Abstract
Reflecting a variety of narrative methods and forms, Narrating Practice With Children and Adolescents presents a diverse collection of stories focused on childhood and adolescent experiences, especially those that are impacted by intersecting forms of oppression. The stories presented in this edited volume are contextualized within the social study of childhood—an interdisciplinary approach to the study of children and childhoods that emphasizes children’s agency, interests, and rights, as well as their interactions with social systems. Bringing together the stories of youth negotiating and contending with experiences with poverty, sexual exploitation, disability, the child welfare system, and trauma, among others, this book asks readers to learn from the stories of young people. Through creating a space of relational, narrative inquiry that illuminates young people’s lived experiences across multiple and shifting social contexts, Narrating Practice With Children and Adolescents affirms youth as holders of invaluable knowledge that can guide social work practice with young people.
The diverse issues, identities, and systems considered in this volume are united by the use of narrative approaches to tell and retell the young people’s stories in accessible and engaging ways. Many of the stories stuck with me long after I read them. I found myself bringing them up in class discussions with my Master of Social Work students, which speaks to the book’s usefulness as a teaching tool. As the editors explain in their introduction, the book is partly inspired by their undergraduate students’ interest in narrative forms, and the discussion questions provided at the end of each chapter enhance its suitability for use in the classroom. Embodying another virtue of the narrative form, Narrating Practice With Children and Adolescents often reads more like a collection of short stories than an academic text, making it a refreshingly inviting read that might also appeal to practitioners.
The book is organized around several narrative forms: ethnographies, narrative inquiries, and life stories; autoethnography and storytelling; and practice reflections and case narratives. To me, the differences between these somewhat arbitrary categories for defining narrative forms were less notable than an aspect that transcended them—the authors’ presence in the narratives. For example, in a chapter that amplifies the voices of youth aging out of foster care, Sabrina Gonzales reflects on her own experience as a former foster care youth and the ways in which that experience influenced her relationships with research participants. Researchers’ use of self is central in autoethnographic contributions, as demonstrated in the chapter by Sherri L. Rings. Rings theorized critically from her childhood experience of living with a disability to advocate for a sociopolitical model of disability. Consonant with feminist and womanist approaches to social research, each author considers his, her, or their own role in constructing or co-constructing the stories of young people, drawing attention to the interactive and dialectical nature of the narrative inquiry.
Undoubtedly, the authors spent countless hours interacting and dialoguing with young people in order to craft these stories, yet the voices of young people themselves are surprisingly limited. The editors acknowledge that “it is primarily through adult interpretation that we come to hear children’s voices, even when children are part of the research process” (p. 4), and by and large, the stories in this book are no exception. Although stories are increasingly being told and shared in a digital format, consideration of technology-driven forms of storytelling is limited to only one chapter in this volume.
In Narrating Practice With Children and Adolescents, Diaz and Shephard aim to “challenge dominant ideas about childhood” (p. 3). Realizing that goal, the stories included in this volume push readers to understand young people as co-constructors of and actors within their worlds. Through a holistic, narrative approach that invites complexity and considers the intersections of race, class, gender, age, disability status, and national context, this book offers an important contribution to the study of children that explodes the notion of a universal childhood experience.
