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Remembering and reminiscing: How individual lives are constructed in family narratives

January 2008
Memory Studies 1(1):49-58

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Emory University

Stories we tell about our lives very much define who we are as individuals, within particular families, cultures and historical periods. In this article, I review psychological research that demonstrates how autobiographical memories are created and re-created in daily interactions in which we share our stories with others, and how this process is modulated by individual, gendered and cultural models of self expressed in everyday family reminiscing. I focus on two critical developmental periods: the preschool years when autobiography is just beginning to emerge; and adolescence when autobiographical memories begin to coalesce into an overarching life narrative that defines self, others and values. I show how individual differences in the ways in which families reminisce are related to individual autobiographical narratives. Importantly, just as our individual narratives are shaped by cultural and historical models of selves and lives, individuals come to shape their culture and their historical moment by the stories they tell.

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Memory Studies

DOI: 10.1177/1750698007083888

2008; 1; 49 Memory Studies

Robyn Fivush

narratives

Remembering and reminiscing: How individual lives are constructed in family

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Remembering and reminiscing: How individual

lives are constructed in family narratives

ROBYN FIVUSH, Emory University, USA

Abstract

Stories we tell about our lives very much define who we are as individuals, within par-

ticular families, cultures and historical periods. In this article, I review psychological re-

search that demonstrates how autobiographical memories are created and re-created

in daily interactions in which we share our stories with others, and how this process is

modulated by individual, gendered and cultural models of self expressed in everyday

family reminiscing. I focus on two critical developmental periods: the preschool years

when autobiography is just beginning to emerge; and adolescence when autobio-

graphical memories begin to coalesce into an overarching life narrative that defines

self, others and values. I show how individual differences in the ways in which families

reminisce are related to individual autobiographical narratives. Importantly, just as our

individual narratives are shaped by cultural and historical models of selves and lives,

individuals come to shape their culture and their historical moment by the stories

they tell.

Key words

autobiography; gender; memory; narrative; self

There were many such stories, and he understood just how important they were,

and listened with patience and respect. A life without stories would be no life at all.

And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to

animals, people to the land? (Smith, 2004: 189)

From the moment infants enter the world, they are surrounded by stories – stories of

their parents and their parents before them, of family and friends, and of how this

new life will unfold and enrich the ongoing narrative (Fiese et al., 1995). The stories

individuals tell about their lives, what psychologists have called autobiographical nar-

ratives, are critical at multiple levels of individual and cultural analysis. For individuals,

autobiographical narratives deﬁ ne who we are in relation to our family, our nation, our

MEMORY STUDIES © SAGE Publications 2008, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore

www.sagepublications.com, ISSN 1750-6980, Vol 1(1): 49–58 [DOI: 10.1177/1750698007083888]

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MEMORY STUDIES 1(1)50

history. From cultural-historical perspectives, the stories that individuals tell are both

shaped by and shape the very understanding of history in the making and in the past.

The stories we tell shape ourselves and the world in which we live.

Intriguingly, by the time toddlers begin to use language, they are already partici-

pating in sharing stories of the past with their parents, listening, conﬁ rming, adding

bits and pieces of information, and by the end of the preschool years, children are

actively engaged in telling and sharing the stories of their lives (see Nelson and Fivush,

2004 and Fivush, in press for reviews). As Bruner (1990) has argued, human beings

are story tellers; it is through stories that we understand our worlds and ourselves.

In this article, I describe how children come to tell the stories of themselves and their

families, and how this process is constructed in family reminiscing that values the

having and telling of a life story, and that varies by individual, culture and by gender.

The premise throughout is that memory in general, and autobiographical memory in

particular, is constructed in social interactions in which particular events, and particular

interpretations of events, are highlighted, shared, negotiated and contested, leading

to ﬂ uid dynamic representations of the events of our lives that function to deﬁ ne self,

other and the world.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY AND NARRATIVE

Autobiographical memory is commonly deﬁ ned as memories related to the self

(Pillemer, 1998; Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). As such, autobiographical mem-

ories differ from simply recalling what happened to include information about why

this event is interesting, important, entertaining, etc., essentially why this event is

meaningful for the self (Fivush and Haden, 2005; Fivush and Nelson, 2006; Pasupathi

et al., 2007). Thus it is the evaluative and interpretative information that transforms a

memory from a simple recounting of what occurred to a reminiscing about what the

event means. Moreover, it is through sharing the events of our lives with others that

these evaluative interpretations evolve over time, as events and their consequences

continue to unfold, with developmental changes in understanding, and with input

from listeners who share, conﬁ rm, negate and negotiate these interpretations (Fivush

and Haden, 2005; Fivush, in press).

