Learning and Teaching Narrative Inquiry: Travelling in the Borderlands (Studies in Narrative)

Learning and Teaching Narrative Inquiry

Studies in Narrative (SiN) The subject of SiN is the study of narrative. Volumes published in the series draw upon a variety of approaches and methodologies in the study of narrative. Particular emphasis is placed on theoretical approaches to narrative and the analysis of narratives in human interaction. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/sin

Editor Michael Bamberg Clark University

Advisory Board Susan E. Bell

Rom Harré

Jerome S. Bruner

David Herman

Jennifer Coates

Janet Holmes

Bowdoin College New York University Roehampton University

Michele L. Crossley

Edge-Hill University College

Carol Gilligan

New York University

Linacre College, Oxford Nort Carolina State University

Allyssa McCabe

University of Massachusetts, Lowell

Eric E. Peterson

University of Maine

Victoria University of Wellington

Catherine Kohler Riessman

Charlotte Linde

Deborah Schiffrin

Dan P. McAdams

Margaret Wetherell

Institute for Research Learning Northwestern University

Boston University

Georgetown University Open University

Volume 14 Learning and Teaching Narrative Inquiry. Travelling in the Borderlands Edited by Sheila Trahar

Learning and Teaching Narrative Inquiry Travelling in the Borderlands Edited by

Sheila Trahar University of Bristol

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdamâ•›/â•›Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Learning and teaching narrative inquiry : travelling in the Borderlands / edited by Sheila Trahar.        p. cm. (Studies in Narrative, issn 1568-2706 ; v. 14) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1.  Education--Research--Methodology. 2.  Narrative inquiry (Research method) 3.  Learning--Research--Methodology. 4.  Multicultural education--Cross-cultural studies. 5.  Education and globalization.  I. Trahar, Sheila. LB1028.L324â•…â•… 2011 370.72--dc22 2011011682 isbn 978 90 272 2654 9 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8678 9 (Eb)

© 2011 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents chapter 1 Introduction: Travelling in the borderlands or a story of not quite fitting in Sheila Trahar chapter 2 Interfaces in teaching narratives Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire & Maria Tamboukou chapter 3 Becoming a narrative inquirer: Learning to attend within the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space D. Jean Clandinin, Janice Huber, Pam Steeves & Yi Li chapter 4 The circle game: Narrative inquiry as a way of life in ACE, a teacher education programme Ariela Gidron, Bobbie Turniansky, Smadar Tuval, Ruth Mansur & Judith Barak chapter 5 Teaching narrative inquiry in the Chinese community: A Hong Kong perspective Yu Wai Ming & Lau Chun Kwok chapter 6 Multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry: Conversations between advisor and advisee JoAnn Phillion & Yuxian Wang chapter 7 Scrapbooks and messy texts: Notes towards sustaining critical and artful narrative inquiry Malcolm Reed & Jane Speedy

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 Clause Linking and Clause Hierarchy Syntax and Pragmatics

chapter 8 Many more than two of us: Denaturalizing the positions of speech and writing in a narrative constructionist research workshop Veronica Larrain chapter 9 ‘Burt’s story reminded me of my grandmother’: Using a reflecting team to facilitate learning about narrative data analysis Sheila Trahar chapter 10 Negotiating intercultural academic careers: A narrative analysis of two senior university lecturers Meeri Hellstén & Katrin Goldstein-Kyaga

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Contributors

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chapter 1

Introduction Travelling in the borderlands or a story of not quite fitting in Sheila Trahar

University of Bristol

Sheila, let me quickly mention this: I know you are inquiring about an article submission. However, I find the idea of collecting different curricula on teaching narrative – possibly with explications of answers to the WHY-THIS-WAY-question, reflections on the learning goals/outcomes, and maybe some reflections on how it worked out – what the students actually took away from the course; including what went well and what did not go so well – a terrific idea for a book volume. Would you be interested to take something like this on? – JUST an idea…. (email from Michael Bamberg to Sheila Trahar, 18 May 2009) How else could I begin a book that is about the learning and teaching of narrative inquiry than with a story? This particular story starts with the beginning of a ‘virtual relationship’ through an earlier email, one in 2008 from the Studies in Narrative Series Editor, Michael Bamberg. It was a request for a copy of a book review that I had written for the Special Issue of the journal Compare that I had edited ‘Narrative Methodological Approaches: Their Contribution to Comparative and International Education’. The following year, when I experimented with using the reflecting team in the teaching of narrative data analysis (Chapter 9) I contacted Michael to ask whether he would be interested in my submitting an article about this experience to the journal that he edits, Narrative Inquiry. I was disappointed by his response that such an article was not ‘quite right’ for the journal, but was not really surprised; my work tends not to ‘fit’ neatly into particular categories, it straddles several. My proposal obviously set him thinking, because he followed up his rejection by asking whether I would be interested to edit a book about ‘teaching’ narrative inquiry. There then followed copious emails and telephone calls between the UK and the US as we refined the idea and discussed who we might ask to contribute; so it was that this book was born.

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In so far as we were aware, there was only one other text that was about ‘teaching narrative’, Up Close and Personal: The Teaching and Learning of Narrative Research edited by Josselson, Lieblich and McAdams (2003). This book, although a very valuable volume, was focused very much on the North American context. Given that there are people engaging in narrative inquiry in many parts of the world, our thoughts were that an edited collection of contributions from some of those different contexts would be valuable and might open up different conversations. A possible, complicating factor – and indeed a politically charged one – was that I needed to accept that a book such as this one, with an international audience in mind, had to be written in English. I wanted contributors who were using narrative inquiry in different contexts and teaching it to people from many other contexts; English, therefore, would not always be the vernacular. I was anxious not to perpetuate the “linguistic hegemony” (Shope 2006, p. 167) of English and I am delighted that Yu Wai Ming and Lau Chun Kwok raise some provocative points about this issue in Chapter 5. A further, possible complicating factor was the title. I chose to use the term narrative inquiry rather than narrative research or narrative for particular reasons. The broad term ‘narrative’ can be used to include narrative therapy. While I am aware that many of those who use narrative in their research are influenced by narrative therapy – I am one of them- the book was not about training people to become narrative therapists. I lean towards a definition of narrative inquiry as embracing “ narrative as both the method and phenomena of study” (Pinnegar & Daynes 2007, p. 5) but I did not want to exclude people who chose to use different terms when they were engaging in similar processes. Provided that all were, broadly, involved in the processes of enabling others to use narrative methods to understand “stories lived and told” (ibid), there was a place for their contribution. Thus, I was adamant that writers reflect their own versions of narrative inquiry and not feel constrained by a particular epistemological reading of it. The sub-title of the book, that uses the metaphor “travelling in the borderlands” to encapsulate “understanding the tensions that exist for those of us who work within the broad plotlines of narrative inquiry” (Clandinin & Roziek 2007, p. 59), is intended to convey that spirit. In spite of the implications in his original email, quoted at the beginning of this Chapter, Michael and I did not want the book to be ‘How to Teach Narrative Inquiry’. Rather we hoped that scholars from around the world who were not only narrative inquirers themselves but were seeking to enable its learning in others, would write about how they went about the latter. Given my own interests in crosscultural research and my persistent interrogation of the continuing dominance of Eurocentrism in research methodology and its teaching, I sought contributors who were prepared to engage in critiques of narrative as well as extolling its virtues.



