Urban Rev (2009) 41:287311

DOI 10.1007/s11256-008-0109-7

Thank You for Making Me Write This. Narrative

Skills and the Management of Conflict in Urban Schools
Alexis R. Harris Marsha D. Walton

Published online: 28 October 2008

Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008

Abstract We studied 364 narratives about personal experiences with conflict

written by urban 4th, 5th, and 6th graders. Narratives were examined in terms of
childrens narrative and perspective-taking skills and the responses to conflict they
described. Several features of narrative were reliably coded, including level of
violence described in the story, childrens descriptions of internal states, moral
evaluations, and responses to conflict. Children described the use of communication
as a response to conflict more than any other response. Qualitative analyses revealed
a relationship between childrens response to conflict and their narrative skills,
moral evaluations, and descriptions of emotion, intentions, and mental states.
Children who reported the use of communication in response to conflict wrote
stories containing very low levels of violence and also displayed attentiveness to
others internal states and strong narrative form. In contrast, children whose narratives reported the use of retaliation in response to conflict were unlikely to report
about internal states or to display strong narrative form. Recommendations are
given for dealing with conflict in the classroom, for focusing on narrative skill
development, and for creating a narrative culture within schools.
Keywords

Conflict resolution
Middle childhood
Narrative

Introduction
Among the many problems facing our urban schools is the perception that our
classrooms are disorderly places, where teachers cannot give necessary attention to
A. R. Harris
University College, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA
M. D. Walton (&)
Department of Psychology, Rhodes College, 2000 North Parkway, Memphis, TN 38112, USA
e-mail: Walton@rhodes.edu

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academic pursuits because they must expend so much energy on disciplinary

problems (Arum 2004; Donetta and Ennis 1997). In 1997, in Memphis, Tennessee, a
coalition of twelve community organizations, convened by the MidSouth Peace and
Justice Center, began meeting to discuss ways to support the city schools in
reducing violence and disruptive conduct. Participating organizations included the
National Civil Rights Museum, three local colleges and universities, and several
community service and religious organizations. After a year of fact-finding efforts
that included a review of scholarly research as well as conversations with parents,
teachers, and administrators in the schools, members of the coalition came to
believe that efforts to suppress conflict among school children would be misguided.
Instead, we should seek to give voice to childrens experiences with interpersonal
conflict, and to help children develop the skills that support nonviolent responses to
provocation.
Substantial research has been devoted to understanding both difficulties of
managing conflict and the positive role of peer conflict in social cognitive and moral
development (Shantz and Hartup 1992). Educators and researchers have sought to
understand the development of conflict resolution skills, and dozens of interventions
have been implemented for reducing school violence and disruptive peer conflict
(Quinn et al. 2007; McLaughlin et al. 2006; Astor et al. 2005; Johnson and Johnson
2001) In this paper, we argue that a critical discursive skill involved in negotiating
non-violent resolutions to conflict is the ability to create narrative accounts of
conflict-threatening situations. Our work is grounded in Bruners (1990) theory in
which narrative is a critical practice for bringing children into culture, and for
repairing conflict-threatening breaches in the social fabric. We have also been
strongly influenced by the writings of Fine and Weis (2003) and Way (1998) whose
work demonstrates powerfully how much we have to learn by really listening to
students and by respecting the validity of their take on the society they are joining.
In this study, we begin to fill two gaps in the research literature. We give
attention to the overlooked area of childrens narrative accounts of their own
conflicts, focusing on responses to conflict reported by children during the
overlooked period of middle childhood. We describe what was learned from our
efforts to listen to Memphis childrens own accounts of conflict, and we conclude
with recommendations for classroom practice and for conflict resolution skill
development programs.
Three overlapping bodies of research inform our understanding of childrens
developing ability to respond to interpersonal conflict in appropriate ways. We first
review literature related to childrens understanding of conflict, then research about
childrens responses to conflict, and finally, research and theory on narrative and its
role in conflict resolution. This consideration of the research literature leads us to a
set of four specific research questions that guided our study of childrens stories of
conflict.
Childrens Understanding of Conflict
Studies show that school-aged children have considerable social-cognitive knowledge, recognizing others feelings or emotions, as well as intentions, goals, and

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strategies (Harris 2006; Saarni et al. 2006), and that their experience with
interpersonal conflict may play a significant role in this development (Shantz 1987;
Dunn and Herrera 1997; Dunn and Slomkowski 1992). Moreover, Dunn and
Slomkowski (1992) argued that childrens experiences of conflict with family and
friends may be especially influential in development because of the emotional and
cognitive components of these conflicts. Both their review of previous research and
their own naturalistic observations of childrens conflict led these authors to
conclude that one of the ways that childrens social cognitive knowledge emerged
was through their recognition and understanding of emotion in conflicts between
friends and family members. Even young children used teasing behavior that
showed that they knew what would hurt others feelings, and they also appealed to
their own and others emotions when justifying conflict behaviors. Dunn and
Slomkowski (1992) argued that in middle childhood, when social cognitions are
maturing and children have an increasing understanding of complex social
emotions, their understanding of behavioral antecedents to emotional responses
would become more evident.
It is very important for children to be able to pick up on different emotional cues
displayed by other children in order to understand conflict situations and to deal
with them appropriately (Lemerise and Arsenio 2000; Arsenio et al. 1993; Crick and
Dodge 1996). Crick and Dodge (1996) found that aggressive 5th and 6th graders
attributed hostile intentions to ambiguous peer behavior more than non-aggressive
children did. This bias among aggressive children in interpreting social information,
such as cues to emotions and intentions, demonstrates a link between childrens
conflict behavior and their interpretations of emotional and volitional information.
Social cognitive skills have direct implications for childrens responses to
conflict (Dunn 2004; Dunn et al. 1992; Dunn and Slomkowski 1992; Shantz 1987).
Dunn and Slomkowski (1992) found that childrens responses to conflict with
family members depended on the emotions being expressed during the conflict,
showing that childrens conflict resolution strategies are influenced by the emotional
content of conflicts. It also seemed that childrens ideas about conflict resolution
developed with and depended on social understanding. In a comprehensive review
of research on childrens conflicts, Shantz (1987) found that social-cognitive skills
were related to various measures of success in peer conflicts.
Childrens Responses to Conflict
Conflict resolution skills, like social-cognitive skills, have been shown to follow a
developmental pattern (Laursen et al. 2001; Shantz 1987). In a comprehensive metaanalysis, Laursen et al. (2001) identified three types of conflict resolution strategies:
coercion, negotiation, and disengagement. Examining research involving real and
hypothetical dyadic peer conflict, these researchers found studies of preschool,
middle childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. Notably, not enough studies
fitting their criteria had looked at middle childhood to form a distinct category.
Preschool and middle childhood were combined to create a childhood category
spanning age 210 years. This meta-analysis found that in childhood, coercion
tactics were used the most often, followed by negotiation, and disengagement was

