Sakamaki photo of Sascha Altman Dubrul at Tompkins square Riot, 1991.
and other subjects from Narrating Practice with Children and Adolescents.
Chris Flast photo of Sascha 1989.
Sascha and this blogger at a book reading in San Francisco earlier this year.
Kate Barnhart then and now.
If you're in NYC/BK come by tomorrow evening for a book talk with Mery Diaz on her new book with Ben Shepard, with a panel featuring Yasemin Besen-Cassino and me, among others. We'll talk about doing research with and writing narratives with/about children....and building up their voice!"
Kat Gregory is with Mery Diaz.
"A four-year process of writing and editing comes to fruition with Narrating Practice with Children and Adolescents
Congrats to Mery Diaz and Benjamin Heim Shepard."
Mery Diaz, photos and caption: "November 6 at 1:20 PMSome photos from last night’s book talk and our wonderful panelists of contributing authors bringing interdisciplinary perspectives to the discussion on Child and Youth issues. Benjamin Heim Shepard Stephen Ruszcz Yasemin Besen-Cassino Deborah CourtneyNarrating Practice with Children and Adolescents! #citytech #columbiauniversitypress"
Sitting on her desk was a copy of Stanley Witkin’s Narrating Social
Work Through Autoethnography. A common interest, we talked about hoping to
give our students something more engaging, a better story. Over time we realized we shared affinities for
activism as well as interest in the intersections of narratives that our
students and clients tell us about the problems and social movements around us:
the DACA students struggling to find a voice in our democracy, the Honk Kong
activists putting their lives on the line, the students of the Civil Rights
movement who would not go along to get along, Emma Gonzalez and the Parkland students calling BS, changing the conversations - Not passive actors but active agents in their
worlds, taking control of their own
lives and stories.
In the development of this book, we asked a few core questions about
the experiences of children:
●
How do we
define and construct childhood?
●
How do
poverty and inequality affect child health and welfare?
●
How is
childhood lived at the intersection of race and class and gender?
●
How can
practitioners engage with youth in service through more culturally responsive
and democratic processes?
“The answer, of course, depends
on what informs your perspective,” explains Professor Dias at our book talk
November 5th. “Very often we start with personal
experiences. We all have emotionally laden memories of our childhood, usually
in relation to the time and space in which our childhood took place, and our
relationship with others during that time and space. For me, it was the 1980’s
for example. The best childhood era, of course. Coming of age between the
analog and the digital. Living and growing up in Washington Heights and in
Ecuador. No seatbelts, riding in the back of pick-up trucks. About 20 family
members seeing us off at the airport. Fire hydrant summers. Paraguas.
Graffitied subway trains. Crack cocaine vials on city sidewalks. Do you know
where your children are? Translating for my mom during parent-teacher
conferences. Walking to school in 3 feet of snow. 3 feet and no snow day. These
are my memories.”
She continues:“I often hear folks from my generation talk about “these kids today”
as they compare to the children of their memories who they remember as
respectful kids, who knew their place, more innocent but also with more grit.
“We live in a world of extreme and widening inequality, rapid climate change, uncharted technological
advances, active shooter drills, virtual bullying, unprecedented access to
knowledge, and force global migrations.
“On the other hand, our understanding is driven by theoretical
frameworks which carry limitations. For long, the most dominant paradigm in
child research and practice has been grounded in psychological developmental
theories. This paradigm understands children in terms of their progress through
determined age-related stages. Here, how children are studied and intervened
upon is based on the ideas of normative characteristics of childhood, and their
progress in the process of becoming well-functioning adults. The paradigm has
assumed universal experiences of childhood development and deficiency.
“Consider the impact in framing: students who drop out versus students
who are pushed out of schools. Kids who are responding to chaos in their
environments versus kids who are labeled with a conduct disorder.
“Research has predominately been quantitative and experimental,
positioning children as objects of study, and decontextualizing their
experiences.
“Traditional sociological
position too has influenced how we have come to understand children and
childhood. Viewing the child’s role within social institutions such as family
or school and how they shape children..
