Narrative Genres PDF

## 2 Sharing and Making Meaning of Experience: Narrative Genres ### What Genre with Purpose Looks Like: The Family History Project, Grades K-8 English as a second language (ESL) specialist Carmela Rademacher's classroom at Delta Center Elementary School is transformed into an Around-the-World Quil...

## 2 Sharing and Making Meaning of Experience: Narrative Genres ### What Genre with Purpose Looks Like: The Family History Project, Grades K-8 English as a second language (ESL) specialist Carmela Rademacher's classroom at Delta Center Elementary School is transformed into an Around-the-World Quilt Museum. The English language learners she teaches are displaying quilts and accompanying stories, placards, and family trees they have made to share their family experiences with others. Parents, classmates, and teachers are visiting the museum today as students stand proudly beside their quilts and accompanying texts. Because it is a special day designated to celebrate family heritage, some children wear traditional outfits (e.g., see Nivedhya's ghagra choli; Figure 2.1). Admiration and recognition echo through visitors' snatches of conversation as they make connections and share their own experiences. One child is excited to learn his classmate is from India. Others exclaim at the languages of the wall placards (Srijith's wall placard in Hindi appears in Figure 2.2). Another child recognizes a quilt made by a sixth-grade book buddy. In the corner of the room, right behind Carmela's desk, a valentine hangs on the chalkboard. A pink heart with ribbon threading through it bears the message, "Mrs. Rademacher/The fabric / that binds us." On the desk sits a vase full of roses from the fifth-grade teachers, along with a card of appreciation. As on the opening day of an art exhibit, visitors express enthusiasm and admiration for all Carmela and her students have accomplished. Inspired by African American and Hmong story quilt traditions, Carmela invited her multi-age (K-8) students to thread their personal and family experiences together in a meaningful way—literally, in the quilts, but also figuratively, as they stitched together a range of genres and texts. The genres they read, listened to, and created included fictional stories, written and oral nonfiction narratives, family trees, and wall placards; all were vital links in setting up the quilt museum. Carmela had created a rich and motivating environment in which to develop her students' reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. They: * learned and reflected on the meaning of personal, family, or community experiences and places * practiced important social skills as they shared experiences with others and listened to and learned about others' experiences * invited others into—and themselves stepped into─unfamiliar experiences, places, and events * developed key genre conceptions that helped them become better readers and writers of narrative texts ### Designing a Communicatively Meaningful Environment Carmela, an avid quilter herself, decked out her ESL classroom with beautiful quilts she had sewn and collected over the years. She had her students study the quilts, observe the patterns, notice similarities and differences, and make connections among them. In sharing the stories of some of her quilts, she communicated her infectious passion for quilt making. She then asked her students if they would like to create their very own quilts about their families to display in a quilt museum and thus communicate their family histories and cultures to their classmates, their classmates' parents, and the other teachers and students in the school ### Providing Exposure and Experience Carmela introduced her students to a number of genres to prepare them for writing their family story (the culminating genre, which would accompany the quilt). They read literary stories, like *The Keeping Quilt* (Polacco 1988), a fictional text about how a quilt is passed down by and holds deep significance for a Jewish family that immigrated to the United States. The story triggered a conversation about heirlooms and how they can sometimes help preserve family memories across the years and the generations. The students also read *The Whispering Cloth* (Shea 1996) and made a virtual (online) visit to the National Quilt Museum. To scaffold the children's writing Carmela, with her daughter's help, videotaped oral-history interviews with students' parents. The interviews focused on the circumstances of the family's immigration to the United States and other experiences important to the family culture and became texts that the children reviewed and used in planning their quilts. The quilts featured cultural symbols both from the United States and from nations of origin, pictures of beloved family members, and national flags (see Katarina's, Vijeta's, and others' quilts in Figures 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5). ### Explicitly Teaching Genre Features and Genre Strategies Carmela used model texts to explicitly teach features of narrative, such as plot development, characterization, and setting. She also reviewed the format and purpose of wall placards using models from real and virtual museums. While paying attention to genre features, students also pursued literacy strategies such as researching, planning, and using visual texts (their quilts) and oral texts (the parent interviews) as the basis for their narrative writing. ### Offering Ongoing Coaching and Feedback The children enthusiastically