Culture in Story-Telling: The Case of American and Pakistani Story Pals

Abstract

In 2016, a Colorado-based American non-profit organization working on providing free education to children living in the slum areas of Sheikhupura, Pakistan initiated a PenPal program between middle-schoolers at a Carbondale community school, a charter school in a middle to upper-class income neighborhood with middle-schoolers at the Sheikhupura non-profit school for underprivileged children. Volunteering with the organizations, the author initiated a co-construct story program between each student pair at the schools as a way to examine how children engage in meaning-making through shared symbols and narrate through their created characters and scenarios the personal experiences of their cultural environments. This paper is a content analysis of the co-constructed stories to highlight themes of sense of self, cultural capital, cultural influences, and conflict resolution in children’s narratives.