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

1.â•… Gathering writers My first instincts were to turn to people that I knew and whose work was familiar to me before casting my net into the unknown. I had met Jean Clandinin when she was a visiting scholar at the University of Bristol; JoAnn Phillion had contributed an article to the Special Issue of Compare mentioned earlier; I met Molly Andrews at a seminar in Bristol and was very familiar with her work and that of her colleagues at the Centre for Narrative Research; Meeri Hellsten presented a paper at a conference I attended and subsequently I contributed a chapter to a book that she edited with Anna Reid; Veronica Larrain had been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bristol as a result of reading my previous edited book (2006); Jane Speedy and Malcolm Reed are colleagues. Wanting more contributions, I contacted Ariela Gidron and friends because of a journal article of theirs that I had enjoyed; C.K. Lau and Flora Yu were suggested to me by JoAnn Phillion. I was particularly keen to persuade C.K. and Flora to contribute because I travel to Hong Kong regularly to teach; getting to know narrative inquirers in that part of the world is important for me. Somewhat to my surprise, everyone that I contacted was enthusiastic and wanted to be a part of this project, most people proposing that they collaborate with colleagues to write their contributions. As first drafts were submitted, I glimpsed patterns, themes, differences, gaps, and was able to go back to writers with what I hoped were constructive suggestions for refinements. I urged some people to be bolder in their writing; I struggled to ensure that terms used were as international and inclusive as possible without seeking to homogenise and be ethnocentric – a task that was not always easy. Gathering the contributions together, communicating with writers, maintaining relationships with some, creating them with others, reflects for me the journey that is narrative inquiry. Come with me now on that journey around the globe, a journey that zigzags backwards and forwards between countries and continents, a journey into the borderlands of learning and teaching narrative inquiry. 2.â•… The chapters Having edited a book previously, (Trahar, 2006) I am aware that the order in which the chapters are placed is important. How does one do this? Thematically? Geographically? My decision to open the book with the chapter, by Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire and Maria Tamboukou from the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London (UEL) in the UK was taken because, for me, it reflects totally the “travelling in the borderlands” of the book’s sub-title. In this chapter, the 3 writers focus on teaching ‘Narrative Research’ the only core module on their MA

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in Narrative Research, showing how their distinct orientations are co-ordinated rather than collapsed into a “homogeneous whole”. In the first section, written by Molly Andrews, we meet the type of students attracted to their programme, those who are “sufficiently self-confident to live with the ambiguity and complexity that the subject matter requires”. Using feature film, and interviews that she herself has conducted, Andrews describes humorously how the students recoiled “at the blind insistence of the interviewer” thus demonstrating vividly how impossible it is to interview anyone without having ideas in our minds, ideas that influence not only what we say but what we can hear. Students have to write and explore the differences between the written and spoken stories using a series of questions that focus them and enable the “slippery process of analysis to be less daunting”. Corrine Squire then takes up the theme of working with approaches to narrative that can be conflicting, illustrating how the team draw on the work of Labov, the phenomenological approach of Ricoeur and Riessman’s emphasis on the interview as a co-performance of identities. Squire draws attention to the ways in which story genres differ across cultural contexts and to the privileging of the spoken word in what she terms “western discourses of authenticity”, a theme echoed by Larrain in Chapter 8. Because their programme attracts people from all over the world, participants are exposed to ways in which collectively formed narratives may be more important than individual narratives for people from particular contexts. In addition, Squire challenges the oft held notion that narrative inquiry cannot be ‘generalised’, proposing that there can be opportunities to make “careful but general claims across narratives” into the realm of social representation and action. Finally, Maria Tamboukou speaks from a critical perspective and, in her contribution to the chapter, writes about the use of autobiographies, diaries and letters, and of using them to make connections between Foucauldian and DeleuzoGuattarian and feminist lines of thought. For Tamboukou, lives are nothing more than entanglements and moments of being; storied actions reveal the ‘birth’ of the political subject. Tamboukou writes of the narratable self that has a unique story without being reducible to the content of the story. The interrelatedness of truth, power/ knowledge and desire in the production of narratives enables, in her words, narratives to “do things”, constituting realities, the social and the subject herself. This first chapter ends with the all important “So what”? question that is – or should be – asked of any methodological approach. And the writers answer that question by explicating their belief that by situating narrative very firmly within contexts, these contexts are consistent points of reference for a “continuing pragmatic politics”. I then travel to Canada and place the chapter written by Jean Clandinin, Janice Huber, Pam Steeves and Yi Li next in the sequence. I did this because here we also have a multi – voiced contribution from a group of people teaching on a



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

narrative programme, including a reflection from one contributor when she was a participant on it. The writers’ emphasis is on thinking with stories in contrast to what they allude to as the more Western convention of thinking about stories. The chapter is presented as a series of fictionalised, storied moments using the collaborative ‘I’ to illustrate vividly their ‘teaching’ of narrative inquiry in its threedimensional space of temporality, sociality and space. Share Jean’s anxiety at the first meeting of the class, the disruption of student expectations, the resistance to theorising, the incredulity on the students’ faces when she reads them a children’s story, her emphasis on sharing stories rather than discussing stories. I like how they interrupt and disrupt dominant narratives, including those of being a graduate student; and how that particular interruption needs to begin in the first class. The authors use the activity, which they call Bookends, to show how they create safety, as everyone becomes the characters in the stories that people share. Such processes are an “immediate stretching open of our emotions, our aesthetic and spiritual senses and our moral imaginations”. The Bat Poet is a powerful example of the latter for me. Used as a metaphor for the “complexity of sharing and receiving responses to stories of experience”, its reading enables students to voice their fears about sharing their stories; how their fears diminish as group members respond to them; how they might shape similar spaces in their work in the world outside the learning environment. In Composing works-in-progress, the writer talks of “never before writing so many stories in either Chinese or English until I took that course!” In this chapter, as in the previous one and in many others, we are reminded of the crucial importance – and responsibility – of listening carefully to one another’s lived and told stories. The powerful words of Cole are used to attest to the importance in narrative inquiry of seeking to understand a life as it is lived rather than seeking confirmation for a ‘theory’. The type of listening that the authors describe is a kind of “stilling of our voices”; redolent of Reed and Speedy’s “attentive listening” that contains “artfulness and mindfulness” (Chapter 7). Their final words “we are pulled to imagine becoming otherwise” as they gather for their last meeting around their “kitchen table space” recall for me Andrews’ emphasis on the importance of being able to imagine a world that differs from the one we think we know, how crucial is the “seeing of difference” (Andrews 2007) – that is afforded by narrative inquiry. In Chapter 4 we travel to Israel for the contribution by Ariela Gidron, Bobbie Turniansky, Smadar Tuval, Ruth Mansur and Judith Barak. This chapter came about because of a piece of writing I had read by them as I was musing on who to involve in this book. Their article in New Directions in Teaching and Learning, while not written about narrative inquiry, implied to me that, as teachers in higher education, they themselves were narrative inquirers. I contacted Ariela and discovered that my hunch had been correct and that she and her colleagues were

