Narrative Social Work Practice

This book highlights the co-creation of the narrative interview and explains how the narrative method can be used to promote competence and wellness, resist oppression, and ultimately liberate clients from their problems. The person-in-environment concept brings together a wide range of personal and societal micro to macro influences that allow practitioners to engage in an effective helping process with diverse individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities.

The textbook has been written at a time of pronounced sociocultural and historical flux, uncertainty, and civil strife that threaten to disrupt the social fabric of the United States. Consequently, the book augments the resilience-enhancing stress model (RESM) approach to the narrative methodology. Each chapter of the text describes a client or constituency undergoing a life transition and the associated risks (stressors) and protective factors surrounding them. Among the topics covered are:

• Adopting RESM Anti-Oppressive Social Work Strategies: A Micro to Macro Approach
• Co-creating a Narrative: Forming Personal Identity
• Macrolevel Narrative Skills and Techniques
• Proactive Resilience Social Work Practice
• Time, Place, and Resilience

The ultimate purpose of the book is for social workers to develop the ability to enhance clients' and constituencies' optimal resilient social functioning in a just and equitable world that embraces diversity, equity, and inclusion. Although narrative social work practice is not yet widely applied, the text elucidates how storytelling can break new ground in achieving asset-based, resilience-enhancing social work practice as well as redress social, economic, and political injustice.

Narrative Social Work Practice: A Resilience-Enhancing Anti-Oppressive Approach is the third in a series of texts that defines risk and resilience theory and its offshoot—the RESM. The book is intended primarily for generalists and advanced students as well as practitioners in the social work field.

Roberta Greene is a professor and chair emerita at the University of Texas at Austin. She has been an active practitioner, researcher, policy advocate, and author. Among her publications are Resilience Enhancement in Social Work: Anti-Oppressive Social Work Skills and Techniques (2023, Springer), Resilience-Enhancing Social Work Practice (2022, Springer), Geriatric Practice With Older Adults: A Resilience-Enhancing Guide (2021, NASW Press), and Human Behavior Theory and Social Work Practice With Marginalized Oppressed Populations (2019, Routledge). 

Nancy Greene is an assistant professor of social work at Norfolk State University in Virginia. She teaches social work practice, human behavior, and diversity classes. Her doctorate is from the University of Southern California. She is a licensed clinical social worker who has practiced in home health care and hospice. She has taught for Tulane University, Grand Canyon University, and Johnson C. Smith University in North Carolina. Her publications include Social Work Practice with Older Adults: A Resilience-Enhancing Guide (2021, NASW Press); “The RESM: An African American client with Dementia and his caregivers” in Human Behavior Theory and Social Work Practice with Marginalized Oppressed Populations (2019, Routledge), and Closing the Health Care Gap (2018, Southern California University).

Harriet Cohen received her educational degrees from the University of Georgia at Athens. She has a rich multiservice career in social work practice, education, and administration. Her expertise cuts across aging, LGBTQ issues, and resilience among Holocaust survivors. An example of her exemplary teamwork is reflected in her participation with principal investigator Roberta Greene as co-principal investigator and Dallas site coordinator on the grant entitled Resiliency, Forgiveness, and Survivorship of Older Holocaust Survivors that received $486,000 in funding from the John Templeton Foundation. Dr. Harriet Cohen has been a life-long advocate for diversity issues. Her scholarship has included the grant entitled Perceived Disclosure Vulnerability of Lesbian and Gay Older Adults Living in Long Term Care Facilities funded by the Hogstel Gerontological Nursing Research Award. Among her articles are Walker, C. A., Cohen, H. L. & Jenkins, A. (2016). An older transgender woman’s quest for identity. Journal of Psychosocial Nursing, 54(2), 31-39; and Jenkins, D., Walker, C., Cohen, H. L., & Curry, L. (2010). A lesbian elder managing identity in a long-term care facility: A case study. Journal of Gerontological Social Work, 53(5), 402-420. 

Taunya Cole is a registered nurse, an author, and a mother. Health literacy and illness prevention have been an interest since Ms. Cole started her nursing career in 2003. Her focus then expanded to holistic health in 2018, which led her to found her business, Rewrite Health, which became an LLC in 2021. Rewrite Health is the vehicle for Ms. Cole to nurture individuals and families in the healing process by assisting them in writing their stories. Ms. Cole has authored the following books: The Brady Boe series, a 5-book series that was completed in 2018. She has also published a workbook titled, Building Confidence & Self-Esteem, and a Children’s book titled, There’s A Bear in My Closet, in 2019. These stories focus on issues of children’s diversity, equity, and inclusion.