began writing, working through multiple drafts until they—and Carmela—thought the piece was ready for exhibition (see Ravneet's family story, Figure 2.6). Then they moved on to the wall placards. They wrote the placard in English (and if they were able to, in their family language as well). Some students recruited their parents to write their placards in their family language (see Ravneet's placard, Figure 2.7). ### The Value of Oral Storytelling The kinship between oral and written narrative genres is often overlooked in the complex process of working with narrative genres in the classroom. Some children and parents who struggle with narrative writing can be gifted storytellers in their native language (and in English as well). Keep this relationship between written and oral narratives in mind and use more familiar oral narrative practices as scaffolds for written narrative practices. David Poveda (2003) spotlights a culturally sensitive teacher who helped her students, many of whom were capable oral storytellers and listeners, to build on these strengths as they learned to read and respond to fictional narratives. ### Rethinking Popular Narrative Assignments: Beyond "My Summer Vacation" A common approach to teaching narrative-taken by Mary early in her career is to assign the "my summer vacation" personal narrative in early September. These stories about summer vacations can inspire cynicism, even dread - as the cartoon in Figure 2.8 well shows! Unlike Carmela's project, the assignment lacks a broader purpose that would make the writing and reading of narratives relevant, interesting, and purposeful. For many students, the events of summer vacation are unreportable when compared to other events in their lives. And even when a vacation has been memorable, the details may be growing dim in September. In desperation, some children resort to inventing details. When completing the "summer vacation" assignment (and many other narrative writing assignments as well), students: * rarely study models * rarely purposefully connect narrative reading and writing to other genres * rarely conduct inquiries to uncover the details of past experiences (by consulting newspapers or archives, talking with family members, or making phone calls to relevant experts, for example) In contrast, Carmela's project and other genre-with-purpose narrative projects are a process of inquiry. When writing narratives students must do more than simply close their eyes and remember the past. They need to conduct research, for example by reading books (including other narratives), talking with family members (and often listening to their stories), viewing archival materials (including photographs), phoning experts to get a term or description right for a story, and so on (Hillocks 1996). When students engage in inquiry as part of narrative writing, they are following the practices of expert narrative writers (Lamott 1994). ### The Purposes of Narrative Texts Students in Carmela's classroom developed general academic skills; they conducted research; planned, designed, revised, published, and presented their work; and read and interpreted a range of texts and accompanying images. They also developed their knowledge of and ability to read, write, speak, and listen to many kinds of fictional and nonfiction narratives. When teachers take a genre-with-purpose approach, students become immersed in, and in some cases explicitly learn about, purposes for and communicative possibilities of narrative forms that have been: * designed to share and interpret a wide range of experiences (personal, family, communal, historical, and fictitious) with readers * composed by someone who either lived through, conducted research about, or has deep vicarious knowledge about the experience being shared * interpreted by someone who is interested in learning about others' past and present experiences (either real or imagined) Typical uses of narrative reading and writing in classrooms tend to foreground retelling personal experiences, writing personal narratives, and/or reading fiction. By contrast, genre-with-purpose projects take advantage of the full range of social and historical actions and interactions that narratives can accomplish in classrooms, schools, and communities (Daiute 2004, 2010; Juzwik 2009; Kamberelis 1999). Rather than using narrative exclusively to dig into students' personal pasts, these projects employ narratives for all sorts of other real-world purposes, like sharing and comparing family cultural experiences and exploring the significance of events and places in the community. ### Truth-Telling and Narrative Texts From a genre perspective, both fictional and nonfiction narratives share the same purposes, a point made clear in the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSI 2010a) on narrative writing. Because we don't see the fiction versus nonfiction distinction as central to narrative, we refer to a range of fictional and nonfiction narrative texts throughout this chapter. The chief difference between a nonfiction narrative and a fictional narrative is the truth claim made for the narrative. When narratives are presented as fiction; veracity does not matter. However, when narrative texts are presented as real-life events, truth telling and sometimes even evidence of veracity (e.g., artifacts from or photos of the event) are expected. We worry when we hear teachers encouraging students to embellish their personal stories so that they are more entertaining or, depressingly, more