Narratives of Resilience
Format
Individual Presentation
First Presenter's Institution
Mercer University - Atlanta
Second Presenter's Institution
Jonathan Brown
Third Presenter's Institution
NA
Fourth Presenter's Institution
NA
Fifth Presenter's Institution
NA
Location
Ballroom E
Strand #1
Social & Emotional Skills
Strand #2
Mental & Physical Health
Relevance
The program focuses social and emotional skills through promoting activities that involve verbal and visual expressions of strengths and mental health through helping a young person focus on a positive self-image.
Brief Program Description
The program combines aspects of narrative therapy and digital technology to increase self-esteem and confidence of adolescents and young adults. Techniques described promote verbal and artistic expression as a way to focus self-concept on successes and accomplishments instead of self-defeating inner dialogues.
Summary
Why do engaging narratives and stories so often create a vivid emotional reaction? This presentation will share digital narratives produced through the community engagement of students and faculty from Mercer University and the Center for the Study of Narrative. Specifically, participants will learn techniques to enhance the impact of narrative interviews, and the digital stories that can be created. Further, this interactional presentation will consider how we sometimes interpret events from a storytelling perspective while examining the interplay between the interpersonal and intrapersonal.
Narrative Therapy, a postmodern approach to counseling, maintains a focus on subjective truth and whereby the counselor facilitates the "re-authoring" of stories by the client. Narrative techniques are particularly useful when working with individuals who might have been knowingly or not, disempowered by a mainstream society that can reinforce values and images that can discourage, if not oppress. By utilizing personal narratives, counselors provide a framework and environment that counteracts a client’s subjective disempowering story to uncover one that is about positive traits such as perseverance.
Evidence
Narrative theory is a multidisciplinary concept seeking to understand how stories help people make sense of the world and how people make sense of stories. Narrative therapy/counseling places importance upon narrative as stories of people's lives that can be changed through particular tellings and retellings. Through people's many skills, competencies, beliefs, values, commitments and abilities, they can reduce the influence of problems in their lives by re-authoring their own stories. While conducting narrative-based interviews does not yet have empirical evidence of efficacy, it follows under the umbrella of a "common factors" approach that a person receives a significant emotional benefit when someone else takes the time to listen to their story.
Biographical Sketch
Don Redmond, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Counseling and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Narrative at Mercer University – Atlanta and has been a Licensed Professional Counselor since 2004. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and doctorate in Counselor Education from the University of Virginia. Dr. Redmond teaches courses on Narrative Theory and Lifespan Development, leads an annual study abroad to Leiden, Holland, and Paris, France for graduate students and conducts and supervises narrative research.
Jonathan Brown, MS is a doctoral student at Mercer and Fellow at the Center for the Study of Narrative. His interests include using virtual reality as a therapeutic narrative intervention and technology in Counseling. He received his Bachelor's from Brewton Parker College in Psychology and Master's in Rehabilitation Counseling from Mercer University.
Keyword Descriptors
Digital Narratives, Narrative Theory, Positive Psychology
Presentation Year
2018
Start Date
3-7-2018 11:15 AM
End Date
3-7-2018 12:30 PM
Recommended Citation
Redmond, Donald B., "Narratives of Resilience" (2018). National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference. 72.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/nyar_savannah/2018/2018/72
Narratives of Resilience
Ballroom E
The program combines aspects of narrative therapy and digital technology to increase self-esteem and confidence of adolescents and young adults. Techniques described promote verbal and artistic expression as a way to focus self-concept on successes and accomplishments instead of self-defeating inner dialogues.
