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"Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy through Personal Narrative provides a wide-ranging look at the origins, concepts, theories, and practices of the field. This unique, exciting collection of essays by a range of distinguished scholars and practitioners offers insights into the scholars and thinkers who fertilized the minds of those who helped shape the theory and practice of digital and media literacy education. Each chapter describes an individual whom the author considers to be a type of "grandparent." By weaving together two sets of personal stories--that of the contributing author and that of the key ideas and life history of the historical figure under their scrutiny--major concepts of digital media and learning emerge. "--

Use these fascinating first-person accounts to bring real-world problems into the classroom!The Use of Personal Narratives in the Helping Professions: A Teaching Casebook is a collection of personal narratives, short stories, and poetry about mental illness and other life-affecting problems, mostly in the context of family life. Each selection is accompanied by questions for discussion; selected reading lists are provided with each chapter. Beginning with problems related to childhood, the stories range through adolescence, adulthood, and old age. This unique book provides students and educato

A corpus of children's personal narratives was analyzed for themes of passivity and disaffiliation, the polar opposites of agency and communion, respectively. The subjects were 96 working class children between the ages of 4 and 9 years. In their personal narratives, children cited themes of passivity more than themes of disaffiliation, with weakness being the most frequently cited individual theme of passivity. With age, children increasingly described weakness in others. Correlations across the agency-passivity and communion-disaffiliation modalities revealed theoretically unpredicted, but empirically interpretable, results.

This article addresses the emergence of networked narration found in Facebook updates. Drawing on anthropological approaches to co-tellership (Ochs & Capps, 2001), we trace how storyworlds are co-constructed by multiple narrators via the communicative affordances which have developed in the Facebook status update: namely, the practices of commenting, liking, linking, tagging, photo-sharing, and marking geographical location. Our longitudinal analysis of 1800 updates elicited from 60 participants over a period of four years suggests that the rise of what we call a 'networked narrative' allows individuals to participate collectively in the construction of 'shared stories' (Georgakopoulou, 2007), and through this process for narrators to co-construct their social identities through their interactions with others. We argue that the distribution of storytelling as it takes place on Facebook may be found in other online and offline contexts, and challenges earlier, linear models of narrative form that have dominated discourse-analytic and literary-critical narratology.

Scholarly readers seem to have avoided a comparison of the writings of Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) and Benjamin Franklin (1706-90). Although they were born three years apart, they are rarely represented in anthologies as having been contemporaries, primarily because Edwards was a Puritan preacher and Franklin was an "Enlightenment" politician and inventor. However, when we disregard these critical constraints and assumptions, we find that as writers and thinkers, they have a great deal in common. In my thesis, I have examined the autobiographies of these contemporary works: Edwards' "Personal Narrative" (c. 1739-42) and Franklin's Autobiography (1771-88). The theoretical approaches of Jane P. Tompkins, Wolfgang Iser, and others have provided me the critical background by which to read these texts. In considering the reader's roles of choosing an "authoritative" voice, interpreting, and responding, we find that the reader is vital to life-writings. Also, we learn that in examining the text, the reader enters into and participates in the autobiographers' lives. An examination of the two narratives reveals three bases for comparison. The first is the way they remember themselves as young men. Following a convention established by earlier Puritan autobiography, Edwards and Franklin write about their childhoods in order to understand that their lives are journeys of trial and error. Both discover that although their adult lives are valuable, their early experiences contributed significantly to their lifelong education: Edwards was educated by God, and Franklin was educated by writing. A second comparison between Edwards and Franklin is their method of identification of errors and failures in their lives. When we read their life-writings, we may expect them to follow the tradition in autobiography of stressing factual details and success. Instead, both men are "silent" about the historical facts of their lives, providing minimal detail of the instances that made them well-known. From the events that are included, Edwards and Franklin articulate their lives in relation to their errors and failures. As a result, they judge themselves for their readers in very human terms: imperfect, humble, and frail. The final examination made between Edwards and Franklin is their struggles with language. Even though they were known for their communicative abilities, Edwards as a preacher and Franklin as a writer, both men demonstrate an inability to choose the precise words to describe their feelings in their autobiographies. In their very search for words, however, they often underestimate their capacity to articulate: what they can express to us is their suspicions of the very institutions they helped establish. Their difficulty of expression allows us to understand their "worlds" because we recognize their fears and struggles. In addition, we share the struggle of the perpetual journeys of Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin.