“Contesting old paradigms, this book is informed by integrating
perspectives to explore children’s experiences: the ecological perspectives and
the more recent social study of childhood.
“Taking an ecological
perspective we look at children in their environment and the transactions that
take place between them (peers, family, school, law and policy, culture and
society).
“In the collection of chapters in this book, these concepts emerge in
the stories on and about children.
Quantitative data can tell us who, how many, how much, or how often. For
example, we know currently in the US about 1 in 5 children live in poverty, and
this poverty disproportionately impacts, Black and Brown children. But we also
want to know how these children negotiate the complexities in their
circumstances and what these experiences mean to them. To learn more, we need
research approaches that represent the perspectives and voices of children,
that help to unpack the tensions between “needs” and “rights” of children and
their “protection” and “control.” All this brings us to narrative approaches.
I follow elaborating on our journey through
the narrative turn in social science.
“We tell stories to
give life meaning. We impose structure on chaos,” I begin, quoting novelist Amy
Hoffman. “We choose a beginning and an end; we elevate some details and discard
others; we try to find lessons and useful information”.
“Through narrative,
we make sense of the world. We explain who we are and where we have been while
providing direction for the future. Doing so, we tell the stories of our lives.
The big we, of course, extends into the lives of children, who spend their
childhoods weaving tales, stretching truths, and making meaning with stories,
getting through the more playful and difficult times of our lives. As we get
older, we tell different kinds of stories, often less interesting ones.
Sometimes we remember those old stories, elaborating on them to make sense of
things, retracing details of who we are and how we got here.
“After all, one of the prominent cultural narratives of our
time is that of childhood. “Childhood was a story adults made up about
themselves,” writes Adam Phillips (2014, 43). “It was to be the story
that caught on. And psychoanalysis would catch on as a story about why stories
about childhood matter...Freud was to make up a story about adult life out of a
story about childhood; a story about development out of a story of assimilation.
A story about civilization out of a story about immigration,” (p.43).
“We collected countless narratives for
the project, some case studies,
other autoethnographies, testimonios, practice reflections. And the process was anything but simple or easy. We come to this project from different perspectives and
experience in the field. We are both social workers with kids. I (Shepard)
never thought I’d work with youth. The task always seemed too daunting. As a
child, I suspected I would never have kids, writing a manifesto on the topic
fifth grade. Yet, the stories about children’s lives kept me wondering what
happened to kids, wondering why kids end up as they do.
“Half of ethnography is confession Clifford Geertz (1973)
writes in The Interpretation of Cultures.
Reading Stanley Witkin (2014) paraphrase these words in his Narrating Social Work through
Autoethnography, I started feeling less guilty about my ambivalence about
working with youth. “[A]n autoethnography is an ethnography of one’s
self-usually focusing on a particular experience or life event – from a social
and cultural perspective,” concludes Witkin (2014, p. 2).
For myself, the event in question happened
in 1975, when my godfather who’d been dad’s best friend, put a gun to his head
and pulled the trigger. In the years to come, the son he left behind took
to setting fires. No one knew how to reach him. And we certainly could not
bring his father back. None of us really knew why he left. But the wound
lingered in most of our lives. Something was terribly wrong. Work was not
right. Life was not right. But the world kept moving. Everyone just moved
forward, with few answers forthcoming. I never thought much about what any of
these decade old memories meant until I started thinking about this book.
“As a social worker, everyone I knew in the field had their
stories. A woman who directed a child welfare agency confessed to playing with
dolls to cope with the stress of a child welfare system with too many gaps and
wounds. Over and over, the stories of providers and the troubled kids they
worked with gripped me. I was drawn to their stories, trying to figure them
out.
“When social work crossed the path of my life, I found
myself working with people with HIV/AIDS years before treatment. Many of my
clients were adolescents, living in single room occupancy hotels, in and out of
the streets, in a world of adults. My clients died every day. In between shifts
at work, I bussed around town tape recording the life stories of people with
HIV/AIDS, trying to make sense of this experience, trying to capture the
experience of a cohort of people living with AIDS before their time ran out.
