Crafting Stories, Constructing Selves: Supporting Girls' Development Through Structured Short Story Writing

Abstract

This study follows 4 eighth grade girls through a 10-week short story unit designed to help develop metacognitive awareness and knowledge about the short story genre. Through interviews, observation, and textual analysis, this article investigates the girls' movement away from a subject orientation (Kegan, 1994), where they had trouble identifying their own goals and beliefs when confronted with multiple competing expectations. Through construction of stories about experiences similar to their own, while simultaneously following their writing and thinking processes, these girls appeared to begin to recognize the need for developing their own beliefs and goals, and figuring out ways to infuse these beliefs and goals into their meaning-making processes when faced with situations where there were multiple competing expectations.