likely to receive a high score on a high-stakes test. Some literacy researchers suggest that how much students and families value "telling the truth" on the one hand and "telling a good story" on the other can vary according to class, culture, and religious faith (e.g., Heath 1983). Truth telling should be explicitly addressed when teaching narrative writings, for not all students share the same notions of narrative truth and falsity. Although writing embellished or entirely imagined stories is worthwhile even at the early elementary level, children can also produce nonfiction ("true") stories and identify them as such. It is especially important to emphasize to upper-elementary and middle school students the need for truth and accuracy in historical projects. For example, the students working on Barney Brawer's Evacuation Day project (described later) initially drafted this lead for their narrative: "Can you imagine that there was a battle with no blood-just victory for the Americans?" But then they ran into a truth-telling problem: They discovered historical evidence that several people had, in fact, died. Blood had been shed. To remain true to what really happened, they changed their lead to "Can you imagine that there was a battle with almost [emphasis added] no blood—just victory for the Americans?" ### What Genre with Purpose Looks Like: The Evacuation Day Project, Grades 4 and 5 Barney Brawer, principal of the Michael J. Perkins Elementary School in South Boston, is constantly coming up with new ways to make United States history meaningful for elementary students. Evacuation Day is celebrated in the Boston area on March 17 (the same day as St. Patrick's Day). The holiday honors the British army's departure from Boston in March 1776, the colonists' first victory after the bloody but inconclusive Battle of Bunker Hill. Although the Perkins students and their parents were well aware of the annual Saint Patrick's Day parade (South Boston is heavily Irish American), they knew little about the history of Evacuation Day, often dismissed as "just an excuse to get the day off on St. Patrick's Day." Mr. Brawer decided to help his students and the school community explore the events that took place in their neighborhood while the country was being formed. So, with the help of parents, teachers, and community members, a group of fourth and fifth graders in the school collaboratively wrote and illustrated the children's book *Why Do We Celebrate Evacuation Day?* *Why Do We Celebrate Evacuation Day?* is available for purchase at amazon.com, or directly from Michael J. Perkins School (in which case the school makes more money for their scholarship fund), for $14.99. To order one or more copies, write, call, or email the Michael J. Perkins School: Michael J. Perkins School 50 Burke Street South Boston, MA 02127 (617) 905-3156 [email protected] ### How to Teach Narrative with Purpose: Five Principles for Instruction We turn now to discussing how our five principles can be enacted in projects involving narrative texts. In Appendices A and B of this book, you'll find planning sheets to help you teach genre with purpose. These planning sheets offer resources for each genre. We encourage you to use them as you develop your own projects using the principles in this book. ### PRINCIPLE 1 Design compelling, communicatively meaningful environments. #### Involve students in something bigger than themselves. The kindergartners through eighth graders in Carmela's room and the fourth and fifth graders in Barney's school were all participating in collective enterprises bigger than themselves: They contributed quilts and narrative texts as artifacts to a museum and collectively authored a narrative about a little-known historical event. They did far more than write personal narratives about what they did on their summer vacation; they became deeply engaged in product-driven, collaborative activities (Heath 1998). Such activities are a critical first step in creating communicative environments that motivate children and adolescents to use narrative texts to learn and to learn about the uses of narrative texts. #### Design opportunities for collaboration among students and with adults. Genre-with-purpose projects demand intensive collaboration among students and between students and adults other than teachers. For example, Carmela's students used family members' oral histories as the basis for their quilts and family stories. In the Evacuation Day book project, "helpful grownups" (28) worked side by side with the students to research the central events of Evacuation Day, which were available only in texts written for grownups, such as *1776* (McCullough 2006). The adults learned alongside the students, which made the project an exciting process of inquiry for all. As the adults related information from the source material (the fact that one cannon fell through the ice of the Hudson River, for example), the students wrote their version of the narrative in their own words: When they had to take the cannons across the Hudson River, they were worried the ice was not strong enough to hold them up. Henry Knox did something smart. He had the soldiers cut holes in the ice. Then water would rise up and freeze and the ice would get thicker and thicker, so the cannons will not fall. But one fell. They still didn't give up. They pulled the cannon up and cleaned it, then kept on moving. The children asked wonderful questions ("Why didn't the British know the cannons were coming?") that led to