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Struggling adolescent readers in a special education classroom were encouraged to engage in the narrative mode of thinking when reading and interpreting texts. The results were promising, and there are implications for helping preserve teachers develop an awareness of narrative thinking.

It seems fitting to use a story to begin a discussion of narrative theory and its implications for both literary interpretation and teacher education. Last spring, while supervising a student during a 3week teaching practicum, I observed her presenting a lesson about a Langston Hughes poem, "Mother to Son" (1994). Angie (a pseudonym) was trying to help her students understand the concept of metaphor by directing their attention to how an extended metaphor was used throughout the poem. She kept asking students to define metaphor and find examples. The students leaned forward in their seats as she spoke, listening intently, but no one responded to her questions. The few who eventually did volunteer waited until the teacher provided highly directive cues as to what she was seeking, an action contrary to her emergent beliefs about encouraging student responses. After her first week in this classroom, however, Angie confided that she found this group of students challenging and frustrating. "They're so quiet, so unmotivated," she wrote in her journal.

As I watched this class, however, I did not see students who were unmotivated. Quiet, yes, but they held on to Angie's every word and movement. I found myself leaning forward as well, trying to send mental messages to her. "They're trying to read your signals," I thought. "They're having trouble with this idea of metaphor because it's still abstract to them. Their body language indicates that they want to talk, but you're not asking the right questions yet." Whenever Angie touched upon something the students knew about-the relationship between the mother and her son, for example, several students shyly raised hands to respond. But after each student comment, the teacher returned to her focus on metaphor. I tried to send one last message to her: "Ask them to tell you about their mothers and grandmothers, ask them to talk about what it's like when their parents come home after a hard day's work. Ask them what phrases their family members use to describe their days, to describe their lives. Let them tell you these stories. Then you can talk about metaphors."

What happened in this class was a result of a lack of experience in encouraging storied ways of knowing as a beginning place for students to construct meaning and to interpret not only literature but all texts. Prior to her practicum, Angie had written enthusiastic journal entries and planned lessons reflecting her appreciation of response theories of literature teaching (Langer, 1995; Rosenblatt, 1995). Yet when trying to teach a unit on the Harlem Renaissance, she resorted to traditional approaches of categorizing types of poetry and defining and identifying examples of literary terms. Angie was responsive to my feedback during our postobservation conferences, but already I heard in her voice the fatigue that can come from the demands of teaching, especially in a district under increasing pressure to improve student achievement. "They need to know these terms," she protested. "They'll be tested on them when they take their state graduation tests."

My responsibility, however, was to help Angie realize that there are more effective ways of helping students recognize the literary terms required by the state curriculum. I wanted her to know that this goal can be achieved, but that she must also provide her students with positive experiences of negotiating the realms of possibility within texts (Miller & Legge, 1999). One way I encourage teachers like Angie to help struggling readers gain such comfort with texts is through narrative approaches to meaning making.

The narrative mode of thinking

On the basis of a study I conducted with urban middle school students in special education classes (Zigo, 1998), I discovered that one way nearly all of these children appeared able to engage in meaning making was through what Bruner called the "narrative mode" (1986) of thinking. I will first explain how I understand narrative theory (Bruner, 1986; Egan, 1993, 1999; Hicks, 1993; Miller, 1994; Wells, 1986) and its relationship to students' thinking and learning. Then I will describe my observations of struggling readers who used this form of thinking naturally and spontaneously, or who entered into it with minimal scaffolding from those of us instructing them. These students demonstrated a greater degree of understanding of texts, vocabulary, and instructional concepts, maintained over time, than when information was presented to them without extended opportunities to engage in storied thinking. Finally, I will provide some suggestions for integrating narrative theory into language arts education, especially during an era when teachers feel increasingly pressured by accountability according to local or state standards.

