Life Stories of Troubled Youth: Meanings for a Mentor and a Scholarly Stranger

Abstract

(From the chapter) Not long ago, a teacher of troubled youth grew weary of the school district's failure to understand why it was difficult for her students to come to school. She asked her students to "tell truth to power" by sending the school superintendent a booklet of their personally crafted life stories. This chapter discusses how the concerns of a proximal mentor (the student writers' teacher) and of a distal narrative researcher (author of the present chapter) played out in their interpretation of two of the stories chosen from students who created a booklet to be given to their superintendent explaining the circumstances of their lives. In discussing the stories it became clear that teacher and researcher saw these stories through different lenses. Jane, the teacher, saw the stories from a guidance perspective. In contrast, Avril, the researcher, did not know the authors of the stories. Like many narrative researchers, her sole knowledge of the informants was the stories they produced and the prompts that elicited the stories. Avril was particularly intrigued by the possibility that the writing assignment produced a considerable audience problem for the authors. The audience problem refers to the person or persons to whom a story is directed, the real and/or imagined reader or listener. Intended audiences presumably contour how autobiographical stories are told. The audience for the story would seem to be especially important for adolescents, whose reference groups are expanding exponentially and for whom peers are particularly important. In this case, the students knew that others besides Jane and the superintendent would be privy to their stories because the booklet would be distributed to their classmates and would also be available to their parents or guardians. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA )