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Article published In: Journal of Narrative and Life History
Vol. 6:2 (1996) ► pp.107–121

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Stories As Academic Counseling Resources

 | Southern Illinois University
Published online: 4 August 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jnlh.6.2.01sto
Abstract This article explores narrative activities in academic counseling encounters. It shows that academic counselors actively initiate, solicit, narrate, and collaborate on stories so as to display knowledge and expertise, assess and articulate students' counseling problems, and problematize otherwise nonproblematic situations. It suggests that narrative discourse is a resource for shaping knowledge, role identities, and problemsolving activities specific to the counseling setting. This article considers conversational stories as deeply situated within the interactional and institutional processes. By highlighting the narrative nature of both the counselor's and the student's talk and by documenting the counselor's narrative counseling strategies, it also extends existing research on conversational stories in interview settings, which focused on responses to interview questions. Illustrative data are drawn from video- and audiotaped, one-to-one academic counseling encounters that took place in an American university. (Linguistics)
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