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interested to write a chapter. The Circle Game focuses on their work as teacher educators in Israel and, once again, exemplifies “narrative inquiry as a way of life” rather than teaching students how to do it. They begin their chapter with the words “Teaching is a complex profession though it looks easy to many” – my own sentiments exactly. Their perspective is that “stories provide coherence and continuity to their experiences and play a central role in their communication with others”; narrative inquiry is “an artful skill, a practical wisdom”. One of the most powerful moments for me in their chapter is “A perfect imitation”, the story told by Muhammed about a little girl who appeared in his classroom with a wound on her face. Following his telling of the story, his fellow students are asked to suggest titles for it, several of them suggesting that the story be told as if it were the wound telling it. This is then followed by an extract from a discussion between the students in which Muhammed is questioned about the writing of the story. His use of several ‘dots’ to end his sentences rather than with one full stop implies to his colleagues that he has more to say than he is caring to tell them. Through their questioning of him, another story emerges; that in his Bedouin society, a child who has special needs is treated ‘differently’. Although it is against the law, the custom allows beating of the child. When I read this story in the first draft of Gidron et al.’s chapter, I faced the dilemma described in the text. I was concerned that here was a story about child abuse that Muhammed should have reported. In addition, I was uneasy with the word ‘retarded’, a term considered inappropriate in the UK. Finally, I took an editorial decision that the word should remain, as this is the word Muhammed used in his retelling of the story, and to alter it would be disrespectful. At the end of the chapter, Gidron and colleagues pose a series of very pertinent questions that include recognition of the risks that both they and their students take in telling stories that may be very uncomfortable but, as they say, in their teacher education programme, narrative inquiry is not “inquiry for the sake of inquiry. It is inquiry for the sake of professional development”. I have learned much from reading their chapter – and from my email correspondence with Ariela and friends, about the context within which they work. It may be one of the most troubled areas of the world but their account of how, in ACE, they work with totally heterogeneous groups that include Jews, Christian Arabs and Moslem Arabs, is a reminder to me of the “continuously decomposing, reproducing and multiplying” (Gannon 2009, p. 69) nature of differences. In addition, their chapter reinforces the “rich potential to develop a sense of global responsibility and citizenship” (Trahar 2011, p. vii) of higher education. In these 3 chapters, while we might catch glimpses of some discomfort in those who choose to attend narrative inquiry courses, by and large, the authors write about the ways in which this initial discomfort is overcome, ways in which the rich diversity of the group is harnessed to challenge Western dominance. Before we become too complacent and congratulate ourselves by claiming



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

that one of the strengths of narrative inquiry is the way in which it challenges dominant narratives through its privileging of ‘local knowledge’, let’s move across the world to Hong Kong, where we encounter Yu Wai Ming and Lau Chun Kwok’s account of teaching narrative inquiry in their Chinese community. Yu and Lau provide us with an overview of how narrative is developing in three different contexts – Taiwan, Mainland China and Hong Kong – before focusing on their own context of Hong Kong. In Taiwan and Mainland China, there are vibrant scenes, with publications and professional fora blossoming. Contrast this with the much less welcoming picture painted of their own community of Hong Kong. Tracing the development of narrative inquiry in Taiwan to the publication of Clandinin & Connelly’s seminal Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research in Chinese in 2003, they present a thriving community of narrative scholars, concluding that much of the work is almost unknown in other parts of the world, because it is in Chinese. In Mainland China, the development of narrative inquiry is traced to Professor Ding Gang at East China Normal University in Shanghai who founded a narrative inquiry journal China’s Education: Research and Review that has attracted the attention of many people in that context. As always, narrative inquiry attracts its critics and Yu and Lau include some sobering words from Chinese scholars sceptical about a methodological approach that is “only collecting stories”. In Hong Kong, they struggle to gain recognition for narrative inquiry – a struggle familiar no doubt to many readers whatever their context – but also one that encapsulates the complexities of language and the privileging of English in that postcolonial environment. Here are fascinating glimpses of why people may struggle; publishing in English language journals continues to be high priority, even though this means that local Hong Kong people are not writing in their first language. Drawing on their experiences as teacher educators, Yu and Lau explicate the different ways that they are creating opportunities for narrative inquiry outside of the formal curriculum. In a context dominated by positivism and quantitative methodological approaches, I consider their accounts of working with narrative inquiry as a research tool, a tool for professional development and a way of teaching, inspirational and imagine that they will resonate with many readers. Their description of the resistance of inservice teachers to sharing more personal stories because of their expectation to learn from “educational experts’ bookish theories”, will remind us of the words of Clandinin and friends in the previous chapter, of how their students were “sharpening their pencils at the mention of the word ‘theory’”. Learning and teaching are undoubtedly culturally mediated processes (Trahar 2011), but perhaps some student expectations of higher education, even those of more mature postgraduate students, are very similar around the world. In the section, Teaching of narrative inquiry as a teaching strategy, Yu and Lau describe ways in which they guide students to reflect critically on the social, cultural and historical contexts in which the

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‘theorists’ emerged, telling them the stories behind the people, making use of visual material to enhance their learning and teaching. Their conclusions are hopeful, if rather poignant, as they reflect on their own commitment to their core values of learning to think narratively, which they consider more important than learning to do narrative. We return to North America for a series of conversations between JoAnn Phillion and Yuxian Wang. Constructed as a dialogue between a doctoral supervisor and her student, this chapter is a multi-layered series of conversations. Through Phillion’s conversation with Wang, a doctoral researcher from China, we see not only how Wang uses narrative inquiry in his context but we also gain vivid insights into his experiences as a Han Chinese researcher working with participants who are Hui, a Muslim minority group. Phillion and Wang’s chapter sets out to explore 2 important questions – how does a researcher from a different cultural background get access to participants’ narrative accounts of learning experiences and how do researchers get, translate and represent voices authentically in narrative inquiry? Phillion reflects on her own narrative inquiry journey, revealing that, as she began to teach narrative inquiry, she felt that there was something missing – a critical perspective and a social justice orientation. Her own approach is thus influenced by critical multiculturalism, critical race theory and indigenous methodological approaches. Through their dialogue we see glimpses of Wang’s struggles with a methodological approach that was seductive but which clashed with his previous training in research methodology that focused on using “figures and technical results” and that situated the researcher as the “sole authority in interpreting data” – discomforts familiar to me and shared in my own chapter. Wang is encouraged to position the Hui participants as collaborators in the inquiry process, enabling him to create an environment in which meanings of their lived experiences could be illuminated. He is urged to think about who he is in the inquiry; who he is in relation to his participants and how his background might both inhibit and enable the voices of the Hui to be heard. Wang is challenged by Phillion to articulate what he understands by “the truth”, drawing forth his riposte to her that, while accepting that ‘truth’ in an inquiry is something that everyone needs to think about, minority education is a controversial issue in China and so he has to tread the political tightrope carefully. This theme of encouraging people to engage in narrative inquiry without paying due care and attention to the possible implications of its use for them in their local context is one that is recurring in my own work and one that is reflected in Yu and Lau’s chapter. I have been teaching in Hong Kong for several years and an increasing number of doctoral students there are using narrative inquiry as a research methodology. Through supervising the research of these students, I have become much more attuned and I hope sensitive to their concerns as they, like Yu, Lau and Wang, battle with sceptical colleagues.