Language and narratives

Language is clearly a critical tool in autobiographical memory (Fivush and Nelson, 2006;

Vygotsky, 1978; Nelson, 1996). Although autobiographical memory is not linguis-

tically represented, it is through language that expresses and organizes the multiple

sensory components of a personal memory into a form that can be communicated to

and with others that autobiographical memories come to take on new understandings

for the self. More speciﬁ cally, language modulates autobiographical memory in two

ways: ﬁ rst, language allows us to share the past with others and through this joint

reminiscing new interpretations and evaluations of past events evolve, and, second,

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FIVUSH REMEMBERING AND REMINISCING 51

language provides an organizational structure for autobiographical memories, namely

narratives.

Narratives are canonical linguistic frameworks that organize event memories into

comprehensible chronological and causal sequence of events in the world (Bruner,

1990; Fivush and Haden, 1997). Although children understand temporal and causal

sequence well before they are linguistically sophisticated (e.g. Bauer, 1996), narratives

move beyond these simple sequences to allow a hierarchical explanatory frame for

events that includes linking disparate events through time as related through themes

(e.g. personal relationships), motifs (e.g. all my personal relationships fail) and relations

to self (e.g. my relationships fail because I am too needy). In this way, narratives allow for

deeper layers of meaning and evaluations that move beyond descriptions of events to

imbue life experiences with psychological motivations and intentions, essentially

creating a human drama.

Narratives and self in cultural context

Narratives of past events provide the building blocks of a life story. It is as individuals

create narratives of speciﬁ c experiences that are then linked together through time

and evaluative frameworks that individuals construct an overarching life narrative that

deﬁ nes self (Habermas and Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 2001; McLean et al., in press).

Moreover, the form and function of narratives are socially and culturally constructed

and constrained in multiple ways. First, cultures deﬁ ne the shape of a life; whether de-

ﬁ ned as a ‘life script’ (Bernsten and Rubin, 2004) or a ‘culturally canonical biography’

(Habermas and Bluck, 2000), cultures deﬁ ne developmental periods, such as infancy,

childhood, adulthood, old age and the appropriate events that should occur during

each of these periods, such as education, marriage, childbearing, and so on. These life

scripts are enacted and embodied in culturally mediated activities, such as schooling

and work life, cultural artifacts, such as novels and plays, and cultural rituals, such as

graduation and weddings. By being immersed in a particular culture, each individual

internalizes aspects of these cultural models and creates individualized representa-

tions of their life and their self, forming a life narrative in relation to the cultural script,

whether it is conforming or deviating from these ideals.

In this way, cultures also inﬂ uence the form of the self. In broad strokes, western cul-

tures deﬁ ne a self as an autonomous agent who controls one’s own destiny, whereas

eastern cultures deﬁ ne a self as an interpersonal agent in relation to a family or com-

munity (Oyserman and Markus, 1993; Wang, 2001a). Cultural views of self are

interwoven with cultural life scripts, deﬁ ning the way in which life events should be

interpreted and evaluated. Indeed, adults in western cultures provide personal narra-

tives focusing on themes of autonomy and achievement, whereas adults in eastern

cultures tell personal narratives focused on community and the moral good (Pillemer,

1998; Leichtman et al., 2003).

Within cultures, issues of race, class and gender further differentiate appropriate

life scripts (Fivush and Marin, 2007). Little attention has been paid in the psycho-

logical literature to issues of race and class as related to autobiographical narratives,

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MEMORY STUDIES 1(1)52

but gendered ideals of self suggest that females have a more relational sense of self,

focusing on issues of care and community, whereas males have a more autonomous

sense of self, focusing on individual identity and achievement (Gilligan, 1982; Basow,

1992). Again, these gendered ideals are expressed in autobiographical narratives; adult

females tell personal narratives imbued with emotional connection between self and

other, focusing on relationships and afﬁ liations, whereas adult males tell personal nar-

ratives more heavily focused on self, with less mention of emotional connectedness and

relationships (see Pillemer, 1998 and Fivush and Buckner, 2003 for reviews).

These culturally mediated internalized models of a life and of a self become the ﬁ lters

through which we experience and evaluate events. This process is dynamic, enacted

in everyday social interactions, in which participants re-create and re-vision these

cultural models (Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986). Thus, the ways in which families reminisce,

and how this process differs by gender and culture, provides a critical site for examining

the social construction of individual autobiographies.