Two years into this, I took a break to go to grad school. I had completed and
transcribed some sixty life stories with people with AIDS. But I did not know
what to do with my box of oral histories.
“Over time, I continued to grapple with various approaches
to thinking about people’s stories, client narratives, and community
practice. Through the life story people bring together disparate parts of their
experiences into coherent narratives, noted my Human Behavior in the Social
Environment Professor, William Borden (1992). No story exists in a void.
“Over
the next two years, I started collecting oral histories of organizers during
the Great Depression six decades prior. My challenge was how to justify my
research approach in the increasingly conservative, positivist steeped social
work department. I wandered through the library, reading as much Chicago
ethnography as I could, and perusing the stacks at the Seminary Co-Op bookstore. One afternoon, I found myself looking at pile
of books assigned by Bertram Cohler for his oral history
research seminar. Cohler, who had worked with Bruno
Bettleheim and Heinz Kohut was something of a legend at the University. He
seemed to understand what I was trying to do with oral histories, or at least
it looked like it from his writings which seemed to synthesize the psychology,
philosophy, and sociology of life stories. Linking questions about
meaning and coherence Max Weber grappled with in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Cohler
(1994:171) argued that the life story account could provide insight into
the depth of a social condition: "The human science is the most
appropriate mode for understudying development and social change as forces
impacting the study of lives over time." Over and over again, he suggested
forces impacting lives also impact communities. Life stories offer insight into
needs and expectations, adaptation and development, highlighting areas of
abundance and scarcity, demonstrating identity formation, growth, and, in some
cases, metamorphosis.
“Cohler owned the classroom like few I have ever known.
He’d just walk in, sit at a desk, not a lectern, and drop a question.
“How was Weber? What problems did it
pose?” Several students would respond and the conversation was on. I was moved
by the empathy Cohler showed for all the students in the room. My first day in
class, he suggested we all read the diaries of Alice James, the sister of
Henry. He sympathized with the struggles of mothers and daughters, as well as
the compromises we adapt to to make sense of our lives. He seemed to care what we all had to say,
bringing out great things in all of us.
“When we read John Bowlby’s 1979 The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds, I made my first
comment in the class, reflecting on the impact of my parents’ divorce and the
many other family dislocations of those in my cohort. Cohler acknowledged my
sentiment, noting that children adapt. Pain is real but people cope in
countless ways. If people are knocked down, they tend to find ways up.
Resilience is like water in a creek, leading to a river. If it gets stuck, it
moves in other directions, he continued, echoing a theme from his 1982 paper
“Personal narrative and life course.” When affectional bonds break, it is not
always easy to repair them. But you can never count kids out, Bert elaborated. They can cope with a lot.
Nothing is determined. This is part of what is important about studying
people’s lives. Bert and I went to get coffee after class. Cohler talked about his experience at the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, a residential treatment center
and therapeutic school for emotionally disturbed youth run by Bruno
Bettleheim who became a mentor for Bert. Cohler lived in the Pirates Dorm. We all
need essential others, he explained. They help us through. And sometimes we have to defend them. I
shared my experience in San Francisco, looking at the stories of people HIV and
AIDS. Resilience was a theme that ran through out conversations. Both his work and mine addressed themes of
stigma and adversity, as well as adaptation, looking to the life story to frame
these dynamics, integrating changes, bringing these struggles to bear,
integrating pain, and offering coherence. Still, there are broken stories, he
explained.
“Editing the project, Bert was always there. Listening to
the stories,” I conclude.
