Development Of Narrative Competence Research Articles

“We will continue our struggle for success”: French Canadian students, narrative, and historical consciousness

ABSTRACT Recent theories of historical consciousness focus on the role narration plays in contemporary people’s attempts to give meaning to the past and orient their practical life as citizens. This article examines the need for probing students’ historical ideas and for developing narrative competence as a way to engage them critically in contested memories of the collective past so as to expand their historical consciousness beyond memory and cultural traditions. Relying on a narrative approach, this study surveyed 635 French Canadian students from different regions of Canada. Canada, a multicultural state made up of nations-within (French, English, Indigenous), represents an interesting case for studying young citizens’ representations of the collective past in a highly diversified society. This study offers new results on how these learners think about national history in the 21st century, and it discusses the implications for the development of narrative competence as a way to bridge the divide between the “cultural curriculum” and “historical thinking.” We argue that history educators need to take more seriously students’ narrative ideas if they truly want to have a lasting impact on their historical learning.

How narrative techniques attract young parents: The refiguration of Logger Vick in the Chinese 3D animated film, Boonie Bears: To the Rescue

This article analyses the screenwriting of Boonie Bears: To the Rescue (2014), a film version of the Chinese 3D animated adventure TV series, Boonie Bears. The child-oriented principle of storytelling is one of the most distinctive features of full-length Chinese animated films, especially those produced over the past decade. Within this context, Boonie Bears: To the Rescue epitomizes how Chinese animators are striving to expand the scope of their target audience from children to parent–child groups through the development of narrative competence. This article explores how the arrangement of narrative techniques helps to attract young parents (in their late 20s and early 30s) to cinemas while also retaining the child audience. These endeavours are primarily represented by the refiguration of Logger Vick, the main antagonist in the Boonie Bears animated TV series, who is transformed from a thoroughly wicked villain to a living, ordinary person who could be considered to be the ‘spokesperson’ for young Chinese adults. In this way, the screenwriting techniques in the film strike a responsive chord in the hearts of its adult viewers, thereby broadening the range of its original (TV series) target audience.

The impact of children’s lexical and morphosyntactic knowledge on narrative competence development: A prospective cohort study

The authors investigate the contribution of children's early comprehension of relational terms and morphosyntactic knowledge to the development of narrative competence in kindergarten and Grade 1. Narrative competence was assessed through the cohesion, coherence, and structure of children’s productions. The participants in this study were 714 Italian children. The authors measured their oral narrative competence through a storytelling task at the beginning and end of the kindergarten year. A total of 115 children were randomly selected and followed through Grade 1, and their narrative competence was measured again. According to the path analysis model, early morphosyntactic knowledge contributes to explain narrative competence in Grade 1. Early comprehension of relational terms contributes to narrative competence at the end of the school year. These findings confirm the importance of exploring the influence of early language skills on narrative competence development and suggests early intervention at the level of language antecedents of narrative competence.

Handwriting, spelling, and narrative competence in the fictional stories of Italian primary-school children

Previous studies with English-speaking children showed that handwriting and spelling abilities played a critical role in the development of writing fluency and quality, particularly during the transition from the kindergarten to primary school; in contrast, studies dealing with orthographically transparent languages found small or no relations between transcription skills and writing competence. The present study examined the question of whether, in a transparent language like Italian, spelling and handwriting abilities predicted the narrative competence of primary-school children, and whether their effects varied as a function of grade. To this purpose, 150 Italian-speaking children (77 boys and 73 girls), attending the third, fourth, and fifth grades, were examined: they underwent an assessment of receptive vocabulary and wrote a fictional story starting from a keyword. Written compositions were scored for handwriting quality, spelling errors, productivity, syntactic complexity, and the use of narrative categories. A hierarchical regression analysis showed that, after eliminating the contributions of receptive vocabulary and productivity measures, only handwriting quality was significantly and positively related to the number of narrative categories utilized by children. In addition, the impact of the two transcription skills did not vary across grades. These findings suggest that, in a transparent language like Italian, spelling ability has a limited influence on the development of narrative competence in primary-school children (at least after the third grade). On the other hand, extensive practice in handwriting might have beneficial effects, by freeing resources that children might utilize to improve the structural organization of written narratives.

Love and the Value of Life in Health Care: A Narrative Medicine Case Study in Medical Education.

This case study is an example of narrative medicine applied to promote self-awareness and develop humanistic contents in medical education. The impact and the human appeal of the narrative lie in the maturity and empathy shown by a student when reporting his dramatic experience during the care given to a newborn (with Patau syndrome and multiple malformations diagnosed at birth) and to her mother. The narrative approach helped the student to be successful in bringing out the meaning behind the story and to position himself from the mother's and newborn's perspective. The student's introspection changed a seemingly scary interaction into a positive experience, overcoming many initial negative emotions, such as fear, disappointment, horror, hopelessness, and insecurity in the face of the unexpected. It is uplifting how the student was strengthened by the power of maternal love to the point of overcoming any remaining feelings of eugenics or rejection. Other important lessons emerging from the case study were the art of listening and the value of silence. This narrative shows how the development of narrative competence can help establish a good physician-patient relationship, because the physician or the student with such competence usually confirms the patient's value and demonstrates concern for them, focusing on what they say and allowing genuine contact to be established, which is necessary for effective therapeutic alliance. The student's interpretations of the meaning of love and value of life inspired him on his reframing process of a medical practice marked by vicarious suffering.

Narrative competence: A neglected area in undergraduate curricula

According to many inter-disciplinary scholars, including, notably, Alasdair MacIntyre and Jerome Bruner, human action draws on and is shaped by available cultural narratives. Nursing is no exception to this fact, and it is this which has prompted the creation of this paper which argues that the development of narrative competence in nursing ought to be a pressing curricular imperative. At a broad level, narrative competence refers to a finessed, ethically-charged respect for human lived and storied experience. At the level of professional development, it demands that nurses must constantly strive to improve on their abilities around attending, interpreting and intelligently responding to the stories of people in their care (Charon 2007, Bach and Grant, 2015). Doing so facilitates empathic and trustworthy practice through sensitive attunement to existential qualities such as inner hurt, despair, hope, grief, and moral pain. All of these qualities accompany the health problems that patients and clients experience, and are of course more fundamentally inscribed within the human condition.

Written role models in professionalism education

After more than a generation of neglect in medical education, professionalism has now been restored to the classroom and clinic. However, the current emphasis on teaching and evaluating professionalism in...

Cinemeducation: A Comprehensive Guide to Using Film in Medical Education

Part 1: Historical context. A review of the literature. Film and narrative medicine: cinemeducation and the development of narrative competence. Part 2: The individual and family life cycle.Child and adolescent development. Adult developmental issues through life cycle. Family dynamics. A life cycle approach to sexuality. Chronic illness. Geriatric medicine. Life threatening illness/end of life. Part 3: Adult diagnostic categories. Post traumatic stress disorder. Anxiety, depression and somatoform disorders. Chemical dependency. Family violence. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. Personality and dissociative disorders. Eating disorders. Part 4: The doctor-patient relationship. Interviewing skills. The professional and personal self of the physician. The difficult patient. Ethics and human values. Medical error. Lifestyle modification. Part 5: Specific populations. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues. Complementary and alternative medicine. Cultural diversity. Physical and mental disabilities. Part 6: Research. A graduate survery of cinemeducation. Part 7: Additional topics. Leadership, teamwork and organizational dynamics. Technological considerations. Part 8: The future of cinemeducation.

Promoting narrative competence through adult–child joint pretense: Lessons from the Scandinavian educational practice of playworld

This paper examines the effects of the playworld educational practice on the development of narrative competence in 5- to 7-year-old children. The playworld educational practice is derived from play pedagogy and the theory of narrative learning, both developed and implemented in Scandinavia. The playworld practice consists of joint adult–child pretense based in a work of children's literature, discussion, free play, and visual art production. When compared to children under a control intervention (conventional school practices without pretend play), children who participated in the playworld practice show significant improvements in narrative length, coherence, and comprehension, although not in linguistic complexity. These findings provide further evidence concerning the role of pretense in the narrative development of young children.