FAMILY REMINISCING

Reminiscing is part of everyday social interactions within virtually all families. Whether

over the dinner table, during bedtime routines, while carpooling or doing homework,

references to past events are frequent and often extended (Miller, 1994; Fivush, in

press). These stories of the past may be simple references to events of the day, they may

be more extended shared reminiscing about events the family experienced together,

or they may be stories about the familial past, about the parent’s childhood or the

grandparents’ adventures (see Pratt and Fiese, 2004 for a review). Not surprisingly,

family reminiscing differs developmentally, depending in part on the abilities of the

child to participate, but, at all points in development, the process is social with parents

and children together creating stories that carry individual meaning. Here, I focus on

two critical developmental periods, the early preschool years, during which autobio-

graphical reminiscing emerges (Nelson and Fivush, 2004), and adolescence, during

which the more overarching life narrative begins to take shape (Habermas and Bluck,

2000; McAdams, 2001).

The emergence of autobiographical narratives

When children begin to talk about the past, at about 16 to 18 months of age, parents

provide most of the content and structure of the narrative, with children participating

mainly by conﬁ rming or repeating what the parent says (Eisenberg, 1985; Hudson, 1990).

Very quickly, however, children begin participating more fully in these conversations;

two-year-olds provide bits and pieces of information in response to parental questions,

and three-year-olds introduce new topics and new aspects of the past event being

discussed. By the end of the preschool years, most children are able to provide a

reasonably coherent narrative of a personally experienced event (Eisenberg, 1985;

Fivush, 2007). This developmental progression, from almost complete reliance on the

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FIVUSH REMEMBERING AND REMINISCING 53

parent to provide the narrative structure to independent skill, suggests that children

are learning the forms and functions of autobiographical reminiscing through partici-

pating in parentally guided, or scaffolded, interactions.

Maternal reminiscing style

Intriguingly, parents differ in their reminiscing style along a dimension of elaboration

(see Fivush et al., 2006 for a full review). Most research focuses on white middle-class

mothers in western cultures, so these ﬁ ndings must be interpreted within these con-

straints. Still, the ﬁ ndings are robust; some mothers display a highly elaborative re-

miniscing style, asking many questions, and providing a great deal of embellished

information about the event under discussion (e.g. the mother asks, ‘Remember when

we ﬁ rst came in the aquarium? And we looked down and there were a whole bunch

of birdies … in the water? Remember the name of the birdies?’ And the child responds,

‘Ducks!’ and the mother continues, ‘Nooo! They weren’t ducks. They had on little suits.

[pause] Penguins. Remember what did the penguins do?’). In contrast, other mothers

display a less elaborative reminiscing style, asking few questions that tend to be re-

petitive and sparse in detail (e.g. the mother asks about a visit to the zoo, ‘What kind

of animals did you see?’ and the child responds ‘Giraffe’ to which the mother asks,

‘And what else?’ The child responds ‘Roar’ and the mother asks, ‘What’s roar?’, and the

child explains, ‘Lion’ and the mother again asks, ‘What else did you see?’) (examples

are from Reese et al., 1993). More highly elaborative mothers provide a great deal of

background and contextual information, expanding and elaborating on actions and

objects and weaving them into an ongoing narrative, whereas less elaborative mothers

seem more interested in eliciting speciﬁ c pieces of information from their child, and

spend little time expanding these pieces of information into detailed descriptions

and explanations of events, leading to little sense of narrative in these exchanges.

Highly elaborative mothers also focus more on the emotional and evaluative aspects of

past events (Fivush and Haden, 2005; Fivush, 2007), thus creating more psychologic-

ally nuanced and personally meaningful narratives of the past.

Importantly, mothers are consistent over time in their reminiscing style; even as chil-

dren become more engaged participants in joint reminiscing, mothers who are highly

elaborative early in development remain highly elaborative later in development (Reese

et al., 1993; Harley and Reese, 1999). Just as important, this is not simply a measure

of talkativeness; mothers who are highly elaborative during reminiscing are not neces-

sarily more talkative in other conversational contexts, such as unstructured play (Haden

and Fivush, 1996), suggesting that reminiscing is a unique context in which mothers

have speciﬁ c goals of sharing the past. Critically, mothers with a highly elaborative

reminiscing style facilitate their children’s developing autobiographical narrative skills.

