Monisha Pasupathi and Kate C. McLean Where Have You Been, Where Are You Going? Narrative Identity in Adolescence How can we help youth move from childhood to adulthood in the most effective and positive way possible? This is a question that parents, educators, researchers, and policy makers engage with every day. In this book, we explore the potential power of the stories that youth construct as one route for such movement. Our emphasis is on how those stories serve to build a sense of identity for youth and how the kinds of stories youth tell are informed by their broader contexts – from parents and friends to nationalities and history. Identity development, and in part- ular narrative identity development, concerns the ways in which adolescents must integrate their past and present and articulate and anticipate their futures (Erikson, 1968). Viewed in this way, identity development is not only unique to adol- cence (and emergent adulthood), but also intimately linked to childhood and to adulthood. The title for this chapter, borrowed from the Joyce Carol Oates story, highlights the precarious position of adolescence in relation to the construction of identity. In this story, the protagonist, poised between childhood and adulthood, navigates a series of encounters with relatively little awareness of either her childhood past or her potential adult futures. Her choices are risky and her future, at the end, looks dark.

Adolescenceâ€"beginning with the onset of puberty and ending in the mid-20sâ€"is a critical period of development during which key areas of the brain mature and develop. These changes in brain structure, function, and connectivity mark adolescence as a period of opportunity to discover new vistas, to form relationships with peers and adults, and to explore one's developing identity. It is also a period of resilience that can ameliorate childhood setbacks and set the stage for a thriving trajectory over the life course. Because adolescents comprise nearly one-fourth of the entire U.S. population, the nation needs policies and practices that will better leverage these developmental opportunities to harness the promise of adolescenceâ€"rather than focusing myopically on containing its risks. This report examines the neurobiological and socio-behavioral science of adolescent development and outlines how this knowledge can be applied, both to promote adolescent well-being, resilience, and development, and to rectify structural barriers and inequalities in opportunity, enabling all adolescents to flourish.

The uniqueness of Child and Adolescent Life Stories lies in the multiple perspectives drawn from youth, their parents, and their teachers. These perspectives provide a range of lenses through which a student or beginning teacher may view child and adolescent development. The complex processes of development occur within a social context, and therefore a professional teacher, administrator, or school psychologist will need to be able to view developmental stages from youths' perspectives as well as from their various social settings.

In Narrating Practice with Children and Adolescents, social workers, sociologists, researchers, and helping professionals share engaging and evocative stories of practice that aim to center the young client’s story. Drawing on work with a variety of disadvantaged populations in New York City and around the world, they seek to raise awareness of the diversity of the individual experiences of youth. They make use of a variety of narrative approaches to offer new perspectives on a range of critical health care, mental health, and social issues that shape the lives of children and adolescents. The book considers the narratives we tell about the lives and experiences of children and adolescents and proposes counternarratives that challenge dominant ideas about childhood. Contributors examine the environments and structures that shape the lives of children and youth from an ecological lens. From their stories emerge questions about how those working with young clients might respond to a changing landscape: How do we define and construct childhood? How do poverty and inequality impact children’s health and welfare? How is childhood lived at the intersection of race, class, and gender? How can practitioners engage children and adolescents through culturally responsive and democratic processes? Offering new frameworks for reflecting on social work practice, the essays in Narrating Practice with Children and Adolescents also serve as a vehicle for exploration of children’s agency and voice.

Adolescents are forging a new path to self-development, taking advantage of the technology at their fingertips to produce desired results. In Adolescents and Their Social Media Narratives, Walsh specifically explores how social media impacts teenagers' personal development. Indeed, through unique empirical data, Walsh presents an aspect of teen media use that is not often documented in the press—the seemingly deep and meaningful process of evaluating the self visually in an attempt to reconcile their presentation with their internal "self-story." Nevertheless, as Walsh outlines, this is not a process without its challenges. Tracking teenagers’ progress towards self-validation from the offline stages preceding online exhibitions, this enlightening volume will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, scholars, and researchers interested in fields such as Social Media Studies, Sociology of Adolescence, Identity Formation, Developmental Psychology, and Society and Technology.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Identity is defined in many different ways in various disciplines in the social sciences and sub-disciplines within psychology. The developmental psychological approach to identity is characterized by a focus on developing a sense of the self that is temporally continuous and unified across the different life spaces that individuals inhabit. Erikson proposed that the task of adolescence and young adulthood was to define the self by answering the question: Who Am I? There have been many advances in theory and research on identity development since Erikson's writing over fifty years ago, and the time has come to consolidate our knowledge and set an agenda for future research. The Oxford Handbook of Identity Development represents a turning point in the field of identity development research. Various, and disparate, groups of researchers are brought together to debate, extend, and apply Erikson's theory to contemporary problems and empirical issues. The result is a comprehensive and state-of-the-art examination of identity development that pushes the field in provocative new directions. Scholars of identity development, adolescent and adult development, and related fields, as well as graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and practitioners will find this to be an innovative, unique, and exciting look at identity development.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President Kennedy, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger: every generation has unforgettable events, the shared memory of which can create fleeting intimacy among strangers. These public memories, combined with poignant personal moments--the first day of college, a baseball game with one's father, praise from a mentor--are the critical shaping events of individual lives. Although experimental memory studies have long been part of empirical psychology, and psychotherapy has focused on repressed or traumatizing memories, relatively little attention has been paid to the inspiring, touching, amusing, or revealing moments that highlight most lives. What makes something unforgettable? How do we learn to share the significance of memories? David Pillemer's research, brought together in this gracefully written book, extends the current study of narrative and specific memory. Drawing on a variety of evidence and methods--cognitive and developmental psychology, cross-cultural study, psychotherapy case studies, autobiographies and diaries--Pillemer elaborates on five themes: the function of memory; how children learn to construct and share personal memories; memory as a complex interactive system of image, emotion, and narrative; individual and group differences in memory function and performance; and how unique events linger in memory and influence lives. A provocative last chapter, full of striking examples, considers potential variations in memory across gender, culture, and personality. Momentous Events, Vivid Memories is itself a compelling and memorable book.

In this volume, the results of a number of empirical studies of the development of narrative construction within a multilingual context are presented and discussed. It is explored what operating principles underlie the process of narrative production in L1 and L2. Developmental relations between form and function will be studied across a broad range of functional categories, such as temporality, perspective, connectivity, and narrative coherence. Moreover, a variety of language contact situations is considered with broad variation in the typological distances between the languages in order to enable cross-linguistic comparison. The analysis of learner data in various cross-linguistic settings may thus offer new information on the role of the structural properties of unrelated languages on the process of narrative acquisition. In the present volume, an attempt is also made to find out how transfer from one language to the other is facilitated. Finally, the effects of input on narrative construction in children’s first and second language are examined in several studies.

The editors bring together an interdisciplinary and international group of creative researchers and theorists to examine the way the stories we tell create our identities. The contributors to this volume explore how, beginning in adolescence and young adulthood, narrative identities become the stories we live by.