Reprinted with permission from Ethics Rounds 2003-04 Winter;13(4):9-11. In the still uncharted territory of “narrative medicine,” the early conceptual pioneers have planted a number of boundary stakes and flags in attempts to define the width and breadth of the new discipline, in much the way that new medical subspecialties are defined and legitimized. Thus, depending on whom you read or talk t...

In this article, the authors introduce the virtual dream, a technique that entails writing a brief spontaneous dreamlike story on themes of loss, using a flexible set of assigned elements of setting and characterization to scaffold the writing. After providing several examples of virtual dreams written by workshop participants, the authors analyze the frequency of important narrative features i...

PURPOSE To characterize, according to the school grade and the type of school (private or public), the performance on orthographic and narrative text production in the writing of Elementary School students with good academic performance, and to investigate the relationships between these variables. METHODS Participants were 160 children with ages between 8 and 12 years, enrolled in 4th to 7th...

In this paper I present a narrative approach to environmental education research. This approach evolved through a dynamic interplay between research questions, theory, experience, conversation, and reflection. I situate the approach with respect to narrative inquiry and clarify the key conceptual metaphors underpinning my study, including “story,” “narrative,” and “metaphor.” I then discuss the...

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of agentic and communal traitnarrative congruence on nostalgia and to replicate previous research showing that self-esteem and positive affect are mediators of the relationship between nostalgia and optimism (Cheung et al., 2013). In Study 1, participants completed ratings of agentic and communal traits and were asked to write about a ...

Sickness and healing are, in part, narrative acts. Patients write about their illnesses with increasing frequency, which suggests that finding the words to contain the chaos of illness enables the sufferer to endure it better (1–3). We physicians, too, write more and more frequently about ourselves and our practices (4, 5). In many forms of narrative writing, doctors are endorsing the hypothesi...

Narratives have been used in the past to enhance technical documents such as research proposals by implementing a single-user writing tool called CANS (Computer-Aided Narrative Support). This study has now been extended to collaborative writing (CW); another area that can greatly benefit from a narrativebased writing tool. Before implementing such an asynchronous, multi-user system, however, it...