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used least. In adolescence, negotiation was used the most, and there was no
difference in the frequency of disengagement and coercion. Finally, in young
adulthood, negotiation was used the most frequently, followed by disengagement,
and coercion was used least. This suggests that conflict resolution strategies develop
in a direction away from aggravating or aggressive strategies toward the more
constructive strategies of mitigation and communication.
Laursen et al. (2001) noted that the time period of middle childhood is a gap in
the research on responses to conflict. There has been some recent research on
conflict in middle childhood (Xie et al. 2003; Murphy and Eisenburg 2002; Newman
et al. 2001; Delvaux and Daniels 2000; Rose and Asher 1999). Much of this
research has examined childrens goals and strategies by presenting hypothetical
conflict situations, and relationships have emerged between the goals that children
express and the strategies they endorse to respond to conflict. Rose and Asher
(1999) related conflict goals and strategies to friendship adjustment. In response to
hypothetical conflict, goals and strategies that children endorsed predicted their
peer-rated friendship adjustment, with revenge goals, for example, undermining
friendship adjustment.
In another study of hypothetical peer conflicts, Newman et al. (2001) investigated
childrens responses to conflicts with aggressive peers at school. The researchers
were primarily interested in childrens reluctance or willingness to seek help from
the teacher in response to conflict, but they identified several strategies that children
in this age group reported as responses to conflict, including verbal and physical
assertiveness, passivity, politeness, and help-seeking. In response to the hypothetical
conflicts presented by the researchers, children were most likely to endorse using
help-seeking followed by assertiveness. The researchers found a positive relationship between help-seeking behavior and revenge goals, suggesting that children
used the teacher as an instrument of revenge.
Childrens responses to conflict may also depend on the participants in the
conflict, e.g., whether the conflict is between friends or siblings. Based on her
extensive research with children and their friends and siblings, Dunn (2004)
observed that children are more likely to use conciliatory or negotiating responses
when dealing with their friends than with their siblings. This suggests that peer
conflict taking place in schools may be of special developmental importance for
children. The body of research examining childrens responses to conflict suggests
that childrens intentions, motivations, and feelings about the conflict and its actors
play a role in the responses that are used and that these responses might be related to
childrens interpersonal well-being and their friendship adjustment.
Childrens Accounts of Conflicts
In the above research on children and conflict, naturalistic observation (Dunn and
Herrera 1997; Dunn and Slomkowski 1992; Arsenio et al. 1993; Laursen et al. 2001;
Shantz 1987) and hypothetical conflict tasks (Laursen et al. 2001; Rose and Asher
1999; Newman et al. 2001) were the primary methods used. Missing in the above
research are the voices of children, recounting their own conflicts in their own
words. Interview techniques have been used in attempts to give voice to childrens

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accounts of their conflict experiences (Murphy and Eisenburg 2002; Xie et al. 2003;
Reichert et al. 2006). These interview-based studies have used probes to elicit
information from children about their experiences related to aggression and conflict,
although they have not emphasized the importance of the formation of narrative
accounts. The authors recognized a need for more studies using self-report
methodology to give attention to the way that children understand their own
experiences.
Narrative data in the form of childrens storied accounts of their own
experiences, allow a glimpse of childrens conflicts as they construe them.
Narrative data adds to the previous research because autobiographical narratives
show how children represent the different aspects of the conflict situation, and they
can begin to reveal how children make sense of their conflicts.
Bruner (1990) discussed three features of narrative that make it critical to conflict
resolution. First, people create narratives when something unexpected happens.
Departures from the ordinary inspire story-telling, and stories have the power to
foreground circumstances and events that are potentially problematic for the smooth
operation of social life. As children listen to the dozens of narrative accounts that fill
their days (Miller and Moore 1989), they come to share a common-sense notion of
what does and does not need to be explained in their social world. As children
become story-tellers and authors, they claim the power to focus the attention of
others on those events they have experienced as non-canonical. This gives them a
voice in a negotiation about what their own behaviors and the behaviors of others
will mean in their social context.
Once narrators identify report-worthy events, good narrative form requires that
they pose explanations (or seek them from their interlocutors). This requirement that
the non-ordinary be explained is Bruners second feature of narrative that makes it
critical to the development of conflict resolution skills. Children must learn what
will count as an explanation in their social world, and this brings them into what
Bruner calls a folk psychology, a shared common sense about how we explain
our own behavior and the behavior of others with considerations of emotions and
beliefs, goals and intentions. Bruner (1990) refers to the dual landscape of
narrative. At one level events unfold, things happen, and the behaviors of actors are
described. At a deeper level, characters have dispositions, motives, and goals
grounded in their thoughts and emotions. These must be communicated (or
deliberately obscured) by the narrator. This is the mechanism by which narrative
form turns actors into characters (Nicolopoulou 2007). Bruner argued that it is in the
sharing of stories that humans succeed in getting into the heads of other actors.
These social-cognitive skills have long been recognized as critical to conflict
resolution, as seen above in the research by Dodge and others.
We rarely experience events as unexpected and neutral, and when we narrate our
experience, we are compelled to take an evaluative stance vis-a`-vis the non-ordinary
circumstances that inspire our stories (Bruner 1990). This third feature of narrative
makes story-telling a critical discourse practice for establishing the self as a moral
actor (Bamberg and Damrad-Frye 1991; Walton and Brewer 2001). When children
create narrative accounts of their own experience, they seek to convince others
about the moral justifiability of their own and others behaviors. Stories have good

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guys and bad guys. Characters make mistakes and learn lessons. Non-violent
conflict resolution is possible when actors are able to tell a story that explains their
behavior in ways that allow others to continue to see them as cooperative
companions with acceptable motives.
Two previous studies have focused explicitly on childrens narratives about
conflict, each of them examining the role of narrative in moral development
(Wainryb et al. 2005; Walton and Brewer 2001). Walton and Brewer (2001) studied
written narratives of children in middle childhood, examining the ways children
assigned responsibility and the ways they described the negotiation of blameworthiness. Wainryb et al. (2005) studied oral narratives from preschool, 1st, 5th, and
10th graders about their experiences of hurting and being hurt by an age-mate. They
made several assessments of narrative structure and cohesiveness and of the tellers
attentiveness to internal states. This work is a strong demonstration of the role of
narrative in the development of moral subjectivity.
Bruners framework raises four questions, which we posed as we examined
conflict narratives of middle childhood. What sorts of events, situations, or
behaviors do children recognize as provoking conflict and requiring explanation?
How do children appropriate their understanding of human emotion and thought,
motives and goals, in their reports about their own conflicts? Do children use
narrative accounts of conflict to position themselves as moral actors and to take
moral, evaluative stances in regard to the non-ordinary events they relate? Finally,
we will ask how our answers to these three questions relate to kinds of conflict
response strategies that the children describe in narrative accounts of interpersonal
conflict.
This study examined childrens personal narratives about conflict experiences
and aimed to give voice to childrens lived experience of conflicts. We identified
conflict response strategies that children in middle childhood described in conflicts
that they experienced, and we considered how these were related to other aspects of
the childs story. We have endeavored to use what we can learn about the way
children construe interpersonal conflict to inform classroom practice in our urban
schools.