other questions ("How did anyone in Revolutionary times know anything they hadn't personally observed?"). This led the team of children and adults to visualize how people communicated across distances (or didn't) in a no-telephones, no-TV, no-radios, no-Internet era! The adults and children together compiled all the separate episodes. They created a big list on chart paper, numbered the episodes in sequence, and identified which parts of the story needed to be fleshed out more fully. For example, the students realized they had written too much about all the snow on the journey and about sneaking the cannons up the hill but needed a description of what happened after the cannons were installed on the hill. Groups of adults and children were commissioned to go back to the history books to find details that would fill in missing parts of the story (how long it took for the British to leave, for example). The children also made illustrations to accompany each of the episodes to be included in the book. #### Provide many tools and materials. Populating the classroom with rich and varied tools and materials is also critical for studying and designing narrative texts (pages 34-35 discuss using model and sample texts). Certainly Carmela's classroom was filled with written narratives (not uncommon in K-8 classrooms), but it is equally important to include a range of narrative tools and resources beyond printed texts. Carmela's classroom included story quilts, a sewing machine, and a computer on which students called up and reviewed their family oral narratives. An important resource for Barney's project was the Evacuation Day memorial on the hill behind the school: The book project began when the whole student body and faculty hiked up the hill to visit it and became curious about the event it memorialized. (A communicatively meaningful environment can expand beyond school walls!) Other tools that can contribute to communicatively meaningful environments include photos and paintings; videos and video games; cameras and video cameras; computers, e-books, or other digital devices; scanners; and artistic supplies for generating, illustrating, or enacting stories in various media (paint, pencils, pens, clay, colorful paper, leaves, fabric, costumes, and so on). Materials like these help students realize that written narrative texts intertwine creatively with other media and modes of communication. #### More Project Ideas for Teaching Narrative with Purpose 1. Have adolescents write and illustrate modern-day fairy tales, personal narratives, or other children's stories to share with younger children-one classroom donated their books to a pediatrician's office (e.g., Stone 2005). 2. Have children read and write fictitious and autobiographical narratives centering on social conflicts as part of a broader project about violence prevention (Daiute 2004). 3. Have children write their own stories about the joys and hardships of learning to read and write, compile them with similar stories by others, and share them with students in other classrooms (Mitchell-1995). 4. Have adolescents use video cameras and other inquiry tools to create stories that critically question and reframe a specific urban area; neighborhood gentrification in Harlem, for example (Kinloch 2009). 5. Have students create comic strips on www.MakeBeliefsComix.com and enter them in the site's Facebook wall competition. The strips can also be posted on students' own Facebook walls. #### Try These Digital Resources! Digitally mediated environments are excellent resources for narrative genre projects in the twenty-first century, with burgeoning interest in digital storytelling and digital archiving of life stories: * The StoryCorps project (http://storycorps.org/) is an oral history resource for K-8 teachers. The project has collected and archived over 30,000 oral histories that are freely available and searchable by theme. * The Center for Digital Storytelling (www.storycenter.org/index1.html) is a collection of resources related to digital storytelling. (For a blog post about uses of digital storytelling in education, see http://jorivas.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/digital-storytelling/,) * Digital Storyteller (www.digitalstoryteller.org/aboutus.htm) is a resource provided for teachers and students by the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. * The Digital Clubhouse Network (www.digiclub.org/mission/index.html) helps people use digital resources, including digitally mediated narratives, to improve their communities. * Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/) is an online collection of more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. ### PRINCIPLE 2 Provide exposure and experience. You may feel you'll have an easier time designing purposeful exposure to and experience with narrative texts than some of the other genres, because many students have been saturated with oral and written narrative texts from a very young age. Yet literacy research since the 1980s suggests that children's exposure and experience with written narrative texts varies enormously by social class and culture (e.g., Heath 1982). So don't assume students read or listen to stories with their families every night; create many opportunities for your students to listen to stories, handle and interact with narrative texts, read narrative texts aloud (if children are able to read), retell stories they hear and read, and produce stories of their own. Many K-8 classroom libraries are