Article in:
Narrative Inquiry: Online-First Articles

Pre-adolescents narrate classroom experience

Integrating socioemotional and spatiotemporal sensitivities

| The Graduate Center, CUNY
| The Graduate Center, CUNY

This study applies sociocultural narrative theory and method to integrate children’s perspectives into research on classroom climate. Sociocultural narrative theory explains how individuals use expressive genres to make sense of environments, how they fit, and what they would like to change. This study incorporates such theory and method into a qualitative research design, applying quantitative analysis techniques to understand trends in student attention and expression. The main goal of this study is to examine whether and how students enact and express socioemotional and spatiotemporal (climate) sensitivities with their use of regular narrative elements. This study employs plot and character analyses to understand 22 sixth graders’ narrations of best and worst classroom experiences. These analyses reveal diverse patterns of focus on classroom events. Differences in the young narrators’ attention highlight areas for ongoing inquiry, with implications for mixed methods studies of classroom climate and related developmental research.

Keywords: narrative inquiry, classroom climate, socioemotional and spatiotemporal sensitivities, early adolescence
Article outline
  • Introduction
    • Classroom climate
    • Measurement in early adolescent socioemotional development research
    • Expanding early adolescent socioemotional development research with narrative methods
    • Sociocultural narrative theoretical framework
  • Methods
    • Research design
    • Participant & school characteristics
    • Procedure
  • Narrative analysis
  • Results
    • Complexity of socioemotional expression: Participant example
    • From the student perspective, Who are the main characters of classroom life?
    • How do the events unfold?
    • Discussion
    • Limitations
    • Implications
  • References
Published online: 14 September 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.20054.fan
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