Method
In the fall of 1998, as a part of a character education requirement introduced in
Memphis City Schools, a pilot non-violence education program was implemented in
two inner-city elementary schools. In addition to programming that involved
community members in interaction with the students, the program provided teacher
workshops, and organized small-group conversations between teachers and
community peace activists. One of the themes in the workshops and a matter that
was often considered in the small-group discussions concerned the importance of
allowing children to examine their own experiences of conflict, orally and in
writing.
Data examined for this study were collected as a part of this emphasis on
childrens writing about their conflict experiences. Classroom teachers asked their

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students to: Write a story about a conflict that really happened to you. Think about
an argument, a fight, or some kind of a misunderstanding. Write everything you can
remember about what happened from beginning to end. Teachers were asked to
give the students 30 min to complete their stories. They were also asked to tell the
students that their stories would be put directly into an envelope and sent to
researchers without being read by the teachers.
Participating Children
All 4th, 5th, and 6th graders present on collection day from the two participating
schools were invited to write their stories, and 364 narratives were collected.
Approximately 65% of the children lived in poverty, as determined by eligibility for
a federally funded free lunch program. The schools were located in neighborhoods
where fear of crime was a critical concern for adults. A survey commissioned by the
mayor (Kirby 2001) found that 54% of adult residents reported they were afraid to
walk outside. Approximately 65% of the children were African American, 34%
European American, with less than one percent from other ethnic minority families.
Corpus
The 364 narratives collected varied in length from 12 to 373 words, with an average
of 115 words. Researchers transcribed the stories, preserving the childrens
punctuation and spelling.
Classifying Childrens Descriptions of Conflict Response Strategies
The narratives that children produced reported a wide range of situations and
described many different responses to different types of conflict. Children primarily
recounted conflicts they had experienced with peers and siblings, but on a few
occasions they wrote about internal conflicts or conflicts involving adults. Children
wrote about violent and nonviolent interactions and they described experience with
psychological, relational, physical, and instrumental aggression.
Working from a grounded theory approach (Strauss and Corbin 1998), research
team members read through all 364 narratives and identified several common
responses to conflict described by these child authors. Readers identified stories that
seemed to be prototypical, and also stories that stood out as unusual. Multiple
readings of the narratives led to the development of coding categories that were
refined as pairs of undergraduate researchers independently coded subsets of the
stories. Inter-coder reliability was assessed for the identification of six types of
responses to conflict that were most frequently described in the stories. Table 1
presents the six categories, and reports the frequency of occurrence in the corpus
and the reliability with which they were identified. These responses were
communication, reconciliation, retaliation, withdrawal, seeking adult help, and
seeking peer help. Inter-coder reliability was established for all coding categories of
Conflict Response Strategies at the level of a .81 Kappa coefficient or above, except
for Withdrawal, for which a reliability Kappa score of .52 was achieved.

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Table 1 Coding for responses to conflict

Variable name
and frequency

Description

Example

Kappa
score

Communication
(n = 159)

Author reports at least one participant

making a non-aggressive, usually
verbal, attempt to alter or understand
the antagonists behavior

She wanted to fight me but I

refuse. So I explained it to
her.

Retaliation
(n = 108)

The[n] he was still checking me

Author reports at least one participant
so I hit him in the jaw.
reacting to an antagonists provocation
with a comparable or escalated act of
aggression or threatening to do so

.83

Withdrawal
(n = 95)

Author reports at least one participant

attempting to escape or ignore an
antagonists provocation

but I changed my mind because

it was the wrong thing to do
and I walked away.

.52

Reconciliation
(n = 92)

Author reports at least one participant

taking steps to restore an amicable
relationship with an antagonist

I told her I was sorry. So he

gave it back to me

.82

Seeking adult
(n = 63)

Author reports at least one participant

seeking adults for help or threatening
to do so

So I came to tell Ms. Labor

Brandon hit me.

Seeking peer
allies
(n = 17)

Author reports at least one participant

So Keosha said she was going to 1.0
seeking peers for help or threatening to
get her sister.
do so

.81

1.0

Assessing the Level of Violence in Childrens Stories

Pairs of undergraduate researchers independently read each story and made a rating
of the severity of violence described in the story. Reliability for these ratings was
assessed using Pearsons r (r = .97). Table 2 shows that 53% of the stories
described non-violent conflict or conflict with mild incursions of personal space or
minimal violence. There were, however, a notable minority of 34 stories (9% of the
sample) in which children described life-threatening or criminal violence.
Assessing Social Perspective-Taking Skills
Pairs of undergraduate researchers independently coded each story, making counts
of childrens use of emotional state words (e.g., afraid, happy, mad), emotional
behavior descriptors (e.g., crying, screaming, frowning), volitional or motivation
words (e.g., wanted, wished, was trying to), and mental state descriptors (e.g.,
thought, believed, wondered). Separate counts were made for own and other internal
states, with reliabilities ranging from r = .80 to .96.
Assessing Moral Evaluative Stance
Coders determined, for each story, the extent to which the author made explicit
efforts to justify or to critique the self or the behavior of other characters in the
story. Justifications of the self included statements such as I didnt want to fight

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Table 2 Severity of violence coding

Violence
rating

Frequency
(N = 364)

Definition

Example

153 (42%)

No physical violence described

She bosses me around all the time

40 (11%)

Physical violence or annoyance not

causing pain or injury

He kept bumping me in line and

poking me

77 (21%)

Violence producing pain, but not injury He pulled my hair and I slapped
him

60 (17%)

Violence resulting in injury requiring

first aid

He got a bloody nose and I got a

black eye

34 (9%)

