Story Work Research Articles

Psychological and other non‐pharmacological interventions in services for people with learning disabilities and dementia

The focus of interest in dementia in people with learning disabilities has been largely on epidemiology, prevalence, assessment and diagnosis. There has been less focus on care issues and interventions, with a paucity of research papers but a growing number of books and resource packs addressing these issues. Psychological and non‐pharmacological approaches are useful in services for people with learning disabilities and dementia, but must be delivered in line with a clear conceptual framework of dementia that aids staff in understanding what is happening to the person with dementia and the effect of their care and responses. This paper describes the most commonly used approaches, including developing an understanding of dementia, anxiety and stress reduction, life story work, reminiscence, reality orientation and validation techniques, helping peers to understand dementia, other therapeutic approaches, and understanding behaviour and dementia care mapping and their impact on the well‐being of people with learning disabilities and dementia and the people who support them.

Life Story Work and Social Work Practice: A Case Study With Ex-Prisoners Labelled as Having an Intellectual Disability

In common with other professions social workers have the power to articulate certain ‘‘truths’’ about the people who use their services (Hare Mustin, 1994). These knowledge statements about people, often situated in case files may become the only background information of the lived experience for people with disability (Gillman, Swain, & Heyman, 1997). Social workers need to develop interviewing, assessment and recording practices that give precedent to the worldview of service users, if they are to truly understand and respond effectively to people's lives (Bigby, 2007). One such way of doing this is by adopting a life story approach to working with vulnerable people, which can provide a holistic stance to a person's social reality (Ortiz, 1985). This article outlines the use of this approach in research with Queensland ex-prisoners who were labelled as having an intellectual disability. By explaining the process used by the first author (hereafter known as the researcher), the methodological findings of this study illustrate how life story work can contribute to social work practice.

Per uno studio dei Cantari fiabeschi italiani

This article deals with a specific aspect of the history of the Italian cantare (fictional works of popular origin from the fourteenth to sixteenth century), that is the possible existence in some of these works of stories and motifs connected with the traditional fairy tale. The first part suggests criteria for identifying these features, in particular how to distinguish between the fantastical elements derived from the fairy tale and those elements arising from some form of literary adaptation, for the most part from Arthurian romance of either French or Italian origin. The second part studies in detail a little known cantare (Historia di tre giovani disgraziati e di tre fate), tracing it back to those fairy-tale roots reconstructed in Stith Thompson's famous work on the folktale.

Life Story Work: Reflections on the Experience by Looked after Young People

Rachel Willis and Sally Holland report on a qualitative study of young people's experiences of life story work. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 12 young people aged 11–18 and looked after by one local authority in South Wales. They had experienced a wide range of styles and content of life story work. The young people reflected on both the emotional aspects of the work and the new information they had gained about their own histories. Life story work invoked a range of emotions among participants, including tedium, pleasure, anger and sadness. It also appeared to have a function in helping young people to work out aspects of their identity. All were positive about the experience, although a small number had found the process tedious at times or intrusive to their everyday lives. Most envisaged a future role for the life story books in their lives, expecting to return to the work for their own reflection or to show it to others. The article concludes that both the process of life story work and the material record produced are important to looked after young people. The paucity of empirical studies in this area is noted and suggestions for future research are made.

30 Life Stories on a Shoe String

Everyone has a story to tell. Life story work offers a way of leaving a personal message. It is an opportunity for making a bit of history, exploring feelings, explaining lives or just getting things out in the open. Choices are made about what stories to tell, how they are told, who will hear them …

How stories work

Stories provide an exciting way into worlds children could not otherwise visit. Because they are such an appropriate way of giving children information, we often use them to spark off interest in a subject. It is less usual for pre-school children to be encouraged to think about how stories work. However, researchers argue that children who think about the way they use language become more confident language users. This seems to make sense. As children grow older we ask them to write stories, yet they may have little experience of thinking about what makes a story and the types of story there are.

Norwegian healthcare workers’ experience with implementing life story work in a nursing home

Norwegian healthcare workers’ experience with implementing life story work in a nursing home

Writing Stories: Developing Language Skills through Story Making

The importance of stories as a key element in personal growth is well established, and stories have long been an integral part of mother-tongue education, especially at primary level. The work of Rosen (1988, 1993) and Garvie (1990), among many others, bears eloquent witness to the importance accorded to ‘story’. By contrast, until relatively recently, storytelling and making was not as prominent a feature of foreign or L2 teaching. However, the situation has changed somewhat in the past decade or so. Andrew Wright's own books (1997, 2009) have made a major contribution, as have the titles from Wajnryb (2003), Medgyes (2002), and Taylor (2000). Contributions to story work have also come steadily from Berman (2002), Watts (2006), and Wingate (2003), among others. So there is, in a sense, plenty of story material around for those motivated enough to use it. Where there is still a relative lack of resources is in the area of writing (in contrast to telling) stories. Creative writing is still very much in its infancy in EFL/ESL practice. Apart from the important contributions of Spiro (2004, 2006), there is very little, though some small regional publications are not insignificant (Maley and Mukundan 2005–2009).