Narrative thinking as a meaning-making process

Bruner has written extensively on the narrative mode of thought, contrasting it with the "paradigmatic mode." According to Bruner (1986):

[Tlhe paradigmatic or logico-scientific [model attempts to fulfill the ideal of a formal, mathematical system of description and explanation. It employs categorization or conceptualization and the operations by which categories are established, instantiated, idealized, and related one to the other to form a system. (p. 12)

In contrast, he wrote,

The imaginative application of the narrative mode leads instead to good stories, gripping drama, believable...historical accounts. It deals in human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course. (p. 13)

Bruner intended us to recognize the narrative mode as more than just telling stories, although the process of composing a narrative is naturally involved. According to Bruner, the narrative mode is a distinct form of cognition, of making sense of the world in a way that differs from the more analytic, linear paradigmatic stance. Like Bruner, Wells (1986) suggested that narrative "has its roots in the perceptual and cognitive processes through which, as individuals, we make sense of all of our experiences" (p. 195). Echoing and extending Bruner, Egan (1999) suggested that story telling reflects "a set of powerful and effective mental strategies" (p. 7). In addition to serving as a cognitive tool relied upon by individuals, he asserted that story telling serves as a significant tool for shaping the understanding and meaning given to events, as used by entire cultures:

The story form has been one of the most powerful and effective sustainers of cultures across the world. Its great power lies in its ability to fix affective responses to the messages it contains and to bind what is to be remembered with emotional associations. Our emotions, simply, are most effective at sustaining and helping in the recall of memories of events. (p. 16)

Similarly, Miller (1994) articulated the interrelationship between narrative as a cognitive tool for personal understanding and as a "major... mechanism of socialization" (p. 159) into a culture's beliefs and practices. According to Miller, a child's participation in a culture's narrative discourse practices leads to the social construction of the self. Hicks (1993) concurred with Egan's (1993) assertion that narrative is "an extremely important symbolic 'tool' that enables children to participate in the social world of classrooms, and thus to learn" (Hicks, 1993, p. 130). Like Egan and Miller, she proposed a theoretical framework that views narrative as "a unique means of sense making" (p. 131) that enables children, adults, and entire cultures "to structure events into meaningful chunks" (p. 131). She also suggested that the concept of narrative be viewed even more broadly, "not as a particular discursive genre, but rather as a set of discourses that are linked to specific forms of social meaning making" (p. 130). In other words, children are not socialized into any singular, distinct narrative or story form but rather into "a repertoire of narrative forms" (p. 133) that serve a wide range of socially constructed meaning-making purposes.

Finally, Wells and Chang-Wells (1992) and Hicks (1995, 1998) pointed out an additional consideration for narrative discourses in schooling. To accept the argument that children (a) are socialized into multiple ways of using language that reflect their sociocultural contexts and experiences (Rogoff, 1995) and (b) often rely upon narrative approaches to meaning making, teachers must recognize that children's primary discourses may not be the same as those emphasized within typical classrooms (Hicks, 1995, 1998). These authors urged educators to identify the nature of literacy events and genres with which children are familiar and integrate such strategies with additional strategies that add to and broaden the child's repertoire of meaning-making skills. Such an approach requires sensitivity to a child's demonstrated abilities as well as a willingness to continually scaffold the child's growth in an increasingly rich body of sense-making discourses, including those considered crucial for success in school (Hicks, 1998; Wells & Chang-Wells, 1992). My observations provide further support for the theoretical stances of Hicks (1998) and Wells and Chang-Wells (1992): When teachers encourage students' natural inclinations toward narrative forms of meaning making, in conjunction with text-based lessons, the students appear more engaged with textual content and demonstrate less resistance to reading material that might otherwise be challenging or frustrating.

Narrative thinking within the classroom

My interest in narrative theory grew from extended observations of 30 students in two urban middlegrade special education classrooms. During the spring of 1997, 1 spent 6 months as a participant observer tracing the meaning-making strategies that struggling readers and writers demonstrated a natural predisposition toward employing, even when their teachers were not explicitly modeling such strategies. All of these children demonstrated difficulties decoding or comprehending written text. My intent, however, was to identify the ways in which these youngsters appeared "abled," so that these natural predispositions could be used to enhance and support explicitly taught reading comprehension strategies that have been used with success (e.g., Englert, Raphael, & Mariage, 1994; Palincsar & Brown, 1984). My observations revealed that nearly every child in both classrooms became more engaged with text and more able to develop and sustain interpretations of fiction and nonfiction when allowed to explore the text through narrative. Engagement in narrative gave many of these children a foothold for beginning to make sense of their classroom texts (Wells & Chang-Wells, 1992). They became more energized in committing themselves to the hard work of decoding, summarizing, interpreting, and speculating upon texts when they were allowed to develop storied responses in relation to what they were reading.

