Narrating Crisis From War Zones to Disease Zones

Abstract

Previous research with young people growing up during and after wars offers insights for how youth are understanding and coping with the COVID-19 crisis. This literature review summarizes findings from research with adolescents who shared their experience and knowledge in war zones as those findings apply to research with youth in this pandemic. Circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic differ in important ways from military wars, yet emerging research explains how abrupt disruptions of daily life and consequences like lack of social support and uncertainty challenge young people’s psychosocial orientations and health. A brief review of issues relevant to youth in crises sets the scene for a discussion of how their uses of narratives in war zones engaged powerful psychosocial processes, including sense making, imagining, and advising, and how those processes apply to youth narrating in disease zones. Focus is on how such discourse activities symbolically manage instability, uncertainty, and separation challenging youth in the COVID-19 era. Because narrating is an interactive process, adults’ open invitations and empathetic listening to youth storytelling are, moreover, pivotal for supporting youth expression rather than shutting it down. The article concludes with implications for future research with youth growing up in the COVID-19 crisis.

Trends in primary school teachers' experience over the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Serbia: A narrative analysis

“…In addition, this multigenre approach provided an opportunity for teachers to convey their reflexive strategies differently, through a letter to a peer rather than through stories, which were reserved more for expressing emotions, contexts, and external actions. A similar trend was found regarding students' use of narrative genres in a related study (Kovács-Cerović et al 2021) and several others (Daiute, 2021;Daiute & Kovač-Cerović, 2017), suggesting a clear benefit of the multigenre methodology.…”

“…The story genre called for an exploration of the events, feelings, and people involved, while the letter genre allowed for an intentional selection of relevant experiences to be shared. Previous studies show that this methodology facilitates the expression of nuanced views and hard-to-access areas of emergent experiences (Daiute & Kovač-Cerović, 2017;Daiute et al, 2020;Kovács-Cerović et al, 2021;Jović, 2020;Daiute, 2021).…”

A leap to the digital era—what are lower and upper secondary school students’ experiences of distance education during the COVID-19 pandemic in Serbia?

“…This richness, gained through the narrative and multigenre approach, overrides and renders simplistic one-dimensional accounts of students' experience in the new world of online learning and distance education, and calls for further research. Offering children the opportunity to narrate in different genres enables different psychological processes as well as different levels of vulnerability in the expression (Daiute, 2021). Different audiences implied by each genre allow for distinct aspects of the experience to become salient and communicated in a manner adjusted to the implied recipient (Jović, 2020).…”