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

Wang asserts that narrative inquiry is congruent with many elements of his traditional Chinese culture, yet he – and Yu and Lau – still have to struggle against the continuing dominance of positivist perspectives and quantitative research in their contexts. The next chapter is another conversation – this time in the UK between my two colleagues Malcolm Reed and Jane Speedy – who “voice dialogically (their) agreement and difference” in sharing with us their approach (es) “to facilitate a climate of narrative inquiry”, that has, in their view, “become disconnected from its arts-based roots on its journey towards inclusion in the canon of social science research”. This chapter, though it is positioned overtly within an arts-based genre, both in its content and in its evocation, nonetheless contains themes that by now have been established in this book. Themes of creating myriad ways of enabling people to learn about narrative inquiry, tussling with the tensions, often healthy and creative tensions, that exist between seeking to make narrative more widely available. In addition, Reed acknowledges the complexities of holding the delicate balance between, as he says meeting “our university’s criteria” and at the same time cherishing the learning that emanates from “getting lost” in their work. Reed and Speedy ask us to think of their chapter as a “sketchbook in which various observations and imaginings are collected’ rather than a “model of their teaching”. They talk/write about the “bumping up” of “artful inquiry practices”… against “social inquiry practices” and while their shared interest in arts-based pedagogy is illustrated vividly and colourfully through their language and images, they also write of the philosophical perspectives that inform each of them. For Speedy it is feminism/postructuralism while Reed locates himself within cultural-historical activity. In common with other contributors, they tell us of how they like to begin their “teaching” with excerpts from novels or poems. As with Andrews et al. in Chapter 2, film has a place not only in the course but also in the assignments that students produce. Reed writes that “the trick for the narrative inquirer is to compose a text with the quality of making us care”. Reading of some of the “tricks” that participants use in their assignments, such as writing around the edges of pages, leaving the middles blank and pointedly white to evoke black women’s marginalisation in academia; the psychology textbook that has been “altered” to show “layer upon layer of life history, speculation, repositioning, anguish” – who could not “care”? They tell us that all of their courses end with a performance, that it is the “performativity that lingers”. In this chapter there are powerful metaphors portrayed through their refracted voices as they disagree with each other and then reflect on what is happening for them, moment by moment, in their conversation. Remaining in Europe, we travel to Southern Europe, and the beautiful, vibrant city of Barcelona where Veronica Larrain shares her account of teaching on a Masters programme in Studies and Projects in Visual Culture. Larrain teaches

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in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Barcelona and, in ways that resonate with Reed and Speedy’s chapter, articulates her efforts to link the arts with education and qualitative research “in order to approach processes of production (both of knowledge and of artistic artefacts) linked to different forms of experience”. Larrain, like me, does not have the perceived luxury of a narrative inquiry course, rather a 3-hour workshop that is part of a series of courses on research methodology and types of analysis and interpretation. She uses the term Narrative Constructionist Research (NCR) as an “umbrella term” offering this as an appropriate tool for the exploration of the complexities of representing experience and research relationships. Suggesting that this complexity is often concealed by particular types of narrative data analysis, Larrain proposes that one of the characteristics of NCR is that it positions narratives as “appropriated by individuals to be used in different contexts”, rendering the relationship between researcher and participant as even more complex. Somewhat differently to other contributors, who place emphasis, albeit in their different ways on writing texts, Larrain claims “writing as a threat to the authenticity of speech”, drawing on Derrida’s explanation that “disdain for writing is associated with an ethnocentric vision of writing”. Larrain’s students are from Latin American countries that she describes as having a “long academic tradition”. This latter strengthens her desire to disrupt what she describes as the “subordinate position” in which university education tends to place students. Using Georgakopoulou’s idea of “small stories”, Larrain encourages the students, in pairs, to tell small stories – orally – that are related to the formation of their identities. Each student is then asked to write the story told by her/his colleague and finally each pair is invited to share their reflections using a set of guiding questions. The responses of the students reveal challenges to, for example, Ricoeur’s notion of emplotment; one student asking whether emplotment is “another ethnocentric concept embedded and naturalized in our culture”. Other students question whether understanding one’s life as a narrative excludes “other human self-understanding”, provoking Larrain herself to muse on whether a narrative tendency to look for coherence hinders self-understanding. “Western culture has tended to assume that speech is a clear and direct means of communication”, and Larrain draws on MacClure to propose eloquently that neither speech nor writing can close the divide that exists between the self and the Other. There are strong resonances for me in Larrain’s challenges to the so called legitimate positioning of “foreign students in a Europeanising academic context”. I am reminded of how complex it is to depart from the idea that oral/written stories in these environments are not “natural products” but are authorised by the groups that surround us in politically loaded academic landscapes. Placing one’s own chapter in an edited collection is difficult. This is the piece of writing that spawned the book, so why not place it first? I wanted the chapters that were collaboratively written to be read first as, in these chapters, the writers



