Developing and extending Wertsch's idea of narrative templates

Abstract

Narrative enquiry has become increasingly popular in recent decades. Although James Wertsch has developed a well-theorized model of narrative as a sociocultural tool, his work has not been as influential on this narrative enquiry as it might have been. This may be, in part, because Wertsch has mostly applied his model to the collective memory of national communities rather than to other mental actions or to smaller or more local meso-level sociocultural contexts. This paper develops Wertsch's idea of the narrative template so that it might be more readily used in researching meso-level sociocultural contexts and for researching mental actions other than remembering, such as learning and the formation of professional identity. It draws on specific examples from education and from teachers' professional learning in England to do this.