Story, Agency, and Meaning Making: Narrative Models and the Social Inclusion of People With Severe and Profound Intellectual Disabilities

Abstract

This article explores models of narrative and story, as practices that can be used to support and develop identity and relationships. Anglo-Western narratives, linked to certain aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition, tend to be goal directed and to privilege agency and action, which can exclude people whose capacities for self-determination are difficult to ascertain. It is argued that social constructionist models of narrative that emphasize the collaborative and scaffolded nature of the developmental process have more to offer when considering how to tell stories with people whose communication is non-symbolic. Moreover, one can learn from the non-Westernized story practices of indigenous people, which are structured more cyclically and focus as much on the how as the what of storytelling. Such frameworks allow us to explore together how meaning is constructed through story as a dynamic and emergent property. They are congruent with an ethic of social inclusion that focuses on community and interdependency rather than on autonomy.

KEYWORDS:

• narrative
• story
• meaning
• disability
• agency
• profound intellectual disabilities
• ethnopoetics
• culture

Acknowledgments

An early version of this paper was delivered as a keynote address called “A Story To Tell,” May 8, 2009, at the biennial conference Communication: Feel the Power of AGOSCI in Canberra, Australia. I am most grateful to the organizers for their invitation to the conference and for the opportunity to develop these ideas through discussion with colleagues there. Insights into Mi’kmaw culture are courtesy of Gordon Pictou and colleagues at the Glooscap Cultural Centre in Truro, NS. Thanks also are due to the anonymous reviewer who provided helpful comments on an earlier draft, and to Christopher Goodey for his invaluable assistance with the inevitable revisions.