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

are talking about the teaching of narrative inquiry as a shared experience. In some senses I am a lone voice in my chapter but I have Alison and Titina for company and, although I offer a personal account of using a narrative therapy practice to “teach” narrative data analysis, this account is blended with their voices. I see my chapter as mirroring not only the spirit of the book, but also the spirit of narrative inquiry, in that I seek to illustrate how I find myself in the “borderlands… frequently crossing cultural discourses, ideologies and institutional boundaries” (Clandinin & Roziek 2007, p. 59). Like Larrain, I have limited time in my narrative inquiry teaching to introduce complex ideas and do them justice. In my chapter I write about taking a method of analysing narrative data – dialogic/performance analysis – and performing it in different ways, using reflecting teams. I chose to do this in an effort to enable participants not only to develop some understanding of the complexities involved in working with narrative data, but also to have them experience and reflect on the value of a narrative therapy practice in learning about narrative inquiry. In common with many other contributors I was – and continue to be – influenced profoundly by my first encounters with Clandinin and Connelly (2000). More recently. I have engaged with other readings of narrative such as the critical and the postructuralist. Like Trinh (1989) I resist classification yet at the same time consider it wise to be able to offer theoretical and philosophical rationales for what I do, provided that I do not become labelled. I dislike labels. I find that once they become attached, they can be very difficult to loosen. So, my own chapter tells the story of how I came to use the narrative therapy practice of a reflecting team, of my reflections on the process, both on the day and a week or so later in conversation with Alison and Titina, the two people who ‘conversed’. Rather than provide a neat ending that proposes the use of a reflecting team as the way to teach narrative data analysis, my chapter ends with the beginnings of another story… And finally, still in Europe, but travelling further north, we meet Meeri Hellsten and Katrin Goldstein-Kyaga in Sweden. I decided to place this chapter as the final one in the book because, while it is another conversation between two academics, in this one the writers focus on their personal and professional narratives in order to illustrate how they can be linked with “new learning in the intercultural higher education context”. Calling for greater use of reflection in academic work – they fear that academics are “losing our touch” at the interpersonal levels – they propose this as a counter to the ever spiralling demands on academics to measure their outputs in various quantifiable ways. These statements will be familiar to many of us working in higher education as reductions in central government funding and proposals for high tuition fees create very different and particular types of culture. Basing their definition of narrative on Somers and Gibson (1994) and drawing on Lundegard and Wickmans’ (2009) use of disjunctive spaces to define intercultural narratives, they provide third person accounts of selected

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parts of their stories followed by their own analysis. The use of the third person is a disruption to the styles of the other chapters, rationalised as a useful way of gaining “deeper insight into the tellings by creating distance between the content and meeting our analytic objectives”. In the first narrative, the writer tells of being born into a Finnish family, of her family’s roots both in the indigenous north and the south of Finland; of being at school in Sweden; of being an academic in Australia. She reveals the complexities of the Finnish language and describes how her experience of being bilingual renders her able to empathise with bilingual students who can occasionally be positioned by monolingual teachers as sabotaging the learning event because their ability to speak ‘other’ languages gives them “access to other worlds”. Identifying herself as an ‘academic’ and maintaining that her ethnic identities are of less importance to her in her academic environments, she writes of being astonished by the comments of her Australian colleagues who attribute her opinions to her “being Finnish”. In the second narrative, the writer draws on her experiences in India and Tibet and her research experiences in Sweden with young people in multicultural contexts, resulting in the concept of a “third identity”, one that is neither that of the host country or of the parents. She acknowledges this as a categorisation, but proposes that it is useful to analyse what she calls the “in-between area”. She reflects on the sometimes angry resistance of students to being categorised; the story of the girl from India who was constantly asked to talk about India, even though she had never been there. Like her colleague in the first narrative, she writes of the importance of certain people in her life and of how her father’s refugee status in Sweden gave her access to those from different countries. In the final part of their chapter, the two writers summarise “the common readings” in their narratives, aligning them with what they term the “fifth dimension” or “intercultural narratives”. They relate the retellings of their stories – and their subsequent analyses – to what they refer to as the “pedagogical vantage points offered by narrative inquiry”, calling for academics to provide examples from their own lives when seeking to engage students in conversations about ethnicity and cultural awareness. I propose that, as contributors to this book, we have no need of such an exhortation as, in our different ways, we have shared aspects of our lives with you, the reader, in order to illustrate how we facilitate similar sharing in our students. 3.â•… Journey’s end – or beginning other journeys? We have travelled around the world and encountered many people, not only contributors but myriad others who have made inevitable appearances in their writings and images. We have glimpsed the borderlands, bumping up against



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction 

similarities and some provocative differences in our readings of narrative inquiry. As I end my story of introducing this book’s contributors and their stories through sharing with you my readings of their writing, I invite you to travel in the borderlands and to read of our adventures on the roller coaster that is the teaching and learning of narrative inquiry.

References Andrews M. (2007). Exploring cross-cultural boundaries. In D.J. Clandin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative inquiry (pp. 489–511). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, F.M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Clandinin, D.J., & Roziek, J. (2007). Mapping a landscape of narrative inquiry: Borderland spaces and tensions. In D.J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative inquiry mapping a methodology (pp. 35–75). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Gannon, S. (2009). Difference as ethical encounter. In B. Davies & S. Gannon (Eds.), Pedagogical encounters (pp. 69–88). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Josselson R., Lieblich A., & McAdams, D.P. (Eds.). (2003). Up close and personal: The teaching and learning of narrative research. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Pinnegar, S., & Daynes, J.G. (2007). Locating narrative inquiry historically: Thematics in the turn to narrative. In D.J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative inquiry mapping a methodology (pp. 3–34). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Shope, J.H. (2006). ‘You can’t cross a river without getting wet’: A feminist standpoint on the dilemmas of cross-cultural research. Qualitative Inquiry 12 (1), 163–184. Trahar, S. (Ed.). (2006). Narrative research on learning: Comparative and international perspectives. Oxford: Symposium. Trahar, S. (2011). Developing cultural capability in international higher education: a narrative inquiry. London, Routledge. Trinh T.Minh-ha. (1989). Woman, native, other: Writing postcoloniality and feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

chapter 2

Interfaces in teaching narratives Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire & Maria Tamboukou University of East London

This chapter is co-written by the three directors of the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London, UK and consists of their reflections on teaching narrative to post-graduate students in Britain. The organisation of the chapter is in three different voices, reflecting the design and teaching of the actual course. There is a general introduction about the course we teach: the genesis of the course, the use of formalisations in making sense of the field of narrative, connecting our classroom to our research centre (and to our own research), and discussing how the course has evolved over the years (including the provision of a distance learning version of the course). The chapter concludes with reflections on some of the challenges and rewards which we have encountered in our experience of teaching narrative, drawing on students’ responses and discussion, and will include questions around how to respond to students who are in search of a ‘quick fix’ methodology, or how to balance our different approaches, amongst others.

1.â•… Introduction The Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London (UEL), UK was formed at the time of the millennium, just over a decade ago at the time of this writing. From that time, we – the three co-directors of the centre – have been teaching courses on narrative research to post-graduate students, applied researchers, academics and others who are at various stages of learning about what narrative research is and how to do it. The courses which we teach include a wide range of issues. Some are quite technical, focussing on the nuts and bolts of research practice, and others are more philosophical, on topics such as the relationship between how humans make meaning in their lives, and the stories they tell and don’t tell about being in the world. In this chapter, we will write about what we do in the classroom, and how this connects to our thoughts on narrative research more broadly. The chapter will be presented in three different voices, as it has long been our conviction that teaching together is done most effectively when we co-ordinate but do not Â�collapse

 Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire & Maria Tamboukou

our distinct orientations into a homogeneous whole. Much of what we write in this chapter will refer to a specific module, called ‘Narrative Research’, which is the only core module in the first semester of our MA in Narrative Research. Our reason for focussing discussion on this particular module is that it is here that students encounter their initial introduction to thinking about and with narratives. Through the years Narrative Research has proven to be a very popular course, attracting a wide range of students and senior researchers. Some of the students live locally, that is to say close enough to the university to be able to attend weekly sessions. However, we also simultaneously run a distance learning version of the module, which means that we quite literally have not only students who come from around the world, but also who are positioned around the world. While the very wide range in interests and backgrounds can be challenging to reconcile, it is our experience that the course is ultimately more engaging because of the diversity of the students. Students seem to come to us because they want to know how to ‘do’ narrative. Often, they will be pursuing a Ph.D., and think that their methodology is somehow broadly connected to stories people tell about their experiences. But our students might also be people who are very well-established in their careers, either fellow academics, artists, policy makers, health professionals, or others who have heard the ‘buzz’ about narrative, and want to find out for themselves what it is and how it might, or might not, connect to the work they are doing. Sometimes they may be frustrated that the answers we have for them are not hard and fast, but for the most part it is our experience that those who come asking to be taught about narrative research are people who are prepared for the ambiguity and complexity that the subject matter requires. 2.â•… Thinking about narrative data (Molly Andrews) One of the first challenges we encounter in our teaching about narrative is to entice students to enter a world which is ultimately conceptually messy. Aristotle famously commented that “It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.” Much of narrative research concerns, in the words of Mark Freeman, “the living, loving, suffering, dying human being” (Freeman 1997, p. 171). Our task as teachers of narrative is to demonstrate convincingly that it is both demanding and complex work, but that the rewards are potentially great. The first and most critical challenge we confront in our teaching is to balance two claims about narrative. On the one hand, there is Barthes’ claim that Narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting … stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative



Chapter 2.╇ Interfaces in teaching narratives 

is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind (sic) and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative … it is simply there, like life itself. (1977, p. 79)

The list which Barthes provides is hardly exhaustive; to this, Riessman (2008) makes the following additions: memoir, biography, autobiography, diaries, archival documents, social service and health records, other organisational documents, scientific theories, folk ballads, photographs, other art work. Further to this, Seale argues that “narratives are constructed through many things, including acts of consumption … Objects can be ordered in relation to the body, the household, a life, in ways that make narrative sense” (2000, p. 37). Shopping as narrative? Is there anything that is not narrative? And if all is narrative, or potentially so, how can it be useful to us as researchers? The concern here is that which is voiced by Ian Craib: One might think that a concept which brings together the world religions, all of Western philosophy, large-scale statistical correlations in the social sciences, every biography and autobiography that’s ever been written, every work of fiction and my account of losing a pet cat obscures more than it illuminates. Narratives [emphasis added] (2000, p. 64) are stories and stories are not simple.”

In a nutshell, our approach in devising our introduction into narrative is to hold together simultaneously the positions of Barthes and Craib. We must demonstrate convincingly both that narratives are pervasive in the social world, that they constitute a core dynamic by which human beings make sense of the world, that we as researchers are engaged in matters of narrative whether we know it or not, and that thinking about and through stories is hard work. To demonstrate this, I use examples from my own work in which my efforts to understand what someone has said to me have clearly come up short of the mark. When students are developing their interview questions, for example, I show them a series of excerpts from interviews I conducted with a lifetime member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. As a student of psychology, I was seeped in debates about the role of affect and cognition (and the tension between them) in human behaviour. It was then, not surprising that I asked my participant to tell me about times when he had experienced a chasm between his heart and his mind. His answer was clear: he rejected the question. “The heart is just the largest muscle in your body, pumping blood round, retaking it back and cleaning it. It doesn’t think, it’s the brain that thinks, and when the brain stops the heart stops.” I heard what he said, but I did not accept it. In the course of several interviews, I returned again and again to this question, rephrasing it (disguising it?), hoping to get a different response. “So, do you often find that your heart and mind pull you in different directions?” I asked him, yet again.

 Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire & Maria Tamboukou



A: No, because I dismiss that. I don’t want to keep on saying it. No, everything is controlled by my mental process … All my emotions come from my thinking. Q: So they’re never in disagreement? A: No, no, no. (Andrews 1991, pp. 60–61)

By the time I get to the final line of this exchange, my students are usually laughing and twisting in their seats, recoiling at the blind insistence of the interviewer. I am nearly crying. How could I be so very stubborn in my refusal to listen? But this is the point I am trying to communicate. It is not that I am unusually insensitive; rather all of us enter into conversations with certain ideas in our minds which influence not only what we say, but also what we can hear. Along with this discussion in class, I assign the students a book chapter of mine, “Reflections on Listening” (Andrews 2007). Here I argue that listening is the most critical component of good research, but it is also one of the most difficult. Rather than burying our war stories, I think that those of us who have spent considerable lengths of time in the field owe it to those who we teach to come clean about difficult choices, compromises we have had to make, and decisions we regret. In our teaching about narrative research, each of the three of us uses examples from our own work, though not always for the purpose of providing a cautionary tale. We adopt the approach throughout the class that the best way to teach narratives is in working with them. Virtually every week, in addition to required reading, we set practical exercises for our students to do outside of the class. Our weekly three-hour meetings are organised as a mixture of lectures and workshops, and are highly interactive. In the first or second week of the class, we show our students Liane Brandon’s short film “Betty Tells Her Story.” (Brandon, 1972) In the nearly forty years since it was made, the movie has acquired a certain cult status amongst researchers, particularly those interested in questions of identity and performance. Elliot Mishler, whose article “Historians of the self: Restorying Lives, Revising Identities” (2004) uses this film as a means through which to explore how the self is restoried over time, described the film in the following way: … Betty first tells a story about an episode in her life that has stayed with her. The story takes about 9.5 minutes and when she finishes, the screen goes dark – it is a black-and-white film. In a few seconds, a message appears: ‘Later that day, the filmmaker asked Betty to tell her story again …’ Much of the power of the film derives from the unanticipated second telling which is not forecast in the first one, and from the contrast between the two which is quickly apparent when Betty reappears and begins again. (pp. 103–104)



Chapter 2.╇ Interfaces in teaching narratives 

The film has proven to be a very effective tool for whetting the appetites of students to some of the key questions of narrative identity: Is the story that Betty tells the same story in time one and time two? Does one version seem ‘more true’ than the other? Who is Betty’s audience? Why is she telling this story? What sense, if any, can we make of this story? And, finally, why am I using this to introduce students to our topic of study? After students have had a chance to view the film, they then read Mishler’s excellent article which bases much of its discussion upon the film, theoretically exploring questions of subjectivity and identity construction and reconstruction, and the complicated role of researchers who must interpret the stories they encounter. Following this initial foray into thinking about narrative, I ask students to write a 500 word story about anything which has happened to them. I ask them to bring two copies of the story to class (one for me, and one to be shared with a partner). I then begin the class by reading the first entry in Paul Auster’s rich collection True Tales of American Life. Entitled ‘The chicken’, it reads: As I was walking down Stanton Street early one Sunday morning, I saw a chicken a few yards ahead of me. I was walking faster than the chicken, so I gradually caught up. By the time we approached Eighteenth Avenue, I was close behind. The chicken turned south on Eighteenth. At the fourth house along, it turned in at the walk, hopped up the front steps, and rapped sharply on the metal storm door with its beak. After a moment, the door opened and the chicken went in.  (Auster 2002, pp. 2002–5)

How, in just five sentences, does the writer accomplish the act of storytelling with such success? Is it really true (after all, it is the first in a book which claims to be about ‘true stories’)? Is it a story which is more about perception than fact? Who is the storyteller, and how does she portray herself in this tale? Ultimately, what is this story about? Questions such as these are posed to the students and help us to begin our collective inquiry into the nature of personal stories and storytelling. Stories do something, they have a point, a function. As Neal, the character in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) played by the American comedian Steve Martin tells Del: You know everything is not an anecdote. You have to discriminate. You choose things that are funny or mildly amusing or interesting. You’re a miracle! Your stories have NONE of that. … And by the way, you know, when you’re telling these little stories? Here’s a good idea – have a POINT. It makes it SO much more interesting for the listener!

