narrative

1. Narrative identity is the stories, the narratives, we tell ourselves about ourselves over time.
2. Life story over time/work in progress.
3. reflect important developmental process
4. contextualised in social relationships

2. I have been paying more attention, in listening out for narrative stories and when I hear them in my general life. So far: I have noticied a tendancy to tell such narrative stories when trying to make a connection with a stranger. Or eg, to reconnect with a friend: we went over similar stories that emphasised our similar outlook on some big world ideas. Are they part of the monologue that goes on in our head, working out what we’d say… what not to say?

3. Part of my recent life has been interactions with a lot of plesantries with adult forigners traveling in NZ. We find a place in common and share stories of our reactions to place. These are small stories rather than ones related to identity but accentuate a human story over a cultural one. We all are wowed by nature, can find walking hard.. etc. There are always common stories. I find the idea of a box of cultural common stories hard as someone who has never fitted in, that there is so many layers of grey.

4. This is where I have problems with the idea. I am conscious of telling a different version of a narrative depending on my audience! Sometimes, the narrative we tell is something we have convinced ourselves rather than what was ‘true.’ Up until a few years ago as part of the stories I had as my identity was that I hated PE at school, had never liked team sports etc.. then I read the diary I wrote at 14, and in black and white was me writing that I had had double PE and it had been fun – more than once. I have heard children say, “I am the kind of person that blah blah” so I look for evidence and can’t see it. If narrative stories are taken in isolation we would find it hard to work people out. What about personality disorders?? How we resolve cognitive dissonance? What about the way we storyasise things – make them to be a better story than the event itself and then repeat this often enough that the actual event is lost.

5. I would say that this varies within the wider school community. Having recently been in home education and meeting other home educated children and adults, being involved in alternative education (Montessori), attending such variety of schools (town and country) and having taught overseas there is a lot of fuzzy edges to the education narrative boxes.

6. See Anne.  The ‘Education” narrative  – the one I got at school and possibly University before I took my first steps as an independent learner as an adult has been relplaced as I have diverged from the dominant ideas around education.

I can see this as a useful tool in understanding others, finding ways to connect and therefore allow a learner to do their own stuff in their own way. How to understand the gap between what people say and what someone hears. The small school I used to teach at did a school wide bulling survey, and we could almost predict the kids who would say they were bullied due to what we had observed of the child’s character rather than evidence of bullying – the child who internalised themself as a victim was!