Criminal or life-threatening violence

Jon got his dads gun and went our

after Chrimaine

because I had on dress and he hit me, so I hit him back. Justification of others
included moral evaluations such as, I admit, she did not do anything wrong.
Critiques of the self included such statements as, I punched him, which was
stupid. And critiques of the other included any negative moral evaluation of
another character, such as, My best friend turned on me. These judgments were
made with reliabilities ranging from r = .83 to .96.
Qualitative Analysis of Childrens Stories
Although the above coding allowed us to make counts and to discover the frequency
of various patterns in our corpus, our best understanding of the meaning of
interpersonal conflict in childrens life came from a qualitative analysis of each
story. This analysis was guided by the following questions:

Does the author describe acts of aggression? If so, is there physical violence
reported? Does the author attempt to explain the aggression? If so, what seems
to count as an explanation?
Does the author demonstrate social-perspective taking skills by describing the
mental or emotional states of the self and/or of other participants in the conflict?
Are attributions made about goals, intentions, or motives? Are emotional,
mental, or motivational states used to explain aggression or violence?
Does the author take a moral stance vis-a`-vis the events described in the story?
Is responsibility assigned for outcomes of behaviors?
How are the above features of the stories related to the kinds of responses to
conflict the author describes?

As we asked these questions of each story we sought to understand how the

childrens narrative skills and social-cognitive sophistication related to the ways
they talked about conflict resolution.1
1

In this paper, we are not addressing questions about gender. Gender effects were, in fact, quite
complicated, depending not so much on sex of the author as on the interaction between sex of the
perpetrator and sex of the victim. These effects are described in Walton et al. (in preparation). The
findings we report here are those that apply to both girls and boys.

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Results
Below, we will illustrate the types of responses to conflict that children described,
showing how social perspective-taking and moral evaluative skills emerged as
children constructed narratives of their experience with violence-threatening
interpersonal conflict.
Communication and Reconciliation
Communication and Reconciliation are the two conflict responses that are most
mature and most supportive of non-violent conflict resolution. Children described
communication as a response to conflict more frequently than any other response
(n = 159). Reconciliation responses were described in 92 stories, and 59 stories
included both. Example 12 below is a very typical story by a fourth grader
describing communication and reconciliation as responses to conflict.
Example 1
One day I was walking down the hall when my sister bumped me and I got
mad. Then we started an argument. After that I told her to sit and then I talked
to her. When I started talking, I told her how I felt when she bumped into me. I
told her that I got mad but, I knew that she made a mistake. So we both said
that we were sorry.
This narrator introduces the story by orienting the reader to the conflict-inducing
breach, an act of mild physical aggression. The author reports her own emotional
state, although she does not speculate about her sisters emotions or thoughts. She
does express confidence in her own moral evaluation with the statement I knew
that she made a mistake. In labeling the action a mistake the author poses the
misdeed as an atypical lapse by her sister. This moral assessment opened the door
for mutual apologies.
Throughout the corpus, descriptions of communication or reconciliation as
responses to conflict were related to several other features of the narratives,
including the severity of violence reported, the childs social perspective-taking
skills, and moral evaluative stance. When narratives described conflicts with no
physical violence, they were more likely to include reports of communication as a
response to conflict than when they described violent conflicts. We found that most
(54%) of the stories that included reports about non-violent conflicts described some
use of a communication response strategy. Communication was not uncommon,
however, even in severely violent conflicts (35%), and this is an encouraging
finding.
Narratives that were rich with evidence of social perspective taking skills, such as
talk about the authors own and others emotional and cognitive states, were also
likely to include references to communication or reconciliation strategies. Fortynine percent of children who reported emotional states (as compared to 36% who
did not) described communication strategies, and 34% of those who made reference
2

The child authors own spelling and grammar have been maintained in all examples.

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to others emotions (as compared to 19% who did not) described reconciliation
strategies. Fifty-one percent of children who made any references to cognitive states
(as compared to 30% who did not) described communication as a response to
conflict.
When narrators took a moral evaluative stance, specifically when they included
the work of justifying the authors own behaviors or the behaviors of others or of
critiquing the self, this also co-occurred with descriptions of communication or
reconciliation strategies. Sixty-two percent of children who made explicit moral
justifications of self (as compared to 34% who did not) described communication
strategies. Even more striking, we found that 91% of children who made explicit
moral justifications of others described reconciliation, as compared to 14% who did
not make moral justifications of others.
Example 2, an unusually descriptive and complex narrative, illustrates all of the
patterns typical of stories that describe communication and reconciliation as
response strategies.
Example 2
When I was 7 years old. I walked home with my best friend. My best friend
and I were talking and laughing. And the next day, we were taking a test, I
know all the problems, but my best friend doesnt. After the test, my teacher
told us our grade. I got an A, and my friend got a D. I guess she was mad,
so she murmured to herself something. That day, she didnt talk to me when
we were walking home. Suddenly she hit my head. First I didnt know whats
going on, then I said angrily, You hit me on purpose because I got better
grade than you! My friend began to run, I see tears dropping down.
Suddenly, I feel really mad, really sad, but also sad about what I had just said.
When I got home, I flopped on my bed, and started crying. Then next day she
walked toward me and said, Im Im really sorry about yesterday
really, I didnt mean it, I I just saw a bird that I want you to see, its pretty.
Im sorry. I smiled, and said, Im sorry too, I misunderstood you I mean
its pretty funny about the way you hit me! We held our hands and said
loudly, Best friends forever! I still remembered how sad she was when she
said that she was sorry. I will always remember that.
This child author describes an act that she initially interprets as physical
aggression, and she reports an elaborate response to the aggression grounded in
communication. The central tension of the story concerns the authors effort to
explain this act of unexpected aggression by her best friend, with whom a walk
home is usually filled with talking and laughing. An elaborate hypothesis about
the reasons for her friends behavior reveals sophisticated social-cognitive
reasoning and perspective taking. Her explanation for the behavior posits a
negative emotion (I guess she was mad), resulting from an unfavorable
comparison with the author. This 4th grader is thinking about how her friend is
thinking about herself in comparison to the author. The ability to think about an
other thinking about the self is described by Selman (1980) as a level of reasoning
that typically emerges in middle childhood. Not only is she able to posit
sophisticated social comparison processes in her friend, this author is also able to