Not everything is a story. Even small children recognise stories when they hear them, and if the story doesn’t make sense, has no plot or departs in no way from

 Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire & Maria Tamboukou

the expected and the usual, then it is very difficult to interpret significance, much less to chart how its meaning might change over time. Having introduced these points via the chicken story, and Betty, the class is then prepared to look at the stories which they themselves have generated. The individual stories are initially workshopped in pairs. I ask students first to tell their story to their partner, and then to give the written version to them. This exchange is then repeated in reverse. We then come together as a group, and begin to talk for the first time about our own stories. I ask the students to think about the difference between the written and spoken stories, both for the person whose story it was, and for the listener/reader. Why did students choose the story which they did? What did it mean to them at the time that it happened? What does it mean now? Who did they think was the audience for the story? What was the experience of sharing their story with someone they did not (necessarily) know? Hopefully engaging in this exercise demonstrates for students the high level of sensitivity which they must bring to their endeavours to interpret the narratives of others. The following week in the module, we begin to work with interviews. In preparation for the class, students interview an individual for approximately twenty minutes about a key moment in their life. This interview, and the transcript which they develop from it, forms a key focus for the data gathering portion of the module. (Sometimes our students have already begun to gather data. If this is the case, rather than conducting the 20 minute interview, I ask them to bring approximately 500 words of their transcript to the class). At this point, the questions about research design are many: how should they decide who to interview? What exactly should they tell the person they are interested in? How much of the pre- and postinterview ‘pillow talk’ should they include? And how should they respond to what they are told within the context of the interview? After discussing details of the interviews, we turn our attention to the construction of transcripts. What kind of document do we as researchers see ourselves as producing? How much detail is too much? Is it ethical to render our respondents inarticulate, including every ‘erm’ and ‘um’, while treating our own utterances in a different manner? How much cleaning up is okay, even desirable? Is it ever possible to fully capture a speech event on a recorder, much less on paper? Through discussion, lectures and workshops, we explore how the transcription decisions we make influence the narratives which we co-produce. We also review how much of the interview needs to be transcribed, and explore a range of options. My attempt in this teaching is to make students aware of the decisions which run throughout the process of conducting narrative research. I genuinely believe that there is a wide range of possible answers to these many questions, and that the decisions one makes should be conscious and fully grounded in consideration of the purposes of the research. I emphasise the importance of researcher accountability – in other



Chapter 2.╇ Interfaces in teaching narratives 

words, ownership of the decisions we have made, and an acknowledgement of the implication of these choices. (It is perhaps worth mentioning here that questions like these do not exclusively pertain to narrative research. However, I do not feel that the account of my/our teaching would be complete if I failed to mention explicitly their centrality in our module.). I firmly believe that whatever document of our recorded conversations we create, it is always that – not only a creation, but our creation. And so there is an urgent demand for researchers to be critically aware of what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how these decisions are more conducive to collecting certain kinds of data, while excluding others. When students bring their transcripts to class, we begin with a merely visual exercise: What do the pieces of paper actually look like? What do the different styles of transcription accomplish? What do they impede? Following this, we then look at selected passages within the interview. What has the participant said, and how has the interviewer responded? Why was this pathway selected and not another? What alternatives were there? What evidence is there of a negotiation of meaning between the two parties? Here, we also consider the transcripts of other narrative scholars, exploring the nuts and bolts of how they conduct their research. To assist the students in their narrative analysis, I have drawn up a range of questions which we revisit throughout the course. These questions focus on core areas, and within each there are a number of detailed questions which students ask of the data: structure, audience, meaning, and the spoken/unspoken. I have developed these prompts over the years as a means for making the slippery process of analysis less daunting. Still, while I hope that these pointers are useful to students, I continually emphasise the inter-relatedness of these questions, as well as their limitations. One of the key tasks in introducing students to narrative data is to try to get them to think about what works, and what does not. Throughout the course, we explore different presentations of narrative data; some are written accounts, others visual, and still others just auditory. We urge students to think about how different kinds of data contribute to narrative scholarship. Crucially, we try to encourage students to become confident with their own data, using it more fully in the projects they produce. In our experience, this is a confidence which is built over time, and which comes out of an appreciation of not only the benefits of narrative research, but equally of its limitations. It is my firm belief, and a core foundation of our teaching, that learning about narrative research stems from committed scholarship – encountering the works of others – combined with doing it oneself. Narrative is difficult to teach because it defies a ‘quick fix’. While I have taught intensive workshops on narrative, I feel that these can often be disappointing experiences, as participants come expecting

 Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire & Maria Tamboukou

that by the end of the day, or three days, they will come away with all the tools they need. Teaching about narrative concerns not only teaching about time and memory in human lives; it is also about taking time. Narrative research is very time-consuming work, and if we wish to do it well, we must be willing to roll up our sleeves, to grapple with messy materials, and to work long and hard. The most we can hope to achieve in the classroom is a thirst for narrative ways of knowing. 3.â•… What is narrative (research)? (Corinne Squire) As Molly has described it, narrative research is a complex, messy field. The Narrative Research module, like the other modules on narrative that we teach at UEL, aims to help students find their own path through this field: one which will follow the route of other researchers, which is unlikely to follow any one previous line from beginning to end, but which will also try to establish a high degree of theoretical and methodological coherence within itself, and in relation to other approaches. We want students to learn through their own practice the importance of paying attention to narrative’s particularities. Sometimes, this is precisely the effect of narrative research, and there is no other. But there is also in some cases the possibility of making careful but general claims across narratives, across narrative research, and from narrative research into the realm of social representation and action – claims that particularistic qualitative research often fails to deliver. This is also why we work through a diversity of sometimes conflicting approaches to narrative research with our students. Such working through helps them not only to grasp and contrast these approaches, and to find out what their own might be, but also to think about what each approach offers, and says itself, about the value of narrative research in exploring particularities, generalities, and social change. At the same time, our teaching approach itself negotiates between these possibilities. It acknowledges the particular advantages deriving from specific narrative research models. But it is also eclectic, working across different models to see what can be found in common within and from them, and what the wider implications of such findings might be. Our interest in narrative knowledge, in general terms, is what drives this eclecticism. One way in which we encourage students to find their own theoretical and methodological narrative research paths, is for us and them to work dialectically, in dialogue with key previous examples of narrative research, starting with apparently more ‘straightforward’ approaches, and moving on to more complex ones. We take these examples seriously, reading them in detail. The students thus pursue a critical review of major work within the contemporary narrative research field which allows them to find and choose their own reference points (Squire 2005).



