Beginning, Middle and End

I didn't want to explicitly guide the construction of their stories. But I did anyway.

How could I not? With an eye toward research and the “others” who might evaluate what I was doing (these others included funders of my projects), I wanted to be able to say things about the emergence of written, narrative expression and its connection to identity. I took a minimalist approach:

Tonya (pseudonym): I want to write a story about my friend, India.
Me: Mkay…what do you want to say?
Tonya: Well, we’ve been friends for a year an’ sometimes she gets on my nerves but she’s good at keeping secrets.
Me: Okay…well…usually stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And in the middle, there’s something that happens that’s important and at the end you say something about why that was important, or weird, or funny, or something.

Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. In terms of a small amount of explicit guidance, that seemed safe enough, right? But there’s always that twinge, that tiny bit of discomfort (it usually happened somewhere between the “okay…” and the “well…” as represented above). Anyway.

I’ve been reading Mishler’s (2006) chapter (Narrative and Identity: The Double Arrow of Time, in Discourse and Identity). He argues that “As Kermode and Doctorow point out, we must know how a “story” ends before we can understand how earlier events in the sequence function as beginnings and middles.” Later, in the same page, he writes “The ‘uncriticized temporal framework’ where time is represented as a ‘linear succession of instants’ is omnipresent, usually as a tacit assumption, in psychology and the other human sciences where CHANGE or DEVELOPMENT (my emphases) are primary topics for theory and research. “

…Hello. Now, the question is, if I/we took Ricoeur seriously, how might that shape how narratives (in digital storytelling with kids or otherwise)…develop? How might that shape how we help kids to tell their stories?

I’m probably just puzzling over things that have been hashed and rehashed in creative writing MFA programs. One more reason to bite the bullet and buy another book (when all else fails…), perhaps one like: The Magic Pencil: Teaching Children Creative Writing.

Existential Question of the Day

Yesterday we frosted and decorated cookies at the digital storytelling project. I was helping one of the kids learn how to use a digital camera that had various nonfunctioning components. One of the girls, a third grader, turned sideways in her chair and said "When is your last day?"

I was thrown off by her question, and so I asked, "What?" She repeated, "When is your last day?" Still looking at her, I paused. After a few seconds I said "...There is no last day." Unsatisfied, she pressed, "When are y'all gonna stop coming?"

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know what the last day is."

And so, all of this raises some very interesting questions for me, as the project co-director and researcher. What I'm doing IS research, so it follows that there should be a conclusion to that research. But given what I'm doing there that is not research-oriented...it just seems strange to conceptualize that there would be a final day. Do the kids need a "last day" for some conceptual organization of what it is that we're doing? This particular girl was most likely asking because they are nearing the end of their school year....But its got me thinking about the nature of the relationships that we've established with each other, and how the kids see us within the larger landscape of their lives.

In terms of the way what I'm learning in this work has become a kind of artifact that I turn over again and again in my head...will there be a last day? I don't think I'll know the answer to that question for a long time.

Inaugural Post

A bit about me. I'm the cofounder of a digital storytelling project in Alabama. In the project I work with African American kids (who are anywhere from 7 yrs old to 14 or so) a faculty colleague and undergraduate volunteers. I am also on the tenure-track as a qualitative research methdologist in the College of Education. Before coming to The University of Alabama, I directed a digital storytelling project in Delaware called "Sankofa Stories," and I was an assistant professor at the University of Delaware. Before that, I was an assistant professor of qualitative research and multicultural education at Indiana State University.

...And before that, I was a graduate student at Michigan State University trying to figure out how to connect my love of reading and writing with questions about how we make sense of ourselves and the social worlds/spaces we inhabit.

In an AERA-type nutshell, my main research interests are identity, literacy, agency and community. To pursue these interests, I focus on the stories we tell and how these narratives are represented in blogs, photoessays, web sites, video games, digital stories and other forms of new media.

Although I've started this blog in order to assist people in the Writing and Literacies SIG of AERA with knowing a little bit more about me, I'm looking forward to posting here. Particularly since I can be a "published woman" each time I click the little orange button.

Nothing like instant gratification.

Anyway, a bit more about me, or actually, about my family: today is my daughter's fifth birthday! Right before creating this blog I dropped her off at preschool, along with the requisite cupcakes and goodybags for her class. As a way to stave off the realization that time passes so quickly (and to pay homage to my anthropologist forebearers), I am looking forward to creating a digital recording of the (small) birthday party we'll be having for her tonight.

Looking forward to seeing you in New York next year, if not sooner.