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evaluate and re-assess her own attributions, recognizing in the end, I misunderstood you.
In addition to this sophisticated recounting of thoughts and beliefs, this author is
exquisitely attentive to the emotional experience of both characters in her story. She
provides detailed descriptions of emotional behavior (murmuring, angry voices,
tears dropping down, flopping on the bed, smiling, clasping hands, loud
affirmations), and she labels both her own and her friends emotional states (mad,
sad). Impressively, this nine-year-old is able to report about the confusion of
experiencing multiple, conflicting emotions at the same time (I felt really mad,
really sad, but also sad about what I had just said.)
Evidence of moral evaluative work is threaded throughout this story. The story
turns on whether the aggression in question was intentional, as the author first
believed (You hit me on purpose), or accidental (I didnt mean it.) Both
characters in the story express remorse, taking responsibility for the misunderstanding, and seeking reconciliation.
Clearly, this author has the social-cognitive skills and the level of moral
development needed to use communication to negotiate peaceful resolutions to
interpersonal conflict. It is notable that she also has good control of narrative form.
She begins her story by setting the stage, describing the relationship and the setting
for the story. She builds suspense as she describes the test results that threaten to
disrupt the friendship. The story builds to a climax, and the author artfully resolves
the tension she has built. She articulates a moral of her story, a lesson learned, and
ends with, I will always remember that.
Withdrawing from Conflict
Children are often encouraged to just walk away in the face of potential violence.
In our corpus, children reported 95 occasions in which someone attempted to ignore
or walk away from a conflict-threatening situation. Example 3 is a narrative that is
typical of stories describing a withdraw response to conflict.
Example 3
The misunderstanding I had was with my sister. At first we were arguing. Then
she got louder and louder. After that she started to push me. Then she pulled
my hair like she was crazy. Later, she yelled more and more. Something was
wrong with her. I tryed to get her to stop. I walked away. She was very mad.
My sister thought she was bad. My sister was very angry. I do not know why
she was angry. She made me angry. I was not angry at all. I do not like when
she makes me mad. Then she gets me in trouble. I did not start the fight she
did. She is always starting something. I never start a fight with her.
In this story, the child reports the progression of her sisters behavior from
arguing, to her voice getting louder and louder, to her physical aggression of
pushing and hair-pulling. She describes her sisters emotional behavior and she
recognizes that such extreme emotion requires explanation. She suggests that her
sister was impaired (crazy, something was wrong with her), but ultimately she
admits a failure to explain (I do not know why she was angry.) In addition to

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descriptions of the sisters emotional behaviors, this author reports her own
emotional states (She made me angry. I was not angry at all.) She makes an
inference about her sisters thought (My sister thought she was bad.), and a
generalization about her inclination to cause trouble (She is always starting
something.) The author engages in a moral analysis focused on getting in
trouble, in which the one who starts a fight is held responsible. In this story, a
decision to withdraw from the conflict is embedded in a good bit of social-cognitive
and moral analysis.
This fourth grader appears to have a fairly mature grasp of narrative form. There
is clearly a dual landscape, describing a sequence of events contextualized with a
consideration of emotions, an effort to understand motives, and a strong moral
evaluative stance. She includes an adequate introduction of the actors and the
situation, and she builds suspense and tension. She is vague, however about what
finally happened and she does not include any clear resolution to the story.
Throughout the corpus, narratives that displayed social perspective-taking skills
were more likely to describe withdrawal as a response to conflict than were those
that did not display evidence of these skills. Thirty percent of children who reported
emotional states (as compared to 21% of those who did not) described withdrawal as
a response to conflict. Thirty-four percent of children who reported motivations or
intentions of the actors in the conflict (as compared to 22% who did not) described
withdrawal strategies.
Retaliation
Communication and withdrawal are responses to conflict that are likely to minimize
the probability of violence. In contrast, Example 4 typifies the one-third of our
corpus (n = 108) that reported the use of retaliation as a conflict response strategy.
This story in Example 4 shows much less social-cognitive and moral sophistication
than did the previous examples.
Example 4
On the 3rd day of school in the Fourth Grade When we went to the bathroom.
When we were washing our hands I heard someone talking about me. So I told
him stop checking me, Then he was still checking me So I hit him in the jaw. then
he hit me back then I hit him again then blood came out of him then the teacher
caught me then called our parents and My dad had a conference with Mr. Grey.
Then After that day the big brother tried to fight me. So it was another fight with
both of us was bleeding and I got wrote up and sent to the office because the
Safety Council saw the whole thing happen the other boy Got suspended and his
big brother I was about to go to permediation but I didnt go to it.
In this story acts of fairly serious physical aggression (both of us was bleeding)
and insulting behavior (checking) are described without explanation or moral
evaluations. The narrative does not consider possible motives for anyones
behaviors. There are no descriptions of or speculations about the emotions or
thoughts of any actors. It is noteworthy that the mechanisms in place at this school
to respond to and to prevent violence were not effective for the children in this story.

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A teacher got involved only after a fight in the boys bathroom had resulted in a
child bleeding. A conference with parents did not prevent an escalation of the
violence with the addition of an older brother. The fact that the second fight was
observed by the Safety Council assured that punishment (suspension) would be
meted out, but the peer mediation program didnt get an opportunity to operate, and
there is no evidence of reconciliation, and no evidence that the author has learned
anything about how to avoid violence.
This author has clearly mastered some aspects of narrative form. The story starts
by establishing a setting. The sequence of events is clear; the author makes some
explicit causal connections using the conjunctions so and because, and the
reader can easily make inferences about other causal links. Unlike the narratives in
Examples 1 through 3, however, this story does not have the dual landscape that
Bruner (1990) described as a critical feature of narrative form. There are no motives
or intentions or goals. Stories in which the author described only retaliation as a
response to aggression tended to be less sophisticated in this sense.
Retaliation was described mostly by children who reported physical violence in
their stories. Thirty-two percent of children reporting severe violence and 48% of
children reporting mild or moderate violence described retaliation. Only 9% of
children who described non-violent conflicts reported retaliation in their narratives.
Unlike those stories in which authors described communication or reconciliation as
a response to conflict, stories of retaliation tended NOT to include sophisticated
perspective taking or moral analysis.
This lack of sophisticated perspective taking and narrative form was also true for
the seventeen stories that reported seeking peer help as a response to conflict.
Calling in ones peers or siblings in a conflict situation was almost always
accompanied by retaliation or threats of retaliation. It was a strategy that tended to
escalate violence.
Seeking Adult Help (or not)
In an interesting subset of 63 stories, children sought the assistance of adults in
conflict situations (or threatened to do so). When adults were called in, they often
meted out punishment to one or both participants in the conflict, or they arranged for
the children to be separated. There were, however, only 5 occasions in which
seeking the help of an adult actually led to a resolution of hostilities. Example 5 is
one of the five stories in which adult consultation proved helpful.
Example 5
When I first started this, in 2nd grade, I was placed in Mrs. Marvins room. A
girl who was not from around here speaded awful lies about me. She went
around calling me names and she even told her two oldest sisters that I wanted
to fight. She and her sisters started trouble with me everyday. Instead of
fighting, I went to Mr. Jerrell and told him about my problem. He told me to
point out the girls. He called their mother and I called mine. We all meet at
Browning Elem for a conference. We worked out the problem with our heads
not our fist. Every since that happened we have been the best of friends.

