How to Analyze Literacy Narratives

Describe | Profile | Contextualize-Connect

DESCRIBE: What are the significant and meaningful features of your set of literacy narratives?

• What ideas do you find in these stories?
  • What attitudes does the writer or narrator display towards these ideas?
  • How does the writer or narrator seem to want the reading audience to think of the story’s ideas?
• What kinds of characters do you find in these stories?
  • What do the characters say and do to and for one another?
  • What roles do they take on?
  • How are those roles related to one another?
  • Which characters have agency in the story?
  • Which characters are being acted on?
  • How does the writer or narrator seem to want the reading audience to think of the story’s characters?
  • What personal needs or imperatives seem to drive the characters’ beliefs and actions in these stories?
  • What are the relevant demographic characteristics of the characters?
• What kinds of experiences, events, plot sequences, conflicts, and patterns of change do you find in these stories?
  • How does the writer or narrator seem to want the reading audience to think of these?
• What kinds of settings do you find in these stories?
  • What roles do the settings play in shaping the events, ideas, and characters of the story?
  • How does the writer or narrator seem to want the reading audience to think of the story’s ideas?
• How does the writer use language to  lead readers to the ideas, feelings, and attitudes he or she wants them to experience or understand?
  • How is figurative language used?
  • How is expressive, emotional or loaded language used?
• How does the writer try to make his or her story relevant to readers?

PROFILE: Who are the writers of these stories and what motivations and beliefs drive them?

• What are the demographic characteristics of the writers in your set of literacy narratives?
• What personal needs and imperatives seem to motivate them?
• What cultural or societal needs and imperatives seem to shape their ideas, beliefs, and stories?
  • Cultural/Societal needs are those needs and behaviors needed for the propagation and maintenance of the culture or society.
    • One societal imperative is the need to produce workers to replace the previous generations’ workers.
    • Another is the need to provide for the well-being of children emerging into adulthood.
    • One cultural imperative is the need over time to (re)produce the belief that the United States is a coherent national community.
• What “master narratives” or “cultural narratives” seem to shape their ideas, beliefs, and stories?
  • A master narrative is a broad and overarching story that people tell themselves about their experiences and their place in a society.  Master narratives tend to shape and define people’s sense of their lives and create our sense of normal and legitimate.  For examples of the master narratives that have historically shaped American society and Americans’ sense of themselves, read this.

CONTEXTUALIZE/CONNECT: What else do we have to know to make sense of these stories?

• In what contexts do these stories exist and operate?
• What work do they do? For whom? How?
• What value do they have?
• What can they teach us about literacy in the world, beyond the particular experiences of any individual?
• What other researchers said about literacy narratives?
  • Do your findings confirm, complement, or complicate their findings?
  • What concepts or explanations do other researchers use to talk about literacy narratives?