Life story work and nursing home residents with dementia

Research has indicated that one means of seeing clients with dementia as individual people, and gaining insight into their lives, is through listening to the stories they tell. This study, undertaken in 2007, used narrative research methodology to listen to the stories of five nursing home residents with dementia. The researcher analytically reconstructed the stories they told to provide insight into participants' understanding of themselves. Each participant told a profoundly different story, indicating that people with dementia are not a homogeneous group, but unique individuals. The study demonstrated that communication and understanding were possible, but challenging, when the participants had a diagnosis of dementia.

Images of Fictional Community College Students

Popular media represent outlets for shaping and informing public perception of institutions and institutional actors found in our society. Community colleges and their students have been featured in a number of fictional works. This paper provides an analysis of the portrayal of community college students in the fictional works of novels, short stories, television programs, and motion pictures. Through this analysis, the authors highlight significant lessons that can be learned from increased understanding of fictional portrayals of community colleges and their students and applied to both community college practice and continued research.

“A Lonely Cottage on the Vasilyevsky Island” and Pushkin’s Tales about st. Petersburg

Pushkin was not only a founder of the Petersburg text tradition; he was the first Russian author who wrote in the style of fantastic realism. Its main feature is a combination of a fantastic plot with realistic details, such as “The Queen of Spades,” “The Broze Rider,” and “A Small Cottage in Kolomna.” The article focuses on a grotesque oral story about the lonely cottage on the Vasilyevsky Island, told by Pushkin and written down and then published by his acquaintance Titov. Based on a hint contained in its introduction, it is argued that the story about a lonely cottage was composed by Pushkin as a sort of a secret funerary composition, which explains the gloomy atmosphere of the narrative. The article also draws parallels between this story and other works by Pushkin in the style of fantastic realism. As a founder of the Petersburg text tradition, it is shown how Pushkin’s picture of the world was moving from a deterministic vision to a probabilistic one.

Untold Stories: A Discussion of Life Story Work

This article by Polly Baynes focuses on life story work with looked after children and is based on her 20 years' experience as a practitioner, independent life story work trainer and mentor, independent reviewing officer and children's guardian. The article traces the history of life story work and considers how changes within social work have affected practice, and are played out within the narratives that we create for children who cannot live with their birth families. The re-emergence of life story work within the current ‘target-led, evidence-based’ culture of social work is discussed and the impact of attitudes to gender, poverty and professional accountability is considered. Finally, there is a discussion of respectful practice with children and the issue of social work power, as manifested in the writing of children's stories.

Life story work in Oldham – embedding it into practice

Life story work in Oldham – embedding it into practice

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Life Story Work: A Practical Guide to Helping Children Understand Their Past, Tony Ryan and Rodger Walker, BAAF, 2007

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Pursuing the Pleasure of the Story: Reading Rosario Cruz Lucero’s “The Death of Fray Salvador Montano, Conquistador of Negros”

This article attempts to draw out the intertextuality of Filipino fictionist Rosario Cruz Lucero’s “The Death of Fray Salvador Montano, Conquistador of Negros” — one of the stories in her collection Feast and Famine: Stories of Negros (2003) — by studying it from the perspective of the reader’s “circular memory” (Barthes 1975). Following the introduction are sections of varying lengths that create conjunctions between the story and other works or concepts drawn mainly from the fields of history, theology, and postcolonial literary criticism. The first section discusses the interplay of conversion and subversion in the story within the context of the conquista espiritual on which was founded Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines. The second and third sections briefly delve into some aspects of the author’s creative technique as evidenced in the story. The fourth section links the pasyon-singing incident in the story with a historical study that focuses in part on the pasyon. The final section reads the colonial relationships depicted in the story in terms of Thiru Kandiah’s concepts of symbiosis and perceptual diversity. Through these varied approaches, the article hopes to demonstrate the richness of the reading experience offered by Cruz-Lucero’s story.

Beyond the Memoir: Telling Life Stories Using Multiple Literary Forms

Critical discussions on written life stories and the elderly often focus on the memoir format alone. Consequently, the role that literary form plays in influencing what types of stories are voiced and what are silenced is often not addressed. This article describes an approach to written life story work that includes the use of several literary forms such as letters, poems, and third-person stories. Through writing examples from older adults who participated in a series of “Share Your Life Story” writing workshops, I argue that literary form greatly influences what story is voiced, and stress the importance of a multiform approach in life story work.

The Child's Own Story: Life Story Work with Traumatised Children

The Child's Own Story: Life Story Work with Traumatised Children

Life story work and bereavement: shared reflections on its usefulness

Bereavement and grief, and the profound impact they can potentially have, can go unrecognised in people with learning disabilities. Here, Sue Read and Claire Bowler describe how life story work, which encourages individuals to reflect and take stock of life experiences, can be used to support a client through loss

Narrating, writing, reading: life story work as an aid to (self) advocacy

Accessible SummaryThis article is about life story work with people with learning disabilities. It talks about reading and writing stories, and listening to them.Telling your life story, writing it down and talking about it with others can be an important part of self‐advocacy for people with learning disabilities.Life stories are helpful when they are told or written in a way that brings back memories that tell you about the real person. They should be written in a clear and honest way. These stories are very important, and other people need to listen to or read them in a careful and respectful way.Life stories show how each person is special and an individual in their own right, with their own history. This is not the case in the files and records of most service organizations.Life story work can help people with learning disabilities to feel good about themselves and to understand themselves better.It also helps support workers and others to see each person with learning disabilities as an individual, to understand important relationships, and the ways in which the person they are working with makes sense of his or her life.