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Although the child does not tell us how Mr. Jerrell conducted the conference, we
can see that he took the problem seriously. He was able to make use of the resources
available in the girls families, and to help the children involved establish ongoing,
working relationships. Unfortunately, the story in Example 6 was much more
typical of the adult-help stories.
Example 6
Last year at my old school riverbrook I got into a fight with this arbino kid
who was always messing with other people. sence he had eye had some
problem he was always around the teacher. So he thouht he could get away
from kid who were going to get him. Every time someone told the teacher
about Nickelous she would say well I havent seen him do anything to you.
That was because he did it every she turned her head. So we told the principle.
She did nothing. So we began to take things in our own hands. One week the
teacher asked me and him to help her with the science hall of fame project our
class was doing. When the teach left he stated talking about family and stuff I
ignored it. But when he hit me it was all over. I warned him to run before I get
up he run right for the the principle office But I cought him and Beat him
down.
This child reports multiple attempts by different students to elicit help from the
teacher with antisocial behavior by a special-needs child. When the teacher
dismissed the childrens concerns, they went to the principal, who also did
nothing, as far as this young author could see. The writer of this story seems to
have recognized that more than ordinary peer-group sanctions were called for to
solve the problem with Nickelous. We have to respect his wisdom in seeking
assistance from first a teacher and then a principal to handle a problem that called
for special sensitivity. When both of the grown-ups declined to address the problem,
this sixth-grader and his friends began to take the problem in our own hands. The
result was violence against a child who was clearly facing serious challenges to his
social adjustment.
Seeking adult help was also sometimes presented in childrens stories as an
option they explicitly ruled out. In Example 7, a 6th grader describes a series of
responses to conflict, including retaliation, withdrawal, and opting not to seek adult
help.
Example 7
One day last year at lunch Justin was checking me as usual. I got tired at it
after about fifteen minutes so I checked him back. The reason I didnt tell was
because the lunch lady Ms. Black never listened to me. Justin got very offeded
by my checking him and gave me a nasty look. later that day in the looker
room he shoved me in a locker. I decided not to fight back so Justin would get
suspended and not me. Justin got caught and was in trouble. As far me, I didnt
recieve a scratch even though he still says he beat me up.
Particularly interesting in this story is the childs offer of an explanation for why
he declined to seek adult help (Ms. Black didnt listen to him). Although he shows
this resistance to actively seeking help, he relies on adult intervention in a way that

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reveals a withdrawal response strategically serving revenge motives (I decided

not to fight back so Justin would get suspended and not me). Often when children
described seeking adult help in their conflicts, they also reported the punishment
that their aggressor received, such as a suspension. Adults were presented more
often as punishers of wrongdoers than as consultants in a problem solving process.

Discussion
Conflict is a meaningful, but also potentially dangerous part of growing up in our
central cities. The accounts we have been able to study by elementary school
children have given us a childs-eye view of conflicts that happen inside and outside
of the classroom: in the halls, in the bathrooms, waiting for the bus, before and after
school. Children gave us heartbreaking stories of criminal and life-threatening
violence and also heartwarming stories of loving families and developing
friendships. We feel privileged to have been let in on their moral dilemmas and
on some of the day-to-day challenges of middle childhood. Our examination of this
rich corpus has led us to make four generalizations about the role of interpersonal
conflict in the lives of urban children and three recommendations for classroom
practice.
Generalizations About the Role of Interpersonal Conflict in the Lives of Urban
Children
Concerning Violence in the Lives of Urban Children
Nine percent of the conflicts children chose to write about included acts of criminal
or life-threatening violence. It is appalling, of course, to have such violence be a part
of any childhood. However, it is important to note that the vast majority of the
stories in our corpus described ordinary peer and sibling conflictsthe kinds of
conflicts that have long been recognized as critical to moral and social-cognitive
development (Piaget 1932; Shantz 1987; Shantz and Hartup 1992). Although these
children lived in the middle of a city that was then third in the nation in violent
crime (according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report), in neighborhoods where a
majority of adults were afraid to walk outside (Kirby 2001), their lives did not
appear to be defined or dominated by violence. For the most part, these children
found good resources in their families and schools to help them understand and
learn from interpersonal conflict.
It is clear from our corpus that the ordinary conflicts of childhood (described
by one of our authors as Me and Daareca always got into arguments. We argued
about pencils, paper, crayos, books, chairs, and space) provoke social-cognitive
and moral development. The stories children told about adult violence or about gang
violence usually included no moral evaluation or attempts to explain others
behaviors. If children in middle childhood are dealing with serious violence, they
need adult help to create narratives that make sense of those experiences. For childsized conflicts, they should be encouraged to create their own accounts.

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Concerning Childrens Responses to Conflict

Childrens stories about their own conflicts described several different strategies for
responding to interpersonal provocations. The most commonly reported response
was to attempt to alter the antagonists behavior or to resolve the misunderstanding
by talking. In the meta-analysis reported by Laursen et al. (2001), negotiation did
not come to be the dominant response to conflict until adolescence. However, these
authors were not able to examine middle childhood as a separate category, because
there were too few studies. We believe that the communication responses that
dominated the conflict narratives in our corpus are the precursors to the more mature
negotiations that Laursen et al. (2001) found in adolescence. The stories we have
studied do not always show communication leading to successful conflict resolution,
but we are convinced that by middle childhood there is a strong inclination to see
talking about the problem as a first response. Children often reported trying other
strategies (withdrawing, retaliating, or seeking help) only after their efforts to
persuade or explain were unsuccessful.
For the children in our sample, there seemed to be conflicting ideas about what
the right way to deal with conflict should be. Certainly not every conflict situation
warrants the same response, and we are not arguing that there is a single method for
resolving conflict that is inherently better than others. Depending on the situation
and the child, the most appropriate response to the conflict may be to talk things out,
to withdraw from the situation, or to seek help. We believe that the maturity
required to know which response will be effective in which situation is achieved as
children hear and tell stories about conflict. The narrative recounting of conflict
experience we studied often entailed an assessment of the efficacy of the
antagonists responses. Some narratives in our corpus explicitly stated a belief
that retaliation or fighting was the best or only way to solve a problem. (One-fourth
grade girl concluded her story with, we solved our problom by fighting.) In a few
stories, this advice was attributed to adults. (Another sixth grade girl justified her
violence with, because my mother always told me if someone hits me hit them
back.) When children tell stories about their conflicts, they are participating in a
moral discourse with other members of their community. They negotiate with their
listeners and in doing so, they adopt or resist and potentially alter dominant values
of their culture.
Concerning the Role of Adults
There were relatively few stories describing the seeking of adult help, and they gave
us a disquieting glimpse of how children assess the effectiveness of adult assistance.
Several children reported being ignored when they sought adult help. (One-sixth
grader attempted to tell the principal about being sexually harassed by a classmate
in the haunted house, but the principal was too busy.) In the large majority of
stories that involved adult intervention, the adult role was to mete out punishment or
to separate the antagonists. There were only five stories like the one in Example 5,
in which an adult served as a consultant to help children solve interpersonal
problems.