My observations also revealed that the children in these two classes often had difficulty accessing information, whether it was from texts or from their own memories. They also struggled when making sense of textual information that focused on abstract concepts or principles (particularly in social studies). In addition to their reading difficulties, it is possible that the textbook contributed to the students' frustration during these lessons (Beck & McKeown, 1991). The vocabulary and sentence lengths were deliberately limited, exemplifying the tradition of rewriting texts to lessen their "cognitive load" (Anderson, 1991, p. 20). As a result, the book provided a dry, superficial summary of the major events of U.S. history. Compelling, richlyvoiced considerations of social, cultural, and political interpretations of historical events rarely appeared, possibly limiting the degree to which students could make personally meaningful connections with the content (Beck, McKeown, & Worthy, 1995). When I began my observations, the teacher's approach was to have the more fluent oral readers read the text in turns, while the teacher prompted a brief discussion after every few paragraphs. After a few minutes, however, many students exhibited signs of disengagement. Their teacher had to prod them continually into participating by asking them to summarize the text or answer fact-based comprehension questions.

I must emphasize that my focus in this study was not on the teacher's pedagogical choices but rather on the students' demonstrations of meaningmaking efforts across content areas. Their teacher, Maureen Daly (all names used are pseudonyms), admitted that her professional background was stronger in mathematics and the sciences than in social studies and language arts. Although Maureen welcomed my suggestions about literary instruction, she explained that she felt compelled to cover content that would be tested on a city-wide final examination that her students were required to take. Nonetheless, Maureen was flexible and open in responding to her students' demonstrations of enthusiasm. Because my own research questions sought to explore what strategies students were initiating with little formal prompting, my task as a researcher was to document when Maureen's students were engaged-that is, when they demonstrated sustained efforts to create understanding while reading and when they were able to talk about content days or weeks after a lesson (Almasi, McKeown, & Beck, 1996). Such behaviors suggested that meaning-making strategies were in operation. My observations further indicated that whenever the teacher allowed the students to rely on narrative approaches in meaning making, the students were engaged and drew on abilities where they did not seem at a disadvantage.

I first noted such meaning-making processes emerging when the students were given opportunities to link textual content with personal experiences-their familiar worlds. If asked to relate anything to their own experiences (e.g., a word such as persecute or boycott or a historical concept such as the exploration of the North American frontier) the students began enthusiastic conversations. They explored different perspectives that often led to authentic questions (Kutz & Roskelly, 1991) and critical thinking (Cornbleth, 1985). It was also important that the teacher allow students ample time to elaborate upon their stories and not simply share a personal example in brief responses. The more descriptive and sustained the students' stories, the more likely the students were to reformulate the new concept in their own words, constantly linking the new ideas with personal experiences.

Storied vocabulary lessons

During my earliest visits to the classroom, Maureen sometimes asked me to lead a small group in reviewing vocabulary introduced during the previous day's social studies lesson. She felt that regular repetition of the words was essential in order for the students to learn them. In my small group, the students generally did not remember a word simply upon reading it from a study list or hearing it read. They almost immediately remembered the word, however, when they received "nudges" that reminded them of the social or relational context of the discussion of the word during their classroom reading. For example, students could recall the meaning of inflation when asked to return to the stories they told the previous day describing its effects within their own neighborhoods. By revisiting their stories about prices at the local store or rising city bus fares, they quickly remembered the meaning of the word. Revisiting stories also sparked deeper questions about what might cause or prevent inflation. Hicks (1993) had similarly documented efforts of primary school children embedding vocabulary definitions in personal narratives, thus imbuing them with meaning and committing them to memory.

A powerful example of such storied knowing emerged when the term boycott was reviewed during a unit on the American Revolution. During one review session, an African American student named Na'tasha suddenly spoke up with passion: "The Montgomery Bus Boycott!" she called out. She then slapped her palm on her desk and addressed her classmates with authority, telling them all that she knew of the story, from Rosa Parks's initial refusal to give up her seat to the final triumph of the organized community. Her manner of delivery-straight posture, full eye contact, commanding voice, and pointed gesturescommunicated a deeply serious intent. "You need to know about this," she stated, demonstrating that this story meant more to her than just a fitting illustration for a concept. Her awareness of the importance of this event as a collective cultural experience suggests an understanding of critical thinking. She understood it not only as the ability to raise and pursue questions (Cornbleth, 1985) but also as the ability to choose from multiple possibilities and select the most meaningful one on a social, intellectual, emotional, and historical plane. In addition, Na'tasha was demonstrating the ability to use "hybrid discourses" (Hicks, 1998, p. 33), whereby she could relate a meaning-laden story of cultural significance to help her negotiate a new, less familiar discourse associated with academic literate practices.

