From Actors to Agents to Persons: The Development of Character Representation in Young Children's Narratives

Nicolopoulou, Ageliki; Richner, Elizabeth S.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01006.x

Cited by 62 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Considerable work has demonstrated the importance of creating story-sharing opportunities for pre-school children (e.g., Engel 1995;Keller et al 2006;Nicolopoulou 2007). Compelling arguments have been made by Daiute (2000Daiute ( , 2002, Shultz et al (2006), Weis and Fine (2000), and by Fine and Weis (2003) for including narrative practices in elementary, middle, and high school settings.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

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“Thank You for Making Me Write This.” Narrative Skills and the Management of Conflict in Urban Schools

Harris

Walton

2008

Urban Rev

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We studied 364 narratives about personal experiences with conflict written by urban 4th, 5th, and 6th graders. Narratives were examined in terms of children's narrative and perspective-taking skills and the responses to conflict they described. Several features of narrative were reliably coded, including level of violence described in the story, children's descriptions of internal states, moral evaluations, and responses to conflict. Children described the use of communication as a response to conflict more than any other response. Qualitative analyses revealed a relationship between children's response to conflict and their narrative skills, moral evaluations, and descriptions of emotion, intentions, and mental states. Children who reported the use of communication in response to conflict wrote stories containing very low levels of violence and also displayed attentiveness to others' internal states and strong narrative form. In contrast, children whose narratives reported the use of retaliation in response to conflict were unlikely to report about internal states or to display strong narrative form. Recommendations are given for dealing with conflict in the classroom, for focusing on narrative skill development, and for creating a narrative culture within schools.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…These must be communicated (or deliberately obscured) by the narrator. This is the mechanism by which narrative form turns actors into characters (Nicolopoulou 2007). Bruner argued that it is in the sharing of stories that humans succeed in getting into the heads of other actors.…”

Section: Children's Accounts Of Conflictsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Thank You for Making Me Write This.” Narrative Skills and the Management of Conflict in Urban Schools

Harris

Walton

2008

Urban Rev

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“…First, an organization of knowledge in the form of narrative arcs can provide teachers with valuable insights into the organization of their students' personal experience (Engel, 1995;Keller, Walton, & Niolopoulou, 2006;Nicolopoulou & Richner, 2007). Through the organization of their memories, personal experiences, and conceptual knowledge, students find different ways to remember, re-imagine and contest meanings attached to any topic.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Collaborative Terrain of Collective Narratives, Students’ Knowledge, Teaching and Learning

Shahzad

2013

JSE

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The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the relationships between students' conceptual knowledge, collective narratives, teaching and learning. The study was based on empirical data generated from ninety-nine narratives, four interviews, and demographic questionnaires. The findings highlighted that collective narratives reflect the narrative arcs that encompass the patterns of students' thinking. Collective narratives can be used to assess the organization of students' prior knowledge maps regarding any subject due to their specific internal structures. The author argued that the collective narratives of students create a collaborative landscape of teaching and learning where students' prior knowledge combined with academic knowledge can be imparted in a systematic way. The study concluded that students' collective narratives offer teachers the benefit of using students' texts as alternative thinking devices in constructing knowledge.

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“…The same body of stories was also used as the basis for two previous studies (Nicolopoulou & Richner, 2007;Richner & Nicolopoulou, 2001) on which I will draw in my discussion. (For various technical reasons, the precise number of stories analyzed in each study varied very slightly.…”

Section: Young Children's Self-generated Narratives In Everyday Sociamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These examples are drawn from a long-term project that examines the development of children's narrative activity and its role in development more generally (Nicolopoulou, 1996a(Nicolopoulou, , 1996b(Nicolopoulou, , 1997a(Nicolopoulou, , 1997b(Nicolopoulou, , 2002Nicolopoulou & Richner, 2007;Nicolopoulou, Scales, & Weintraub, 1994;Richner & Nicolopoulou, 2001). This project centers on the analysis of spontaneous stories by preschool children generated and recorded as part of a storytelling and story-acting practice pioneered by the teacher/researcher Vivian Paley (e.g., 1986Paley (e.g., , 1990) that is integrated as a regular -but voluntary -component of the curriculum in the preschool classes I have studied in California, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.…”

Section: Young Children's Self-generated Narratives In Everyday Sociamentioning

confidence: 99%

The elementary forms of narrative coherence in young children's storytelling

Nicolopoulou¹

2008

Narrative Inquiry

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This article argues for rethinking and reorientation in the study of narrative coherence and its development in young children. The most influential model guiding current research in this area (a) tends to equate narrative coherence with causal linkages between events and (b) suggests that the primary (or exclusive) strategy used by children to achieve coherence is to embed causally-connected event sequences in the goal-directed actions of a single major protagonist. Despite its undoubted contributions, this approach is misleadingly narrow in several respects, and it has not been able to reconstruct the actual dynamics and trajectories of young children's narrative development. A first step toward overcoming these limitations is to undertake the foundational work of reconstructing and examining the range of actual modes and strategies of narrative coherence used by children, beginning with young children, which must include delineating the different narrative purposes and intentions these embody and the distinctive ways that they integrate events and event structures with the depiction and coordination of characters and relations between characters. I offer some theoretical and methodological proposals along these lines, illustrated with empirical examples.

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From Actors to Agents to Persons: The Development of Character Representation in Young Children's Narratives

Cited by 62 publications

References 49 publications

“Thank You for Making Me Write This.” Narrative Skills and the Management of Conflict in Urban Schools

“Thank You for Making Me Write This.” Narrative Skills and the Management of Conflict in Urban Schools

The Collaborative Terrain of Collective Narratives, Students’ Knowledge, Teaching and Learning

The elementary forms of narrative coherence in young children's storytelling

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