Longitudinal research indicates that maternal elaborative reminiscing style is more pre-

dictive of children’s developing autobiographical narratives than children’s own earlier

language or narrative skills (Reese, 2002; Fivush et al., 2006), and experimental studies

that train mothers to be more elaborative during reminiscing ﬁ nd that these children

become more narratively skilled than children of untrained mothers (Peterson et al.,

1999). The research evidence is clear: a highly elaborated maternal reminiscing style

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MEMORY STUDIES 1(1)54

predicts children’s more elaborated independent autographical narratives across the

preschool years (see Reese, 2002 and Fivush et al., 2006 for reviews).

Culture and gender in maternal reminiscing style

Research on cultural differences in maternal reminiscing ﬁ nds that western mothers are

more elaborative overall, and more elaborative about emotional aspects of the past,

than Asian mothers, whereas Asian mothers focus more on morality and compliance

(Wang, 2001b; Leichtman et al., 2003). By the end of the preschool years, western chil-

dren are telling more elaborated, detailed narratives of their personal past and display

higher levels of emotional understanding and regulation, whereas Asian children focus

more on moral rules and social roles (Han et al., 1998; Wang, 2003), suggesting that

maternally scaffolded narratives are part of children’s developing understanding of their

life experiences. In terms of gender, there is some evidence, at least in western cultures,

that both mothers and fathers are more elaborative (Reese et al., 1996; Fivush and

Buckner, 2003) and focus more on emotions (Reese et al., 1996; Fivush et al., 2003)

when reminiscing with daughters than with sons. In turn, by the end of the preschool

years, girls are telling longer, more detailed and more emotionally imbued narratives of

their personal experience than are boys (Buckner and Fivush, 1998).

Patterns of individual, gendered and cultural differences in early parent–child rem-

iniscing as related to children’s developing autobiographical narratives suggests that

children are learning how to interpret and evaluate their personal experiences in these

early interactions. Parents, and especially mothers, who scaffold elaborated, richly

detailed narratives of the past, focusing on emotions and evaluations, have children

who come to tell their own personal narratives in more embellished, emotional and

evaluative ways.

Family narratives and adolescent identity

As children develop through middle childhood and into early adolescence, they become

increasingly able to think about multiple facets of an event simultaneously, to maintain

cognitive and emotional ambiguity, and to infer and deduct both physical and psycho-

logical connections between events (see Habermas and Bluck, 2000 for a review). With

these skills, adolescents become capable of overarching life narratives infused with

increasingly sophisticated perspective and evaluation. Thus, in adolescence, we see the

beginning of a life narrative that links events across time and places the self in relation

to others, embedded in an unfolding human drama of interconnected stories. How

these stories are constructed in family reminiscing remains critical for adolescents’ de-

veloping sense of self-understanding.

Family reminiscing

We have begun to explore relations between family reminiscing and adolescent self

understanding in a two-year longitudinal study beginning when children are just entering

adolescence, at about 10 to 12 years of age. In this research, the entire family is asked

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FIVUSH REMEMBERING AND REMINISCING 55

to narrate together highly emotional events that the family has shared in the past.

Some families display an overall collaborative style (similar to elaborative reminiscing

early in development) with each family member contributing to an emerging, coherent

narrative of what occurred, constructing a shared perspective on the past event, in

which each family member’s contributions are woven into a single story that expresses

and validates multiple perspectives. Other families engage in more independent rem-

iniscing, with each family member telling their part of the story, but these disparate

parts are not woven together; rather, the narrative remains a series of individual stories

of what occurred. A shared collaborative perspective is related to higher adolescent

self-esteem, whereas an independent perspective is related to higher adolescent self-

efﬁ cacy (Bohanek et al., 2006). A closer examination of the emotional content of these

narratives reveals that families that express and explain more emotion, providing a

more embellished causal understanding and resolution of emotional experiences, have

adolescents who display higher social and academic competence (Marin et al., in press).

These patterns indicate that different aspects of family reminiscing are related differ-

entially to adolescent’s emerging sense of self.

Intergenerational narratives

In addition to soliciting family narratives of shared emotional experiences, we also tape-

recorded family dinner time conversations in order to examine how family narratives

emerge more spontaneously in everyday interaction (Fivush et al., in press). Narratives

emerge frequently (about once every ﬁ ve minutes), with multiple family members con-

tributing across several conversational turns in co-constructing the story. Not surprising,

the majority of narratives are about events that happened that day. Perhaps more

surprising, many families also tell stories about more remote events, events shared

by the family in the past, and stories of the parent’s childhood and other extended

family members. These stories are often long and embellished, with all family members

participating in the retelling, indicating that these stories are often told and enjoyed.