Storied learning in relational contexts

The use of storied narration as a way of making meaning was also a link with many of the students' home lives. From my interviews with parents, often conducted at their homes, I learned that several youngsters came from families and cultural communities where such narrative talk was a strategy. It was how people made sense of events together, whether gathering to watch the evening news or having extended family members help with school work by telling stories around the kitchen table (Heath, 1986). Aleesha, a seventh grader, explained that her great-uncle had been instrumental in helping her learn about World War II: "I don't know how he knows all this stuff, but the only way I can learn something is if I listen to his stories. He's the one I go to for history."

I became more convinced of the power of storied relational approaches when working with the students who evidenced the most serious reading disabilities. One eighth grader, Katie, could read and write only on a limited basis. All of her learning had to be supported through oral and visual means. One day, I was helping administer a quiz on the American Revolution and I took Katie to a small workroom where I asked her questions. The questions were all factual and about defining terms and matching dates and persons with events. While I privately questioned the value of giving Katie such a test, I understood that Maureen felt compelled to prepare her students for the heavily fact-driven format of the city-wide final examinations. One question asked for a definition of the Treaty of Paris. Katie looked at me blankly and said, "I don't know." "Do you know what a treaty is, Katie?" I asked. Katie responded doubtfully, "It's a service?" I decided to reword my question. "Suppose you and I sat down at this table together, Katie, and wrote out a treaty. Why would we be doing that?" Without hesitation, Katie replied, "Oh, it's how you end a war. Oh! The Treaty of Paris, wasn't that how they ended the Revolutionary War?" My elaboration for Katie was hardly a full-fledged story, but the very act of contextualizing an abstraction such as a treaty, involving the two of us as characters, was all Katie needed to recall what the word treaty meant and then apply it to a test question that had baffled her only seconds earlier. This incident supports Egan's (1993) observation that "narrative enables children to realize capacities to perform certain tasks not realized in non-narrative contexts" (p. 120).

Role-playing: Active storying as a means to critical thinking

Another narrative strategy in which the students seemed fully "abled" was collaborative development and elaboration of stories through roleplaying. When encouraged to do so, the students could put themselves into situations from their textbooks with relative ease and often moved toward making connections with contemporary situations and with their own self-knowledge (Miller, 1994). One day, when Maureen spontaneously asked her students to consider and act out what their roles in colonial Massachusetts might have been, they quickly moved into a kind of narrative metacognitive thinking about what kind of person each student was, how he or she might have responded within historical situations, and further, about what was missing from their textbook's descriptions of colonial New England.

Immediately after the students took turns reading aloud a passage about life in a Puritan colony, Maureen placed her hands on Malcolm's and Na'tasha's shoulders, telling them they were a Puritan couple. The more verbal of the two, Na'tasha matter-of-factly reported what their roles would be in this culture: "He'd be a farmer, and I guess I'd be his wife." With minimal prompting from Maureen, Malcolm and Na'tasha began to negotiate what jobs each would do in such a household, recognizing the specific roles that males and females would have had and correcting one another based on their knowledge of the period. This exchange involved much kidding, with Malcolm clearly enjoying his role of "doing all the farming, hunting, and building, while she has to stay home and cook and clean." As Na'tasha began to protest her role, the other students pointed out, "That's what you have to do. That's how it was back then."

The rest of the class then joined in verbally and physically. Although Maureen assigned a few additional roles, most students began to stand up and determine their own. Edward announced that he would be the mayor of this colony. Randy and Anthony decided that they would be farmers like Malcolm. Isaiah, after quietly mulling over how he might enter this activity, suddenly declared, "I'm not gonna be no farmer!" After a few moments of thought, he grinned and explained that he would "build houses and rent them out to any new people just coming." Miguel and Edward turned to Angel and told him that he would be the sheriff, but Angel determined instead that he would be an Indian chief. "What will you live in?" the teacher asked him. "A teepee," he replied, but Na'tasha corrected him, saying "No, you'd live in a longhouse with a hole in the roof so the smoke could come out." Angel then reasoned that if he were an Indian, he would be upset with the colonists for what they were going to do to the land in the coming years.