well stocked with fictional narratives, and this is important. But it's also important to share a wide variety of narrative text types beyond fictional narratives: personal narratives and autobiographies (see text box on pages 40-41 for further discussion), family narratives, community narratives, and historical narratives. Sometimes the genre distinctions blur, as in the texts listed in the box on page 34. Studying these "hybrid" texts can show young readers and writers how authors creatively manipulate genres for their own communicative purposes. ### Recommended Model and Mentor Narrative Texts for K-8 Classrooms Many of these books can be used across the K-8 span and even the chapter books, like Seedfolks, may be read aloud to younger children. #### Ten for Primary Grade Readers 1. A Chair for My Mother by V. B. Williams. Mulberry, 1982. (fiction) 2. Little Panda: The World Welcomes Hua Mei at the San Diego Zoo by J. Ryder. Simon and Schuster, 2001. (nonfiction) 3. One Smile by C. McKinley, Illumination Arts, 2002. (fiction) 4. On My Way to Buy Eggs by C. Chen, Scholastic, 2001. (fiction) 5. Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship by, I. Hatkoff, C. Hatkoff, & P. Kahumbu. Scholastic, 2006. (nonfiction) 6. Swimming with Dolphins by L. Davis. Blue Sky Press, 2004. (fiction) 7. The Man Who Walked Between the Towers by M. Gerstein. Square Fish, 2003. (nonfiction) 8. Tell Me a Mitzi by L. Segal. Scholastic, 1970. (fiction) 9. Wangari's Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa by J. Winter. Harcourt, 2008. (nonfiction) 10. Zoo by A. Browne. Sunburst, 1992. (fiction) #### Ten for Upper-Elementary and Middle School Students 1. Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the School at Weedpatch Camp, by J. Stanley. Crown Books for Children, 1993. (nonfiction) 2. Crow Boy by T. Yashima, Scholastic, 1965. (fiction) 3. Exploring the Titanic by R. D. Ballard: Scholastic/Madison Press, 1988. (nonfiction) 4. Holes, by L. Sachar. Bloombury, 1998. (fiction) 5. Mama Went to Jail for the Vote by K. Ker. Hyperion, 2005 (historical fiction) 6. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the March on Washington by F. Ruffin. Scholastic, 2001 (nonfiction) 7. Seedfolks by P. Fleischman. HarperTrophy, 2004. (fiction) 8. Spies of the Mississippi: The True Story of the Spy Network That Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement by, R. Bowers. National Geographic, 2010. (nonfiction) 9. They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist. Group by S. C. Bartoletti. Houghton Mifflin, 2010. (nonfiction; because of disturbing content, probably best reserved for middle schoolers) 10. The View from Saturday by E. L. Konigsburg. Atheneum, 1998. (fiction) #### Ten Genre-Blurring Narratives 1. Bad Kitty vs. Uncle Murray, by N. Bruel. Square Fish, 2011. 2. The Complete MAUS: A Survivor's Tale by A. Spiegelman. Pantheon, 1994. (because of disturbing content, probably best reserved for middle schoolers) 3. Crossing Borders: Stories of Immigrants by T. Lang. Celebration Press, 2005. 4. Dawn Land, by J. Bruchac & W. Davis. First Second, 2010. 5. The Kids' Invention Book by A. Erlbach. Scholastic, 1997. 6. Knucklehead: Tall Tales and Almost True Stories of Growing Up Scieszka by J. Scieszka. Viking, 2008. 7. Paddle-to-the-Sea by H. C. Hollings. Sandpiper, 1980. 8. Persepolis by M. Satrapi. Pantheon, 2004. 9. The Secrets of Vesuvius by S. C. Bisel. Scholastic, 1990. 10. The Trapp Family Book by H. Wilhelm. Heinemann, 1983. ### Use model or mentor texts. Carmela's and Barney's projects used model narratives in different ways, but in both projects students examined models to inspire writing and to develop reading and listening skills. Carmela's students studied the published narratives, *The Keeping Quilt* (Polacco 1988) and *The Whispering Cloth* (Shea 1996), to see how family stories could be organized around a meaningful object.. The books included many of the features of narrative genres outlined above. But sometimes, as in an ambitious project like the *Why Do We Celebrate Evacuation Day?* book, there are no model texts for children to examine. This is good in that it motivates the project, but it means you need to search for model texts about related historical topics. Because there were no children's books about Evacuation Day, Barney and his students looked at books about Bunker Hill Day. They made the fascinating discovery that there is more to celebrate about Evacuation Day than there is about Bunker Hill Day, because the Battle of Bunker Hill included many deaths and was not a turning point in the Revolutionary War. The discovery led students to come face to face with the power of storytelling: Which stories are told, and how they are told, can influence our understanding of the past and sometimes the present. Barney's students had the power to change perception by telling a neglected but important story in local and national history. Filling a classroom with model texts can be time-consuming and expensive. Teachers have long consulted with school, public, and university librarians. In addition, local, national, and international digital teacher networks, such as the National Writing Project (www.nwp.org/) or the Bread Loaf Teacher Network (www.middlebury.edu/blse/bltn/), can be extremely helpful in identifying and sometimes even locating model narrative texts for a new project, as are the digital repositories listed on pages 32-33. Grant writing is also an important professional skill for you to develop in an effort to