“My chapter considers narratives of
homeless youth in New York City. To do
so, it utilizes the ethnographic and life story methods explored in the
introductory essay as a means to consider the needs of this vulnerable
population. It traces the personal
stories of three service providers who coped with institutionalization and
chemical dependency in one way or another themselves as adolescents before
joining the organizations New Alternatives for LGBT Youth, as well as the
Icarus and Streetwork projects. These life stories provide us with insights
unavailable through other methods, detailing themes of adaptation, resilience
and coping. Such narratives open spaces
for social action, personal agency, change and meaning creation. “The stories people fashion to make meaning
out of their lives serve to situate them within the complex social ecology of
the modern world,” writes Dan McAdams (2008, 242). These are narratives of survival, traced between
public and private selves, contending with both who one might be or dream of
being, and an unforgiving external world of judgements, punishment, and
homophobia, leaving many in the streets or locked up. “The stories we construct to make sense of
our lives are fundamentally about our struggle to reconcile who we imagine we
were, are, or might be in our heads and bodies with who we were, are, and might
be in the social contexts of the family, community, the workplace, ethnicity,
religion, gender, social class, and culture writ large” says McAdam (2008,
242). Thank you for taking the time to
consider a few of them. Thanks for being
part of the project everyone,” I conclude turning to the panel.
Following our introductions, the authors tell the
stories of their work, highlighting the narrative approaches they used in their chapters, describing the ways they illuminate the lived experiences of young people.
Kristina Baines highlights a theme that runs throughout
the book. Kids are caught in between traditional
practices and modern autonomy, she explains, with conflicting narratives. And that impacts their health. For adults,
they look the same. But kids know it’s a little bit different.
The world changed; jobs changed, says Yasemin
Besen-Cassino. The services sector changed. Narratives reflect the lived
perspective of inequality.
A diagnosis
is not just a diagnosis, says Deborah Courtney. They happen because of stories. Understand a story that manifests symptoms,
notes Courtney presenting a narrative case study, of Kim, from her practice applicable
to the emerging field of trauma studies.
A medical model offered one intervention, a trauma informed perspective offered
another. Experiences in trauma was the common theme of Kim’s story. No matter the situation, there was a trauma in that history. I could see beyond symptoms to get to a trauma narrative. Looking at how her trauma
continues to act on the brain. It said
you are not safe. Self-injuring alleviates
the intensity of the emotional pain. We
all need to be trauma informed practitioners. We need to educate ourselves about this. Hold a safe space. Kim presented
a lot of symptoms. She wasn’t
crazy. A lot of triggers from her current
moment opened up past wounds over and over. She needed another way to respond. Over
time, Courtney used trauma informed practice to
educate and treat Kim. And her world shifted.
Stephen Ruszczyk follows
telling the story of four undocumented students
who he got to know. It was meaningful
for them to tell their stories, he says, referring to the Hawthorne Effect.
There was a beneficial element of helping them co-narrate a narrative. Co
constructing a story, bringing him
into the process his interviewees were
going through. Telling a story in the
context of the American dream, undocumented youth are limited, two returned to Mexico. Another graduated early. Another needs help. We need to move beyond heroic narratives,
allowing immigrants to live ordinary lives and succeed. Sharing a counternarrative creates a way to
show young people as full humans.
Elizabeth Palley talks on the process
of writing her chapter. It was hard to write, she confesses. A lot of reflection was needed. Why don’t we
have a better system. We need a mass
movement?
A central theme of the book is that youth are speaking but not being heard, I follow.
What are they trying to tell us, I ask the panel.
“They are showing us they are
in pain,” Courtney replies. “With active
shooters and drugs, we are not hearing them. Why are our kids in so much pain? We are not creating spaces
for them to hold the pain.”
“Just let them know you see them. Say you’re proud of them,” says one of my
students in attendance. City Tech
students are the best. They always remind me.
“What did you learn from it” I ask
Mery.
“…from this entire process of writing
editing and having discussions about the stories in the book is how important
it is to have theoretical frameworks, perspectives and methods that capture the
complexities of the human experience, and in particular children and youth who
are so often understood in such two dimensional ways “ mature/ immature”. An
important overarching question in this book is “how can we explain the lived experiences of
children, the circumstances of their lives, and how can we respond?” Because the book is interdisciplinary and pushes to look at
these lived experiences ecologically, we move away from rigid theorizing about
the causes of social ills and how we should address these. We move from away
from the false dichotomies of the self vs environment and engage with the
different systems at work. I think this is extremely crucial. seeing kids as
both social actors that interact with and respond to larger social forces that
can determine their circumstances.”
