Building Resilience and Identity through Narrative Competence

About

50-minute Workshop

Presenters: Deborah S. Greenhut, PhD, President, Princeton Research Forum (Princeton affiliate of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars)

This 50-minute interactive session explores how narrative competence—the ability to recognize, interpret, and reshape the stories that influence identity—can support first-year students’ confidence, agency, belonging, and authentic communication. Using narrative-based pedagogy and the Authoring Moments Framework™, participants will experience a brief simulation demonstrating how uncertainty in writing may reflect deeper tensions involving identity, authority, belonging, and expectation.

Through Think-Pair-Share, narrative mapping, reframing, and guided reflection, faculty will examine how self-limiting academic stories can shape student engagement and participation. Participants will then apply the Notice–Name–Reframe–Retell process to common first-year challenges and identify one practical way to incorporate an “Authoring Moment” into teaching, advising, mentoring, or student support. Attendees will leave with a shared vocabulary and immediately usable strategies for strengthening student agency, resilience, and belonging.