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In initial workshops and conversations with the teachers from the two
participating schools, ambivalence was expressed about encouraging children to
bring conflict-threatening problems to the teacher, since tattling was seen as a
problematic behavior. These conversations took place, in 1998, months after
elementary children in an Arkansas town across the river from Memphis brought
guns to school and fired on classmates, and several months before scenes of a
massacre at Columbine High School riveted the attention of the nation. In the ten
years since, concerns about children bringing weapons to school and about serious
effects of bullying have prompted many schools to implement programs that urge
children to report problems to adults.
For the most part, teachers we talked to understood their role in conflict
resolution in ways that were fairly consistent with the ways the children saw them.
Their job was to keep peer conflict from interrupting the learning environment they
were maintaining in their classrooms. Separating disputants was a much more likely
teacher response than bringing them together to negotiate resolutions. When conflict
came to their attention, their goal was to make a fair determination of
blameworthiness, and to punish accordingly. Over the year of conversations
between these teachers and community peace activists, many teachers began to
experiment with new ways of looking at their role and at the role of peer conflict in
their classrooms. When conflict threatens to disrupt ongoing instruction, it may be
prudent to postpone it, rather than to suppress it. Some teachers began to look for
the conflict episodes that opened opportunities for teaching about peacemaking.
Concerning Narrative Skills and Conflict Response Strategies
Children who demonstrated strong narrative skills wrote stories that featured
Bruners dual landscape. At one level, they reported a sequence of causally linked
events, and at a second level they explained and evaluated those events by describing
actors emotions, thoughts, goals, and motives. The children whose stories included
these features of social perspective taking and moral stance were more likely to
describe communication and reconciliation responses to provocation than were the
children whose stories reported only the observable events of the story. Stories that
were completely or almost completely lacking any features of a dual landscape were
especially likely to feature retaliation and escalation of violence.
There are two ways to interpret this finding. It may be that children who chose to
write about easier or more solvable conflicts were able to give their attention to
making a more sophisticated narrative. The same children may have neglected to
report about internal states of actors and may have silenced their own moral voice if
they had chosen to describe a conflict that involved retaliation and more severe
violence. Alternatively (or additionally), it may be that the children with betterdeveloped narrative skills are also better interpersonal problem solvers. Their
conflicts may actually be more often resolved by communication. Although we
dont have solid evidence that children who chose to write about conflicts that were
successfully resolved were children who actually experienced more of these
conflicts, there is good reason to believe that the skills demonstrated in these more
sophisticated narratives are the same skills that make children successful

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interpersonal problem solvers (Daiute and Buteau 2002). Previous studies, such as
Crick and Dodge (1996) and Dunn and Slomkowskis (1992) have shown that social
perspective-taking skills, such as recognizing others emotions and intentions, are
essential to successful conflict resolution.
Figure 1 illustrates the process by which telling stories, especially stories about
ones own conflicts, facilitates the development of conflict resolution skills.
Narrative discourse requires children to attend to those hiccups in social interaction
that require explanation. Recognizing which behaviors you need to explain to others
is important to avoiding misunderstandings that can become violent. When children
tell stories, they get practice in recognizing and interpreting others motives and
emotions. When they share stories, they also get feedback about how their
interpretations align with those of their interlocutors. Children who recognize that
others motives and emotions are relevant to the recounting of a conflict may be
more attentive to their antagonists point of view in a conflict situation. Finally,
when children tell stories about their conflicts to other children and to adults, they
are establishing their own moral authority. As the author of their experience, they
get to make moral assessments. As the member of a storytelling community, they
have to negotiate to get their take on the rightness of their own behavior to stand.
All of this practice afforded by narrative puts the child in a position to use
communication and negotiation skills to solve interpersonal conflicts.
Recommendations for Urban Educators
Do Not Try to Suppress Conflict in Schools
While bullying and victimization are undoubtedly dangerous for students wellbeing, everyday peer conflict is an important part of development. We believe that it

storytelling or
story writing
experience

practice in recognizing
the non-ordinary events
that require explanation

practice attending to
goals, motives,
intentions, & beliefs of
self and other

practice in attending to
emotional behavior &
emotional experience
of self and other

practice in attending to
moral justifiability of
own and others
behavior

improvement in skills
that facilitate conflict
resolution

Fig. 1 How storytelling facilitates conflict resolution skills

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is necessary for schools to move away from associating conflict exclusively with
risk and violence, toward a more constructive conceptualization. Chen (2001, 2003)
suggested to teachers of young children that although the first reaction to peer
conflict in the classroom may be to squelch it, teachers should try to see conflict as
an opportunity for social and moral development. When teachers view conflict as a
manageable and important part of childhood, rather than as a threat, conflict can
become a part of the learning that goes on within schools. When peer conflict
threatens to disrupt ongoing instruction, teachers need to have an established
classroom practice that allows them to postpone the conflict without suppressing it.
By third grade, most students have learned enough self-control to be able to
cooperate with a teachers instruction to hold that dispute until we finish this
lesson, and then you can take it up in the dispute center. This can most reliably be
successful if teachers have the support of a second adult in the classroom. Peer
Mediation is a good example of a program that has given teachers support in
implementing this kind of practice. Peer Mediation programs have been successful
in helping schools to manage conflict not by attempting to suppress it, but by giving
students the time, space, and assistance to talk through their conflicts with other
peers (Johnson and Johnson 2001; Bell et al. 2000, Lupton-Smith et al. 1996).
Include Narrative Skill Development as a Part of Conflict Resolution and Violence
Prevention Education
Conflict resolution interventions tend to encourage communication, sometimes with
the use of a mediator (Johnson and Johnson 2001; Bell et al. 2000; Lupton-Smith
et al. 1996). These programs, however, do not necessarily stress the development of
childrens ability to communicate effectively. In the stories that children wrote for
this research, they often reported unsuccessful attempts at communication as a
response to conflict. Many of the children who described violence in their stories did
not seem to recognize that the thoughts, feelings, emotions, and motives of the
actors were relevant.
We believe that children with strong narrative skills are well-equipped to solve
interpersonal problems. They are likely to exercise social perspective taking skills
and to make moral evaluations of conflict situations. Good storytellers will be able
to explain their own motives and goals in ways that will be acceptable to their peers.
Narrative is a site where meaning is constructed according to social and cultural
expectations. Personal narrative writing and story telling tasks can be used to
facilitate the development of critical peacemaking skills.
Daiute (2000) showed that working with fictional narratives can also be helpful
for developing childrens understanding and critical evaluation regarding issues of
conflict and social injustice. In the context of a literacy-based violence prevention
program involving urban third and fifth graders from diverse cultural backgrounds,
Daiute and Buteau (2002) assessed the effects of written narrative on physical and
psychological well-being. Children in the intervention program wrote three sets of
narratives: fictional, autobiographical, and story completion. These narrative
activities were designed to facilitate the consideration of social problems and
conflicts. This study gave evidence that both the writing of fictional and

