The Key Practice, Building and Sharing Stories and Social Understandings: The Intrinsic Value of Narrative

Abstract

One of the major goals of the English Language Arts is to teach students to read, understand, and write narratives. This report examines the ways in which the skills that support narrative develop during the school years, outlines a model of narrative as a “key practice” in which the ability to model social situations supports narrative understanding, and feeds into the ability to use stories to reflect about stories and the classes of social situations they represent. Narrative is important precisely because it helps people develop their understanding of the social world and reason about their place in it. Assessments of narrative reading and writing need to take this broader construct into account.