NCCRESt

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Personal Narratives

• Between the Lines: School Stories
  Reviews five stories that can introduce students to youthful narrators whose dreams and thoughts may be quite similar to their own, but whose cultural backgrounds may be very different. Using stories about school experience generates discussion about prejudice and discrimination.
• Beyond Multicultural Training: Mentoring Stories from Two White American Doctoral Students
  Using a personal self-disclosing format, relates two graduate students' experiences with multicultural training. Narrates each student's story and then offers three points that expand on an article that examines multicultural training for White students in counseling psychology, such as the trainer's need to balance support and confrontation.
• Charting a Course for Research in Multicultural Counseling Training
  Presents an integrative reaction to three articles on multicultural training. Follows the narrative path set by these pieces, offers a theme analysis, and uses personal experiences to delineate 31 characteristics of positive training environments.
• Critical Pedagogy: Translation for Education that Is Multicultural
  Examined the translation of multicultural learning activities in a college classroom into critical pedagogy in public school classrooms. Practicing teachers enrolled in the course completed interviews and surveys.
• How Reading and Writing Literacy Narratives Affect Preservice Teachers' Understandings of Literacy, Pedagogy, and Multiculturalism
  Discusses how to prepare teachers to educate diverse learners engaged in multiple and new literacies, describing a graduate course that introduced language, literacy, and culture. Data from students' writings, reading logs, reading responses, and final papers on literacy and pedagogy indicated that reading and writing literacy narratives was a positive experience, fostering multicultural understanding and complex conceptions of literacy.
• Japanese Enough? A Korean's Journey to Japanese Identity
  Describes one Japanese woman's reflections of the personal struggle fought by a Korean woman living in Japan. Other countries are thought of as being monocultural or monoethnic societies, in contrast to the United States' cultural melting pot.
• Learning How To Ignore Racism: A Case Study of One White Beginning Teacher in "The White Highlands" and the Two Black Boys in Her Care
  This paper focuses on the experiences of one beginning teacher, studying the ways issues of race and ethnicity are dealt with in a predominately white elementary school. Faced with issues of racism in the classroom, the teacher had no strategies to handle either overt or covert racism, both of which appeared to be condoned by those responsible for her training.
• Living and Learning: Experiences North and South
  An Afro-American multicultural education professor explains how struggle has accompanied her academic pursuits and lifelong experiences. She traces her sharecropper family's history, demonstrating the intergenerational effects of undemocratic class, race, and gender relations and showing how her learning experiences have shaped her beliefs as a multicultural educator dedicated to mutual teacher/student respect.
• Making Peace: A Narrative Study of a Bilingual Liaison, a School and a Community
  Explores the role of bilingual liaisons in resolving conflicts and building bridges of understanding between schools and diverse communities, discussing the representation of individuals' voices and narrative forms that engage readers aesthetically and critically; addressing multiple conflicts affecting the lives of minority language students, their families, and schools; and noting the need to move to a paradigm of making peace. (SM).
• Multicultural Counseling Competencies as Tools to Address Oppression and Racism
  The background, rationale, and framework of the multicultural competencies documents are discussed. Central concepts include development of awareness of personal assumptions, values, and biases; understanding the worldview of the culturally different client; and developing appropriate intervention strategies and techniques.
• Narrative Therapy: A Storied Context of Multicultural Counseling
  Narrative therapy attempts to examine and use the meanings and consequences that are the foundation of the stories and experiences clients bring to therapy. This article reviews narrative theory, including a description of key narrative techniques, and its application to multicultural counseling.
• On Knowing the Place: Reflections on Understanding Quality Child Care
  Reflects upon experiences with the First Nations' Partnerships and the European Commission Child Care Network to argue that efforts to understand quality care have been insufficiently sensitive to socioecological and cultural factors related to defining and assessing quality. Argues for a reconceptualization of early childhood care, and presents reactions of professionals, academics, First Nations communities, and Africa Institute participants.
• Personal Experience as a Guide To Teaching
  Analyzes teacher educators' experiences using storytelling about teaching to prepare second-career teacher candidates to critically reflect on their practice and teach for diversity. Using stories, prospective teachers developed retrospective explanations and justifications for their teaching practices, constructing platforms from which to launch future actions.
• Professional Growth: Teaching Truth
  Emphasizes teacher's role in imparting multicultural education to students by relating personal experience of a teacher who unravels his family history and discovers with pride his multicultural heritage. (BAC).
• Projecting the Voices of Others: Issues of Representation in Teaching Race and Ethnicity
  Discusses the practice of first-person accounts in curriculum examinations of race and ethnicity. Refutes the essentialist notion that only members of a particular group can address issues concerning that group.
• Structured Racism, Sexism, and Elitism: A Hound That "Sure Can Hunt" (The Chronicity of Oppression)
  The author recounts personal experiences with socio-politically structured racism, especially in education and religion; and the growth gained in confronting this nemesis. A career ranging from pastor to counselor to counselor educator has brought understanding of the link between religion, education, and counseling and a commitment to multicultural counseling.
• Teaching through Diversity
  Argues that one of the richest vehicles for enhancing students' classroom learning is the diversity of the student body itself. Integrating diversity into the classroom process also increases motivation and facilitates development of social, cognitive, and communication skills necessary for today's multicultural workforce.
• Telling Stories: On Ethnicity, Exclusion, and Education in Upstate New York
  Public debate between Euro-American seniors and minority speakers on the educational needs of the Hispanic-American community in upstate New York is examined. Differing views of group identity emerge, and reasons for the social and educational status of the ethnic minority are presented.
• The Interconnection between Personal Liberation and Social Change: Coming Out in the Classroom as a Transformative Act
  Presents one teacher educator's experiences working to transform the classroom by telling his own stories and coming out to his students early in the semester. The author believes that by sharing his story with his students, he shows them how to embrace freedom and enter into communication with each other in states of being, not seeming.
• Voices from Uganda. African Voices Series
  This multi-language collection of autobiographical writing from Ugandan children and young adults who are living in Britain as refugees is illustrated with photographs and children's drawings and includes comprehensive country introductions. In the collection, young people give their accounts of migration and explore how their identities are changing in their new country.
• Who Owns History? (Teaching and Learning about Cultural Diversity)
  Notes that history is always based on someone's vision of truth, expressed through a process of distillation, selection, inclusion, exclusion, reorganization, and prioritizing. Argues that the shorthand, watered-down, or warped history of mainstream textbooks regarding cultural diversity should be supplemented with original documents, fiction, and the voices of real people telling their own stories.