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autobiographical narratives can have therapeutic effects. Children who wrote more
over time about the consequences of conflict on social relations, conflict resolutions,
and conflict resolution strategies, also exhibited fewer problem behaviors over time.
Daiute and Buteau (2002) argued that the writing of narratives might serve to
integrate social, emotional, and cognitive aspects of life, and thereby provide
support for childrens well-being.
We recommend that teachers present to children varied narrative prompts, both
autobiographical and fictional, encouraging them to address issues of conflict,
violence, and injustice. Table 3 includes suggestions for narrative prompts. As
children create narratives, teachers should note the progress they make in each of
the four sub-skills presented in Fig. 1. As they get better at identifying reportworthy events, making inferences about goals, motives, thoughts and emotions, and
as they sharpen their own critical evaluative stance, children will become better at
conflict resolution and violence prevention.
Work Toward Developing a Narrative Culture Within Schools
We believe that schools can create a narrative culture, where children are
encouraged to tell about their experiences, and to listen to each other. Creating
storytelling traditions and opportunities for children is a step toward the prevention
of violence and the creation of a problem solving community. Through storytelling,
children can present their ideas about the nature of conflict, and about appropriate
response to conflict. When children can hear each others stories and feel free to tell
Table 3 Suggested narrative prompts
Suggested prompts for autobiographical narratives
Each prompt should be followed by: Tell about something that really happened. Tell everything that
happened from the beginning to the end
Tell a story about a time when you hurt someones feelings
Tell a story about a time when something unfair happened
Tell a story about a time when you felt angry
Tell a story about an accident that happened to you
Tell a story about a time when you met someone who was different from you
Tell a story about a time when you disagreed with your friend
Tell a story about a conflict that happened to you
Suggested prompts for fictional narratives
Each prompt should be followed by: Tell about something that happens in your imagination. Tell
everything that happens from the beginning to the end
Tell a story where two friends get into a conflict and then make peace
Tell a story where someone gets into an argument with their family
Tell a story where someone feels disappointed about something
Tell a story where someone helps another person
Tell a story where someone tries to make friends at a new school
Tell a story where a teacher helps two students solve a problem
Tell a story where someone is being bullied

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their own in a safe and accepting setting, they will have opportunities to learn from
each other constructive ways to deal with the kinds of conflicts they face in school
and elsewhere.
Schools can support teachers and encourage this type of narrative culture in many
relatively simple ways. We recommend creating a designated space in classrooms
where children can tell their stories and be listened to by classmates and teachers.
To complement existing curriculum, teachers can set aside a portion of time where
students tell or write stories of their own experiences or write fictional narratives
related to the subject matter of study. This is clearly supportive of literacy goals, and
can also be an important aspect of social studies. Many schools have character
education or violence prevention curricula in place that offer a perfect setting for
sharing stories related to conflict and many other themes. These activities would
give students practice in narrative creation and a realm to construct meaning from
their experiences. A key element to this type of activity is that students both tell
stories and listen to each others stories, and that adults model genuine respect for
childrens authority as authors.

Conclusions
Considerable work has demonstrated the importance of creating story-sharing
opportunities for pre-school children (e.g., Engel 1995; Keller et al. 2006;
Nicolopoulou 2007). Compelling arguments have been made by Daiute (2000,
2002), Shultz et al. (2006), Weis and Fine (2000), and by Fine and Weis (2003) for
including narrative practices in elementary, middle, and high school settings. Daiute
(2000) suggested that teachers allow students to experiment in their narratives with
different approaches to situations, even if they are not culturally expected or
accepted. Weis and Fine (2000) and Fine and Weis (2003) have promoted
classrooms that empower students to give voice to their experiences and warned
teachers and other adults against silencing the difficult issues that are important to
students.
There are questions raised by our work that will only be answered with future
research. We are not able to establish a clear causal connection between
developing narrative skill and the ability to resolve conflicts without violence.
This will require an experimental interventions study, comparing the effectiveness
of violence prevention curricula with and without the addition of the explicit
encouragement of narrative we have recommended. Our work has focused on
children in a Southern U.S. city where there have historically been vibrant
storytelling traditions in both African- and European-American communities. Our
recommendation that teachers facilitate the sharing of stories and that they
encourage the development of the four features of narrative illustrated in Fig. 1 is
grounded in Bruners theory of narrative and in our observations of children in a
particular cultural context. There is good reason to believe that both the form and
function of narrative may differ in communities with different story-telling
traditions (Cuneo et al. 2008). Exploration of the implications of these differences
is an important area for future research.

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Our work reported here, and our ongoing work in Memphis (Stagg et al. 2007) is
attempting to demonstrate the importance of a narrative culture in middle childhood.
By facilitating students telling and listening to each others stories, teachers can
work with children to create a community of shared experience and meaningmaking. Example 8 underlines our belief that students will respond to and
appreciate a classroom culture that is open to receiving their stories of conflict.
Example 8
This story is about my brother and me. One day I was playing with my
brothers game boy. Then he can and took it from me. Then ask him to give it
back to me, but he wouldnt. I know why to because I didnt ask nicely. So I
then I ask him like this. Kyle will you give it back to me? Please! I beat you
dont known what he did he gave it to. I said thank you very very much. I wish
I could twll what my family is like. Buy the way my brothers name is Kyle
Dickerson he is one of the green dog #33 in the house.
P.S. Thank you for making me write this.

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