Provocatively, families that tell more of these kinds of family stories over the dinner table

have adolescents who know more of their family history, and also display higher self-

esteem and lower levels of internalizing (anxiety, depression) and externalizing (ag-

gression, acting out) behavior problems. These ﬁ ndings point to the critical importance

of placing one’s own life in the context of familial history that provides a framework for

understanding one’s self as a member of a family that extends before one’s birth and

provides the stage on which one’s individual life will be played out. One’s own story is

embedded in the stories of others in the past and in the present.

CONCLUSIONS

In this article, I described research demonstrating the prevalence and importance of

family narratives. Stories we create with others through socially shared interpretations

and evaluations of our personal past constitute our very being. This process begins early

in development and continues throughout the life span. Memory of our past is not

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MEMORY STUDIES 1(1)56

relegated to a dusty archive, but lives in the moment, in a constantly evolving dialectic

between our self and others in the telling and retelling of who we are through what we

remember. Research has shown how this process is modulated by individual, gendered

and cultural models of self expressed in everyday family reminiscing. Importantly, just

as our individual stories are shaped by cultural and historical models of selves and lives,

individuals come to shape their culture and their historical moment by the stories they

tell. Autobiographical narratives are not just about the individual, but are very much

about the historical time and place within which lives are lived and interpreted. Clearly,

as Smith (2004) notes in the quote that began this article: ‘A life without stories would

be no life at all.’

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Emory University Center for Myth and Ritual in American

Life through a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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Smith, A.M. (2004) In the Company of Cheerful Ladies. New York: Anchor Books.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wang, Q. (2001a) ‘Culture Effects on Adults’ Earliest Childhood Recollection and Self-

description: Implications for the Relation between Memory and the Self’, Journal of

Personality and Social Psychology, 81(2): 220–33.

Wang, Q. (2001b) ‘“Did You Have Fun?”: American and Chinese Mother–Child Conversations

about Shared Emotional Experiences’, Cognitive Development 16: 693–715.

Wang, Q. (2003) ‘Emotion Situation Knowledge in American and Chinese Preschool Children

and Adults’, Cognition & Emotion 17(5): 725–46.

ROBYN FIVUSH received her PhD from the Graduate Center of The City University

of New York in 1983 and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Human

Information Processing, University of California at San Diego from 1982 to

1984. She joined the Emory faculty in 1984 where she is also associated faculty

at the Institute for Women’s Studies and the Violence Studies Program. Her

research focuses on early memory with an emphasis on the social construction of

autobiographical memory and the relations among memory, narrative, trauma and

coping. She has published over 89 books, book chapters, and articles.

Address: Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.

Email: psyrf@emory.edu

at University of Western Ontario on August 8, 2008 http://mss.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Beyond Memory: The Transcendence of Episodic Narratives

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2024

Daniela J. Palombo

Les êtres humains ont une propension à raconter des histoires et à faire de la narration. Bien que le domaine de la mémoire épisodique accorde une grande attention au contenu mnémotechnique des narrations, ces dernières ne servent pas uniquement à transmettre le passé. Au contraire, les narrations sont un moyen de créer du sens, des liens sociaux et d’autres facettes complexes de la cognition et de la pensée humaines. Cette courte réflexion traite de l’importance de la narration dans ces différents domaines. En outre, il aborde brièvement le rôle de la narration de la mémoire dans l’ère numérique moderne.

Playing with funds of difficult knowledge: interactional insights for heritage language education

Article

Feb 2025

Ava Becker

Migration stories are at the heart of how many immigrant-background Heritage Language Learners (HLLs) construct a sense of home, community, and identity across spatiotemporal scales. Nevertheless, narratives containing difficult knowledge (e.g., about war) are generally seen as threats to, rather than as assets in language learning and in education more broadly, and as such, are rarely drawn on in classrooms. In this paper I analyse excerpts from a group interview that I conducted with four grade-four girls during a year-long ethnographic case study. In particular, I examine how we all used various linguistic and paralingiustic resources to construct play frames . The play frames created a lower-stakes space in which to navigate the emotionally complex cultural memories that my interview questions about origins and migration prompted. The findings have implications for how language teachers listen to and engage with their HLLs’ funds of difficult knowledge.