create a "slush fund" (in addition to your own pocket) for purchasing model narratives and other materials and resources. And receiving a grant may have the added benefit of connecting you with other teachers working on similar projects. Mary's Stories in the Land grant from the Orion Society supported her work on the Boulder book project (described later in this chapter and in the Coda) and connected her with eight teachers from around the country who received a grant for the same period of time. Literacy researcher Judith Langer (2001) lists participation in multiple professional networks as a key characteristic of teachers who "beat the odds" to cultivate student growth and achievement in schools where student success is not predicted by socioeconomics and other demographics. ### PRINCIPLE 3 Explicitly teach genre features. By explicitly teaching narrative genre features and designing opportunities for students to learn about them, you can orchestrate increasingly sophisticated encounters with narrative genres. To decide which features to teach explicitly (a critical step), you first need to understand the characteristics of narrative texts. #### What do I need to know about narrative text characteristics? You'll benefit greatly from an understanding of narrative genres (oral as well as written) that goes well beyond the genre features you teach your students. You needn't (and shouldn't) teach your students all the terms on page 36, but just being aware of them will allow you to introduce your narrative writers to ever-more sophisticated moves and to provide ongoing coaching and feedback with confidence. ## Common Characteristics of Narrative Texts* #### Elements * Abstracts encapsulate the gist of the story at the beginning of the text (Labov 1972; e.g. “You'll never believe what Janie did yesterday! What shocking behavior!"). * Setting: When and where does the story take place? Setting, as well as characters, are introduced in sections called orientations, usually at or near the beginning of the narrative (Labov 1972). * Characterization: Who does the action involve? Characterization refers to how characters are described and developed and how they interact with other characters. * Plot: What happens? Plot describes the general sequence of events that happen in a story. * Problem situation or conflict: What is the problem or conflict in the story? * Rising action: How does the plot develop? * Resolution: How is the story problem or situation resolved? * Theme: What is the point of the story? Theme describes why the action matters to the narrator or to others. Authors and speakers communicate themes through evaluations, or strategies that help readers and listeners interpret story events (Juzwik 2009; Polanyi 1985). #### Language Characteristics * Detailed descriptions are created using adjectives, vivid verbs, metaphors, and any number of other techniques to evoke images for readers and listeners. * Temporal and causal transitions show relationships between and among sentences and sections of a narrative. Narratives rely on temporal transitions (e.g., very soon and suddenly) to manage the passage of time and on causal transitions (e.g., because) to specify logical links. * Special language devices typical of narrative include beginning a story with the time-honored fairy- or folktale cue *once upon a time*, using rhyming words, constructing dialogue, and posing rhetorical questions. * Play with language for the sake of language. Narrative is a great vehicle for studying expressive stylistic choices at the sentence level (e.g., “Not by the hair on my chinny chin chin!"). * Verb structures in narratives tend to be simple past or present tense verbs rather than more complex verbal phrases, especially when narrators are moving the plot forward (e.g., "The next day, the wolf came again"). * Clauses and sentence structures in oral narratives and stories written for children also tend to be simple rather than complex (e.g., “And [the wolf] gobbled up the little pig”). *Any given narrative text is unlikely to, and needn't, have all of these characteristics.* ### Narratives in The Three Little Pigs and Why Do We Celebrate Evacuation Day? #### Characterization: Who does the action involve? The characterization component of narrative texts encompasses how characters are described and developed and how they interact with other characters. Fictional and nonfiction stories alike are populated with protagonists (main characters), minor characters, and antagonists (villains). In *The Three Little Pigs* (Marshall 1989), the third little pig is the protagonist and "hero" of the story: Early on, we see that he is sensible because in contrast to his happy-go-lucky and casually dressed brothers, he wears a dapper suit and carries a handsome bag to sally forth into the world.. The antagonist is, of course, a "lean and hungry wolf." Notably, nonfiction narratives also have protagonists. For example, the protagonists of *Why Do We Celebrate Evacuation Day?