Nearly all of the students became involved in the cooperative process of creating a believable "vision" (Wolf, 1994, p. 9) of a Massachusetts colony. Their imagined colony became more elaborate, as more links were made across roles: If Anthony owned 10 cows and Randy had five children, Anthony could sell his milk to Randy. Edward proposed that as mayor he would need to raise taxes to support the colony. As the students left for their next class, Edward and Angel continued to speculate upon the role of the sheriff in such a place, inspiring Maureen to revise the next day's lesson to consider law in a Puritan colony. As with the students in Wolfs (1994) study of literary interpretation through drama, the act of taking on another perspective as a character was intriguing enough for the students to continue thinking about that character's role even after formal instruction time ended. Miller (1994) asserted that "stories of vicarious experience are often as highly evaluated as stories of personal experience" (p. 173), suggesting that role-playing is a suitable substitute when students are not able to participate in authentic firsthand experiences of social or historical events.

Role-playing was also an effective way of enabling students not only to comprehend the textual and curricular content, but also to probe more deeply into their sociopolitical roles within the dominant culture (Giroux, 1987). In much the same way that Angel recognized that there were more possibilities for historical perspectives than the limited ones their text presented, Maureen and I noted an expanding circle of students taking on such reflective, critical stances toward individual and cultural relationships within U.S. society.

These episodes demonstrate two important values of allowing narrative approaches to meaning making to emerge. First, it was through these experiences of experiential storytelling or extended role-playing in relation to texts that students began to formulate critical questions or insights (Cornbleth, 1985). Angel, for example, moved toward reading against the text's Eurocentric depiction of colonial life by choosing to take on a Native American perspective (Apple, 1992), perhaps reinforced by his recent discovery of Native American heritage within his Puerto Rican family background. A few days after that role-playing episode, Na'tasha made a similar observation about the text, possibly associated with having to take on a white role in the colony.

As a follow-up activity to the role-playing, the teacher divided the students into small groups to determine what the Pilgrims and Puritans had in common. The very first commonality voiced was Na'tasha's comment that these people were "all white." When Maureen asked how she knew that, Na'tasha explained, "Well, I don't see nothing about no black folks in here!" While the teacher was pleased that the students were going beyond what was presented in their texts and making inferences based on what was not written in them, the role-playing activity that took place just 2 days earlier may have contributed. For the students to have taken on roles, they had to think about just who these people were, and who they were not.

In much the same way that Angel realized that the book took a European perspective by presenting colonization only from that point of view, he also recognized that any discussion of the Native American point of view could be added only by his deliberate choice to add it. Similarly, when Na'tasha was limited by the text in taking on only a white woman's role, it became more obvious to her that the text presented no black roles to embrace. The proximity of the role-playing experience to Na'tasha's awareness of the absence of blacks in the text's depictions of early colonial culture suggests at least the possibility of such a connection.

A second strength of narrative approaches to meaning making is that they are generative processes. Maureen introduced the activity, but the students sustained it by joining in and elaborating upon their roles. While Maureen occasionally probed their thinking with questions such as, "Where would you live?" or "What would you raise on your farm?" the students combined their knowledge from the text, knowledge gained from other sources, and their reasoning about colonial conditions in order to develop their imagined colonial "ecology." Such role-playing reflects a way of thinking that lends itself to complexity rather than the simplification of content. Singer and Singer (1990) pointed out that extended opportunities to engage in pretend play help children "confront the human need for narrative, to organize the seemingly random events or social interactions that occur in [a child's] milieu...into story sequences" (p. 127). Daiute (1990) suggested that children use imaginative play to advance beyond basic skills to explore "ideas, feelings, and forms in simulated, risk-free contexts" (p. 6). Thus, while a spontaneous introduction of role-playing engaged these students physically and socially, it also engaged them cognitively in a way that simply reading and summarizing their texts might not have.