Remembering Life Events During 1992–1993 in Mumbai, India: A Narrative Identity Perspective

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2024

Narrative identity embodies a coherent account of significant personal memories. The present study analyzes the autobiographical memory of the period 1992–1993 within a narrative identity framework. During 1992–1993, Mumbai witnessed Hindu–Muslim riots after the Babri mosque demolition. This interreligious conflict was subsequently followed by the serial bomb blasts in March 1993. Twenty Muslims and 18 Hindus who lived in Mumbai during 1992–1993 participated in the present study. During the interview, participants were asked to describe their lives during 1992–1993, without being cued with the words riots or blasts. Event recall and narrative content were both analyzed using a mixed-methods approach. Spontaneous recall of flashbulb memories of the riots and bomb blasts was analyzed with respect to religion. Religion significantly influenced recall of events, with more Muslims recalling the riots whereas more Hindus recalled the bomb blasts. Incorrect event sequence or confusion over event sequence was evident in the narratives of a few Hindus. Narrative content was subjected to reflexive thematic analysis and yielded an overarching theme of event appraisal encompassing three subthemes: continuing impact of the event on the present, event reappraisal, and perception of the police during the riots. Findings indicate that religion, education level, and age at event were related to event appraisal. Implications of event appraisal with respect to current well-being are discussed.

The role of teacher-related factors in enhancing quality service provision in pre-primary schools of Gambella regional state, Ethiopia

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2024

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the crucial factors that impact the quality of pre-primary education in Gambella Regional State, Ethiopia. This study uses a convergent mixed-methods design, integrating both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, to investigate the complex relationship between teacher-related factors and the delivery of quality pre-primary education. This research aims to identify the challenges faced in pre-primary education and provide recommendations to improve the quality of service provision, ultimately fostering positive learning outcomes for children. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a convergent mixed-methods design, combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies to examine the crucial factors of effective teacher-related elements in providing quality pre-primary education in Gambella Regional State, Ethiopia. Data were collected through surveys, observations, interviews and focus group discussions involving education experts, school principals, teachers and parent–teacher association leaders. Quantitative data was analyzed using inferential statistics, while qualitative data were analyzed thematically. This study integrated the findings from both methodologies to provide a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between teacher-related factors and quality service provision in pre-primary education. Findings The findings of this study revealed a significant shortage of trained teachers with adequate experience and understanding of early childhood learning. In addition, inappropriate qualifications, insufficient play-based methods and communication shortage between teachers and parents were also identified as critical issues. This study found a strong, positive association between teacher-related factors and quality service provision (coefficient of 0.815 and p-value < 0.001), explaining 51.4% of the variance in service quality. These findings highlight the urgent need for policymakers and educators to prioritize teacher training and professional development in pre-primary education to enhance the quality of pre-primary education and improve learning outcomes for children. Research limitations/implications This study has some limitations, including the use of a convenience sample and the reliance on self-reported data from teachers, which may be subject to social desirability bias. The findings may not be generalizable to other regions with different contexts, cultures and education systems. Despite these limitations, this study has important implications for policymakers and educators. The findings highlight the critical need for teacher training and professional development in pre-primary education. Practical implications The findings of this study have important practical implications for policymakers, educators and stakeholders involved in pre-primary education in Gambella Regional State, Ethiopia. This study highlights the urgent need for policymakers to prioritize teacher training and professional development programs in pre-primary education. The findings suggest that improving teacher qualifications, addressing individual learning needs and enhancing play-based methods can positively impact pre-primary education quality. Additionally, this study emphasizes the importance of communication between teachers and parents, as well as effective time management, resource utilization and play-based methods. Social implications The social implications of this study are significant, as pre-primary education is a critical foundation for a child’s future academic success and overall development. The findings of this study highlight the need for policymakers and educators to prioritize teacher training and professional development in pre-primary education. By addressing the shortage of trained teachers and improving teacher-related factors, pre-primary education quality can be significantly enhanced. This, in turn, can lead to improved cognitive, social and emotional development outcomes for children, setting them up for a lifetime of success and positive contributions to society. Originality/value This study makes an original contribution to the literature on pre-primary education in Gambella Regional State, Ethiopia, by examining the crucial factors of effective teacher-related elements in providing quality services. The convergent mixed-methods design used in this study provides a comprehensive understanding of the complex interplay between teacher-related factors and the delivery of quality pre-primary education. The findings highlight the significant shortage of trained teachers, inadequate qualifications and deficiencies in addressing individual learning needs and using play-based methods, time management and communication between teachers and parents.

