changed to "your" in 12 places. In 3 experiments,…

This article presents the developmental continuum of children's storytelling skills and provides examples at each of five levels: labeling, listing, connecting, sequencing and narrating. The authors connect these developing narrative skills to communication, literacy and cognition. Strategies to facilitate development from one level to another are…

Investigations that focus on children's hand gestures often conclude that gesture production arises as a result of having multiple representations. To date, the predictive validity of this notion has not been tested. In this study, we compared the gestures of 82 five-year-old children holding either a single or a dual representation. The children…

This conversation begins with two observations: first, the professional organizations--conferences and journals--need to play more self-conscious, activist roles in shaping scholarly canons. Second, whatever canon now presides over American higher educational history is an extremely tolerant one. So much of current scholarship seems to arise out…

In this paper we describe the action research projects of two second-grade teachers. Using the state-mandated content on famous Americans, the teacher/researchers developed foundational levels of historical thinking in their second grade students. To develop temporal understanding, the first teacher employed a time line of visual images to place…

Children's communicative competence is essential and predictive of their success in school. However, in England in recent years we have faced particular challenges inculcating this understanding into primary and early years teachers' practice. Furthermore, some studies have raised concerns about children's communicative competence on school entry.…

Over the last 3 decades or so, English and its related disciplines of Rhetoric and Composition have adopted new tools of research--tools other than the traditional ones of narrative and description. These other tools are empirical or scientific, those that are common to the social sciences, including experiments, case studies, surveys, and…

According to narrative theory, stories are told when there is a need to resolve conflicts. Like history, the law, too, has the task of choosing among many stories, designating one as "what really happened." Bernard Jackson suggests that judges, in deciding cases, look for "narrative coherence," that is, internal and external…

Stories are one means of communication between people of all ages. The telling of stories or listening to them is a part of a tradition as old as human experience. This guide gives practical advice, curriculum suggestions, and story examples for teachers interested in using storytelling with young children. The following are the sections: (1)…

This consideration of validity issues in self-study research argues that issues of validity in such research are first and foremost moral arguments about educational practice. The arguments point to narrative study because versions of narrative work are considered a necessary component of self-study. Narrative research has been criticized on…

This study of the narratives of 48 black, low-income, urban kindergartners examined the frequency of topic-centered style (a discourse centering on a single topic) and topic-associating style (a discourse of personal anecdotes or episodes whose connections are never overtly stated). The children were from four classrooms in two schools in Pontiac,…

The study of narrative is an interdisciplinary enterprise actively pursued within literary criticism, semiotics, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and psychiatry. Within education, narratives have found their practical application in two areas. In the curriculum field, narratives seem an obvious choice as organizing…

A storyteller, folklorist, music advisor and language arts teacher uses storytelling in his classroom to inspire students to talk, write, perform, listen, and learn. Beginning with a seventh-grade elective class, the teacher (an employee of the Foxfire project and not trained as an English teacher) decided to spend two weeks with the students…

Written and published by the students at Gary High School, Gary, Texas, "Loblolly Magazine" is published twice a year. Issues are frequently devoted to a distant theme. The theme of this issue, "East Texas Storytellers," attempts to capture some of the local color and regional history of eastern Texas. The first article,…