Sustaininq narrative thinking: further considerations for teachers

A final, important consideration about the value of narrative thinking as a meaning-making strategy is whether it can be supported over time, leading toward increasing student independence in retaining and making use of information. I did not pursue this in my initial study, but I did note evidence suggesting that this is possible. During one smallgroup session, the students were having difficulty understanding how the American colonists could have tolerated British oppression. They did not believe, for example, that people could be forced to house British soldiers in their homes. Following Maureen's cue, I turned the scenario into spontaneous role-playing. By chance, I was wearing a red jacket that day, so I became a Redcoat. When the students tried to resist my orders, I became increasingly authoritarian, to the point of threatening severe punishment if they did not obey. The students' opinions of the colonists began to shift when they realized that their initial efforts to ignore the British would have been futile.

Two weeks later, the students were reviewing this material to prepare for a unit test. Several could not remember the vocabulary, dates, or details associated with the incidents that triggered the Revolution. Suddenly, Malcolm pointed to me and said, "Remember when she had on that red coat? Remember when she started hassling me?" All students from our small group said, "Oh, yeah!" and then began to recall relevant details from previous lessons. Although I planned and facilitated the initial role-playing, the students' return to a narrative mode came from their own initiative, with promising indications that this helped them retrieve meaningful information.

Miller and Legge (1999) provided even stronger support that over time students can make use of their own narrative strategies with decreasing reliance on teacher prompting. Their study of student literary responses supported by conversations in the narrative mode traced the increasing richness and complexity of students' interpretations of literary texts over the course of a year. A high degree of teacher modeling and scaffolded support was necessary, sustained for several months, before at-risk students appeared able to initiate such strategies independently. Nonetheless, this study demonstrated the promise that instruction in narrative modes of thinking holds for helping struggling readers and writers to draw upon their strengths while learning to negotiate challenging texts and traditional academic literacies.

These examples helped me understand how youngsters might benefit from first drawing upon their familiar worlds through storying in order to move toward making connections with additional "possible worlds" (Bruner, 1986, p. 159) available to them through their transactions with texts. My beginning teachers generally recognize the importance of tapping into students' personal knowledge and experiences as a way to begin a discussion or interpretation of text. These novice teachers, however, sometimes fail to recognize that such efforts should not be limited to brief introductory sets designed to capture students' attention. Narrative conversations generally need to be allowed to develop and become more elaborate so that additional connections may emerge, as in the roleplaying activity Maureen led. Preservice teachers often need to experience and practice facilitating open forum discussions (Langer, 1995; Sorenson, 1993), a promising approach that can lead to sustained narrative reflection within classrooms. In my methods classes, I now have my students respond to texts through narrative approaches, encouraging them to engage in role-playing and to allow memories, images, and stories to surface as they begin to develop interpretations. Their encounter with the same poem Angie selected, "Mother to Son" (Hughes, 1994), led to memories of their own parents' uses of figurative language, which inspired a discussion of sociolinguistic considerations of community discourses (Gee, 1990). To encourage such reflective processes, it is also important for these students to record their feelings and insights as they engage in narrative approaches to literature. Many remark that simply taking a few additional minutes to allow their stories to develop leads to more complex personal insights of a text.

Unfortunately, the greatest threat to such conversations is time, especially in the growing number of locales where high-stakes tests and standards movements are in danger of turning curriculums into lists of factual content to be covered (Gordon & Reese, 1997). I can recognize why Angie feels pressured to plan lessons such as the one I observed, when she is faced with a test requiring students to select examples of metaphors in multiple choice questions.

My role as a teacher educator, then, is twofold. First, I must help Angie and others like her understand that students are more likely to understand, recall, and care about what metaphor means after having played with the word through a highly personalized, storied exploration of their own experiences of metaphorical language (Egan, 1993). Second, I must help these teachers identify and counteract the damage that may be done if a state language arts curriculum is reduced to a series of standards that prioritize identification of decontextualized facts and lower-order thinking processes at the expense of critical thinking and heightened self-understanding. Fleischer (2000), for example, outlined strategies to help teachers actively enlist parental and community support in challenging widely held misconceptions about literacy learning. Otherwise, narrow understandings about reading, writing, speaking, and thinking threaten to deny students access to the possible worlds that await them when classrooms are free to encourage multiple avenues of meaning making.