Making sense of sibling economic gaps: racialized meritocratic frames, economic inequalities, and family relationships

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2024

We look at how economically divergent siblings in the United States make sense of their economic gaps, highlighting family relationships as an arena in which economic inequalities are experienced and negotiated. Drawing on over sixty in-depth interviews with a racially diverse sample of predominantly middle-class persons who report themselves to be in better economic circumstances than their sibling(s), we examine “sibling difference stories,” or siblings’ explanatory accounts of their economic divergence. We analyze the integration of cultural discourses of inequality into these stories. Siblings deploy a meritocracy discourse of individual responsibility in conjunction with other cultural frames to make sense of economic gaps. These include “Born that Way,” emphasizing inherent differences of ability, and “Birth Order,” about how siblings of different ages experience family life differently due to their age-based location in family structure and history. The “Institutional Failures” frame, prevalent among racial minority siblings, points to the failure of social institutions and policies to provide needed supports to the sibling lagging in achievement. Black, Latino/a, and biracial informants further situate institutional failures within systemic racism. Our study’s relational approach draws attention to the role of intimacy and emotion in how people make sense of inequality.

Maintaining Personhood and Authority in Everyday Talk of a Family Living with Dementia

Chapter

Nov 2024

Lyndsay M. Lindley

Bringing together cutting-edge research from a group of international scholars, this innovative volume examines how people with dementia interact with others in a variety of social contexts, ranging from everyday conversation to clinical settings. Drawing on methods from conversation analysis, it sheds light on how people with dementia accomplish relevant goals in interaction, as well as how changes in an individual's discursive abilities may affect how conversationalists negotiate a world in common and continue to build their social relationships. By exploring interaction, this book breaks new ground in challenging the commonplace assumptions about what constitutes typical or atypical interactions in communication involving people with dementia, and further demonstrates the unique and creative strategies all speakers employ to facilitate better and more collaborative communication. It is essential reading for academic researchers and advanced students across sociolinguistics, interactional linguistics and conversational analysis, as well as health care practitioners.

Growing up in place: two middle-class London girlhoods in the 1920s and late 1940s/1950s

Article

Nov 2024
Child Geogr

Julia Brannen

Young people at a crossroads: Climate solidarity through intergenerational storytelling

Article

Jul 2024

School‐based teaching on climate change rarely draws on diverse experiences and knowledge about climate change that circulate in migrant homes and communities. We set out to consider experiences of climate change education (CCE) in schools in Manchester, UK, and Melbourne, Australia, among migrant‐background students. We interviewed young people aged 14 to 18 and educators in multicultural secondary schools about climate change education. We then trained and supported young people to interview their parents. Here, we show how those interviews built young researchers’ appreciation of family stories. Those accounts revealed aspects of parents’ lives growing up that provided a platform from which families could discuss the changing relevance of climate change in their countries of origin and present locations. From those shared insights emerged critical, contextually informed understandings of climate change. Given those outcomes, we argue that intergenerational and cross‐cultural storytelling, when brought into dialogue with scientific knowledge, can support climate change educators. They can then draw upon a range of knowledges and responses to climate change wider than that, which currently exists in most classrooms. We conclude by suggesting that among diverse learner cohorts, what then becomes possible is work to build a greater sense of agency and capacity for empathy with respect to climate change.

Intergenerational family narratives and their measurement among adults in the Czech Republic

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2023

Tereza Rynešová

Who recounts the Stalinist past? Mnemonic roles, acts of remembering and life-scripts in Russian families

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2024

This article asks why some memories of the Stalinist Gulag are shared while others are not. Considering remembering as a social act, we argue that who engages in acts of remembering, to whom, when and how helps explain what is remembered. The article draws on family memories shared by participants of 16 focus groups in four research sites in Russia. We find that mnemonic actors – most often grandmothers – remember victimhood in veiled ways, structured by life-scripts that focus on the positive: they couch the bad in the good of the Soviet past, particularly focusing on evasive action and near misses which highlight the stoicism and cunning of family members who narrowly avoided repression. We suppose these narratives emerge in families and are shared within the focus groups due to perceived social appropriateness. The study adds to the literature on entangled memory and argues for the use of focus groups as a method for exploring the social patterning of remembering.

The Construction of Autobiographical Memories in the Self-Memory System

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2000

The authors describe a model of autobiographical memory in which memories are transitory mental constructions within a self-memory system (SMS). The SMS contains an autobiographical knowledge base and current goals of the working self. Within the SMS, control processes modulate access to the knowledge base by successively shaping cues used to activate autobiographical memory knowledge structures and, in this way, form specific memories. The relation of the knowledge base to active goals is reciprocal, and the knowledge base “grounds” the goals of the working self. It is shown how this model can be used to draw together a wide range of diverse data from cognitive, social, developmental, personality, clinical, and neuropsychological autobiographical memory research.