Prison art programs are essential to helping people with conviction histories develop prosocial behavior, enhancing self-esteem, and strengthening community ties. I know this because participation in prison arts programs helped move me from being a confused young man in prison to what I am today. Despite correctional administrators' robust history of promoting rehabilitation for the incarcerated, statistics on recidivism are daunting with the vast majority of persons released from prison being re-arrested within five years. Traditional rehabilitation programs and legislative efforts to reduce barriers to employment for former inmates are focused on successful community re-entry. However, the quality and diversity of correctional programming beyond job skills training also has implications for community re-entry. Research has linked arts education with development of the right brain functions of focus, creativity, patience, and the ability to work with others. Prison arts programs increase preparation for community re-entry by building skills, positive attitudes toward self and higher learning, and community connections, benefiting returning citizens and contributing to public safety. In California, Arts in Corrections programs, begun in the 1970s but decreased because of funding in 2000, have been re-launched. Led by artist Gregory Sale and highlighted to visitors at Alcatraz, Future IDs is a multiyear, social art project examining individual transformation stories that help reframe the narrative of re-entry. The program allows incarcerated participants to conceive and develop a vision for a future self, reimagining themselves and their positions in society. It also raises public awareness, communicating the value of criminal justice reform, and helping generate the critical community support necessary to reframe the reintegration narrative. Although raised in a supportive environment, the author faced incarceration and the uncertainty that comes with the conflict between official rules and prison culture and with release and recidivism. The Future IDs program's focus on artistic expression helped the author to heal the trauma of dehumanization experienced during incarceration and to regain a sense of self-worth and confidence. Creating his Future ID helped him to find greater clarity about his identity, to liberate himself, and to embrace a new life he walks today in service to others.

One major effect of displacement by war and subsequently living in a refugee camp is the disruption of the social, cultural, economic and legal institutions of communities; this affects parenting and a child's development. Few research studies address the effects of war, political upheaval, and displacement on parenting, specifically the experience of motherhood and the cultural socialization process of children. Yet, most research points at the undeniable connection between social and cognitive competence and the social and physical context, with changes in these contexts influencing the competencies parents' inculcate in their children. Furthermore, there is sparse literature focusing specifically on African refugees' experiences prior to resettlement in the U.S. Moreover, available data and research often fails to separate African refugees by country of origin and subsumes their unique backgrounds and experiences necessitating further inquiry and understanding of this population. To address these gaps, this phenomenological study utilized the narratives of four African refugee mothers from Liberia to further our understanding of how displacement by war affects mothers' beliefs about childhood, and the social and cognitive competencies they desired and inculcated in their children raised in a refugee camp. Through narrative inquiry, this study also focused on participants' experiences as women and mothers during this time of displacement from their respective communities.

Frames are not only universal cognitive categories to explain the narrator's consciousness, they are also a socioculturally determined concept. Using verse/stanza analysis, which is widely accepted as an effective means of analyzing narrative structure, this study examines how narrative discourse markers and linguistic strategies contribute to the culturally specific framing of Japanese oral personal narratives. Japanese adult narrators were found to employ particular linguistic markers: (1) the formal verb-ending patterns that are often pointed out as politeness markers indicating the insider-outsider distinction, and (2) psychological complements that are generally assumed to express a greater degree of hesitation and softness. It was found, however, that in narrative contexts, these two markers are more likely to appear at the end of a stanza than in any other position. In other words, in contrast to the general belief that these markers serve as devices to show politeness, when investigated from the viewpoint of narrative discourse, they have turned out to possess multiple functions, such as a psychologically effective means for cultural and contextual framing. These findings also call for an awareness on the part of Japanese language instructors to emphasize such multiple functions in the class-room, so that they may help prevent learners from making subtle but potentially critical mistakes.

AbstractOnly limited attention has been drawn to children's narrative practice of negotiating cultural ideas about who they are and what they can do. This paper focuses on children living in families where adults have psychosocial problems and analyses how they negotiate different family‐related and/or societal master narratives about their identity and agency. Twenty‐two children, 6–17 years old, have been interviewed about themselves and their lives. The findings suggest three master narratives as central in children's telling: the story of the child as problem bearer, the story of the child as inheritor of psychosocial problems and the story of the child as an unknowledgeable object. The analysis shows that children negotiate these master narratives by positioning and repositioning themselves and others in, and through, their telling. The core contribution of the study is the notion that children's problem descriptions contain important information about both material and discursive aspects of the problematic situation. Through listening to children's stories, social work practitioners and researchers can deepen their understanding of how the individual child relates to, and negotiates, wider cultural ideas about identity and agency. This knowledge is relevant in the pursuit of matching support with the child's needs and perspective.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION. BROWN WRITING QUEER: A COMPOSITE OF LATINA/O LGBT ACTIVISM -- Dancing at the Crossroads: Mulata, Mestiza, Macha, Mujer -- We Are a Part of the History of Texas That You Must Not Exclude! -- From the Closet to LGBT Radio Host in Dallas -- An East L.A. Warrior Who Bridged the Latina/o and the Gay Worlds -- A South Texas Activist in Washington, D.C., Houston, and San Antonio -- The Boy in Fear Who Became a Latino/a LGBT Advocate in Philadelphia -- No te rajes—Don't Back Down! Daring to Be Out and Visible -- Creating Spaces to Break the Circle of Silence and Denial -- The Queer Roots of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, Texas -- Latinas/os and the AIDS Treatment Advocacy Movement -- We Must Preserve Our Latina/o LGBT History -- All the Identities on the Table: Power, Feminism, and LGBT Activism in Puerto Rico -- Visibility, Inclusivity, and the Fight for LGBT Rights in New England -- Finding a Home in Transgender Activism in San Francisco -- CONCLUSION -- Index