* (Michael J. Perkins School 2007) are Henry Knox and General George Washington. Some object to calling the persons in nonfiction narratives (especially personal narratives) characters; however, labeling nonfiction protagonists, antagonists, and villains characters helps students realize that even in narrative writing, real people (including narrators) become characters and that writers have choices about how they portray these characters. Students in difficult circumstances can even be empowered by invitations to imagine their life, family, and national stories in new ways (Daiute 2010). #### Setting: When and where does the story take place? The setting of *The Three Little Pigs* is folktale land rather than a specific time and place. The long-ago time is cued with, "Once upon a time." #### Plot: What happens? The plot of the story is the general sequence of events that take place. Plot includes the commonly taught story elements of problem or conflict; rising action; and resolution or ending. Keep in mind that the "beginning, middle, end" structure is not the only option for structuring plot. Sometimes narrators choose to start a story "in medias res"-in the middle of the action. * *Problem situation or conflict: What is the problem or conflict in the story?* In stories, the plot is often realized in three distinct and identifiable sections: an instigating problem, rising action (or exposition), and resolution. Problem situations put the plot into motion. In *The Three Little Pigs*, the problem-a conflict between each pig and the wolf-is established when the "mean old wolf" blows the first pig's home in and gobbles him up. * *Rising action: How does the plot develop?* More complex narratives tend to develop through connected episodes.. In *The Three Little Pigs,* three major episodes-one featuring each of the three pigs--begin "The first little pig," "The second little pig," and "Now the third little pig." * *Resolution: How is the story problem or situation resolved?* Story plot is usually resolved as characters respond to those conflicts: The third little pig outwits the wolf three times and ultimately gobbles him up! * *Theme: What is the point of the story?* Themes are the broad point or points a story addresses-the “so what?" This meaning-making dimension separates narrative from similar genres, such as recounts. Some "my summer vacation” narratives become lists of vacation events (with the structure "and then... and then...and then...") that simply recount past events, rather than stories showing why the events matter to the narrator or to others.. Theme is constructed through a wide range of textual resources, often described as "voice." Through voice, authors show their stance on story events. Marshall uses dialogue as a key means to convey his stance on events in *The Three Little Pigs.* For example, on the penultimate page of the story, the wolf announces, "Here I come! Dinnertime" next to an illustration of the sensible third pig putting a boiling pot into the fireplace, the book *How to Cook a Wolf* lying nearby. The pig's rejoinder ("You can say that again!") at the top of the final page projects Marshall's signature comically ironic authorial voice extolling the virtues of planning, cleverness, persistence, and skill exemplified by the third pig-the themes of the story. ### Narrative Evaluation in the Evacuation Day Project As noted on page 36, evaluation facilitates narrative meaning-making. When Barney's Evacuation Day project was nearing completion, the group realized they hadn't yet answered the "so what?" posed in their book title. Why do we celebrate Evacuation Day? Why does this story matter? Why should people today care about these long-ago events? This became a "juicy" (Barney's word) exploration about the past in relation to narrative and led to a text box at the end of the book that reads: Why do we celebrate Evacuation Day? * We celebrate Evacuation Day because it was a victory with almost no blood! * We celebrate Evacuation Day because the British soldiers had taken over Boston. When they left, the Americans could be in charge of our own city. Now people could make their own laws and stand for their own rights! * We celebrate Evacuation Day because one clever idea-and a lot of hard work-can change history! Note that this evaluation occurs in a nonfiction narrative.. As already discussed, fictional and nonfiction narrative texts share the same characteristics. The distinction between fictional and nonfiction narratives has no bearing on text characteristics; rather, the distinction hinges on whether a narrative is real or imagined. ### Not all Narrative Texts include all the Narrative Elements and Structural Features Not all narrative texts include all the narrative elements and structural features discussed in this section; texts written by young children rarely do. Often young children's earliest efforts at writing narratives--and sometimes their later efforts- produce recounts rather than stories. Other times, as in Ravneet's "My Family Story" (Figure 2.6), attempted narratives are arranged as purely descriptive pieces rather than temporally sequenced and causally linked narratives. The text elements and structural features outlined on pages 37-38 are simply characteristics that frequently typify "fully formed" narrative genres. Narratives are written and spoken toward the broad social purposes of sharing and making meaning of experience with others, and the features of narrative texts are driven by these purposes. Students who are taught genre with purpose begin to realize that narrative texts make a point (or several points) about the teller or the world through temporally ordered events, told from one or more points of view. Although students can rarely explicitly label the structural elements of their own narrative texts, many do enact several structural narrative genre features in their writing. Furthermore, once children have learned some of the key genre features, they are more likely to enjoy story parodies , such as Wiesner's version of