Origins of Autobiographical Memory

Article

Full-text available

Sep 1999

This study tested the predictions of M. L. Howe and M. L. Courage's (1993, 1997) theory of infantile amnesia compared with a social-interactionist account of autobiographical memory development (R. Fivush & E. Reese, 1992; K. Nelson, 1993b). Fifty-eight mother–child dyads were assessed for maternal styles of talking about the past and for children's self-recognition, language production, and nonverbal memory when the children were 19 months old. Children's shared and independent memory reports were then assessed from 19 to 32 months. Maternal reminiscing style and self-recognition uniquely predicted children's shared memory reports across time, even with children's initial language and nonverbal memory factored out. Self-recognition skills also predicted children's later independent memory. These results support a pluralistic account of the origins of autobiographical memory.

Autobiographical Memory in Korean, Chinese, and American Children

Article

Full-text available

Jul 1998

Autobiographical memory and story recall were examined in Korean, Chinese, and American children (N = 158). In each culture, 4- and 6-year-olds (half boys) participated, with interviews conducted in the country–language of origin. On Day 1, children were given identical free-narrative interviews about life events and were shown a narrated story. On Day 2, children were interviewed about the story. Day 1 results indicate that in comparison with Asians, Americans provided more references to specific past events, more descriptives, more references to internal states, such as evaluations, and more mentions of themselves relative to others. Age differences were observed in Asia and sex differences in the United States. Objective story memory performance was equally accurate across cultures, although memory content differed.

Contextual variation in maternal conversational styles

Article

Full-text available

Apr 1996

The consistency of individual maternal conversational styles was assessed across two different contexts: free-play and conversations about past events. Twenty-two White, middle-class mother-child pairs participated when the children were 40 months old. During separate sessions, mothers played with their children using a provided toy and elicited their children's memories of shared past experiences. Cluster analyses revealed two distinct maternal styles in free-play and two comparable maternal styles of talking about the past. Most important, individual mothers' styles were found to vary across the different contexts. The findings suggest that mother-child dyads must be observed in multiple contexts to adequately characterize relations between maternal styles and children's language and narrative development. Further implications of maternal styles as reflecting context-sensitive strategies are discussed.

Getting a life: The emergence of the life story in adolescence

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2000
PSYCHOL BULL

In the life story, autobiographical remembering and self-understanding are combined to create a coherent account of one's past. A gap is demonstrated between developmental research on the story-organization of autobiographical remembering of events in childhood and of life narratives in adulthood. This gap is bridged by substantiating D. P. McAdams's (1985) claim that the life story develops in adolescence. Two manifestations of the life story, life narratives and autobiographical reasoning, are delineated in terms of 4 types of global coherence (temporal, biographical, causal, and thematic). A review of research shows that the cognitive tools necessary for constrtlcting global coherence in a life story and the social-motivational demands to construct a life story develop during adolescence. The authors delineate the implications of the life story framework for other research areas such as coping, attachment, psychotherapeutic process, and the organization of autobiographical memory. DOI 10.1037/0033-2909.126.5.748

Autobiographical Memory: Social and Cultural Perspectives on Autobiographical Memory

Chapter

Feb 2019

Robyn Fivush

Momentous Events, Vivid Memories

Book

Dec 1998

David B. Pillemer

Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes

Book

Jan 1978

Lev S Vygotsky

Narrative practices: Their role in socialization and self-construction

Article

Oct 1994

Peggy J. Miller

This book brings a surprisingly wide range of intellectual disciplines to bear on the self-narrative and the self. The same ecological/cognitive approach that successfully organized Ulric Neisser's earlier volume on The Perceived Self now relates ideas from the experimental, developmental, and clinical study of memory to insights from post-modernism and literature. Although autobiographical remembering is an essential way of giving meaning to our lives, the memories we construct are never fully consistent and often simply wrong. In the first chapter, Neisser considers the so-called 'false memory syndrome' in this context; other contributors discuss the effects of amnesia, the development of remembering in childhood, the social construction of memory and its alleged self-servingness, and the contrast between literary and psychological models of the self. Jerome Bruner, Peggy Miller, Alan Baddeley, Kenneth Gergen and Daniel Albright are among the contributors to this unusual synthesis.

The intergenerational self: Subjective perspective and family history

Article