“Thank You for Making Me Write This.” Narrative Skills and the Management of Conflict in Urban Schools

Abstract

We studied 364 narratives about personal experiences with conflict written by urban 4th, 5th, and 6th graders. Narratives were examined in terms of children's narrative and perspective-taking skills and the responses to conflict they described. Several features of narrative were reliably coded, including level of violence described in the story, children's descriptions of internal states, moral evaluations, and responses to conflict. Children described the use of communication as a response to conflict more than any other response. Qualitative analyses revealed a relationship between children's response to conflict and their narrative skills, moral evaluations, and descriptions of emotion, intentions, and mental states. Children who reported the use of communication in response to conflict wrote stories containing very low levels of violence and also displayed attentiveness to others' internal states and strong narrative form. In contrast, children whose narratives reported the use of retaliation in response to conflict were unlikely to report about internal states or to display strong narrative form. Recommendations are given for dealing with conflict in the classroom, for focusing on narrative skill development, and for creating a narrative culture within schools.

“Cause That’s the Only Skills in School You Need”

“…Those difficulties were related to limited verbal skills, accounts of peer rejection, or references to sadness and emotional numbness. This finding mirrors that of Harris and Walton (2009), who noted that children narrating revenge scenarios had overall lower narrative skills and were less likely to report on emotional states than other youth. The SIP research is inconclusive, but some early studies found that aggressive children generate fewer solutions compared with their peers (Lochman & Dodge, 1994).…”

“…However, the typology was limited to a convenience sample of girls, and responses were limited to relational aggression. In a broader context of conflict resolution, Harris and Walton (2009) analyzed narratives from a community sample of fourth through sixth graders from urban schools. Working from a grounded theory approach, the authors coded 364 written accounts of an experienced conflict collected as part of a writing exercise in an intervention in two inner-city elementary schools.…”

Why Me? An Exploratory Qualitative Study of Drinking Gamers’ Reasons for Selecting Other Players to Drink

“…In the second stage, a working codebook was created based on the data coding techniques that are used when a topic is novel and when a codebook is yet to be developed (Harris & Walton, 2009; Syed & Nelson, 2015; Wainryb, Brehl, Matwin, Sokol, & Hammond, 2005). The second and third authors completed multiple readings of the data.…”

A Qualitative Study of Indian Children’s Perspectives on Peer Conflicts

“…She takes us to the principal.' It is possible that teachers respond this way because they understand their role in children's conflicts to be about preventing conflicts from disrupting the learning environment in the classroom (Harris and Walton, 2009). A small number of older children also reported that sometimes teachers would simply ignore on-going conflicts.…”