Chapter 2.╇ Interfaces in teaching narratives 

We begin this work with some of the papers of William Labov, often used as a simple starting point in narrative teaching (Labov 1972, 1997). Labov does indeed have a reassuringly straightforward, though much contested, definition of what a narrative is, involving stories told in the first person about particular events by a narrator who experienced it her/himself. Definitional issues are also of great concern to students – after all, if they are going to do narrative research, they need to be able to say what they are researching. Labov’s definition can be tried out with the spoken and written stories students produced with Molly; modifications can be suggested and related to later, critical approaches to Labov’s work (Patterson 2008). Students can start to construct their own theories of what constitutes ‘narrative’ from this practical work of trying things out. Students are thus already from the beginning working as researchers within this course. Narrative is a salient aspect of most people’s everyday lives, valued, evaluated and theorised in ordinary life contexts. This positioning of narrative learning as narrative research simply extends this involvement. At the same time, Labov’s narrative research raises some extremely complex questions that students return to again and again throughout their course: the relation of stories to cognition, to social context, to the pleasures of storytelling, and to the politics of narrative language, for instance. The Labovian work leads to some examples of more encompassing definitions of narrative within the phenomenological work of Paul Ricoeur (1991), which philosophically grounds many narrative researchers’ understandings of selves, narratives, and their readers’ or hearers’ interpretations; and then – returning to the social research field – within the influential contemporary writing of Cathy Riessman (2008), whose approach to interviews themselves as narrative co-performances of identities, within and across which selves are positioned in particular, often conflicting ways, gives students a very different, highly situated take on what a narrative ‘is’. We also spend some time examining two other perspectives: work on small-scale, conversational stories, often produced in the course of daily life, which are perhaps the most pervasive and life-shaping narratives of all (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008), and analyses of larger cultural narrative patterns and their significance, for instance, my own work on religious and ‘speaking out’ narratives of HIV in the South African context (Squire 2007), Ken Plummer’s (1995) more general work on disclosure narratives – for instance around sexual identities, AIDS, and sexual harassment and abuse – and their relation to social change movements, and Judith Butler’s (2005) account of the contemporary ethicopolitical requirement to produce self-narratives. Throughout these critical readings, ourselves and the students pay close attention to what is often called the ‘context’’ of narrative research – that is, the conditions, including the narrative conditions, within which narratives are produced, reproduced, heard, written or seen, understood, misunderstood or partly

 Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire & Maria Tamboukou

understood, and researched. These conditions are interpersonal, socioeconomic, cultural and political. In thus addressing narrative in context, we are particularly lucky to be working with the students who come to CNR. Because narrative modules like Narrative Research are rare and in some demand, they attract students with backgrounds in many different disciplines and fields of work, and from all over the world. We facilitate this transnationalism by teaching some modulesincluding Narrative Research – online, as well as at the university campus. The consequence is that we all benefit, as teachers and students, from an extremely broad awareness by module participants of the possibilities and limitations of the various approaches to narrative research, and from their sophisticated understandings of narrative ‘context.’ For instance, conventional Aristotelian notions of narrative genres such as tragedy and comedy get disturbed by participants with experience of quite different canonic story genres; western ideas about the centrality of self-narratives to individual lives are put in question by participants from the global South, in particular, for whom more collectively framed narratives are often much more important in their research. The range of approaches that we address is not always easy to practise in the classroom, or online. Some are more straightforward than others: students can, for example, examine positioning and co-construction within the narratives they have already worked with. It is a little harder to take Ricoeur into a workshop setting, but we try to understand at least what the theoretical and methodological implications of his ideas for students’ particular research interests might be. As for cultural genres, it turns out to be relatively easy for students both to identify aspects of such genres within their own stories, and to try out genred self-narratives through writing additional stories under the constraints – but also the possibilities – of using a single contemporary genre – a romance, western, or detective story, for instance. The contexts or conditions of narratives can be explored within the module, but much of this work necessarily remains speculative. The narrative research approaches that we examine present students with a number of theoretical and methodological incommensurabilities which they need to negotiate when putting together their own understanding of narrative research. For instance, researchers taking a phenomenological approach sometimes view narrative research as involving simply attention to narrative material, obtained for instance by asking for life stories, or stories of career, illness or family, and approach the analysis of the narrative material itself purely thematically, without necessarily paying any analytic attention to narrative aspects of it. Researchers interested in everyday small stories may see interview transcripts as too overwritten by that specific context really to tell us much about narratives in other, more usual circumstances. Those of us interested in social and cultural genres and how they are written and spoken out within individuals’ stories, may feel that to begin narrative research by asking for or encouraging stories is to limit the narrative



Chapter 2.╇ Interfaces in teaching narratives 

and other scope available to participants. Some research on larger narrative contexts might suggest that little extra is gained from research on personal narratives, since the same set of metanarratives – of for instance gender or class – write themselves across all aspects of discourse and practice, from political and media representations right down to individual stories. We want students to be aware of such contradictions; out of them, they can develop a narrative heuristic if not theory of their own, that can change, but that is enough of a framework to allow them to research. This diversity of narrative approaches leads the course to narrative boundarytesting. Is a still image, a sound or an action a story, or part of one? Do any of these become narrative if they are part of a sequence, or clearly symbolic? What about the narrative potential of ‘narrative’ painting, narrative music and dance, habitual social patterns of for instance shopping, cooking and eating (Seale 2000), or buildings (Ryan 2004)? If sound is important in spoken narratives, what is ‘narrative’ about it – does it just make extra, specific contributions to the spoken story? Students spend some time remembering and thinking about sounds, silences, tone of voice and gestures within the stories they have produced and studied. What if any of this could they have recorded or noted that would have changed the story? Are such considerations a fruitless pursuit of completism, a kind of displaced scientism, or do they usefully alert us to the hegemony of the spoken word in western discourses of authenticity? We also spend a week looking at photographs, and their relation to images, speech and writing around them, particularly in relation to Barthes’ work (1980, 1981), trying to sort out ‘where the story is’, what to do with it – and what it does with us. This work is central to the module because it exemplifies the productive associations that are possible – though often neglected – between narrative research in the social science and humanities fields. It is on these associations, in the area of written narratives, that the next section of the module draws. 4.â•… Narrative phenomena, narratable selves (Maria Tamboukou) Autobiographies, letters and diaries are at the heart of my on-going research and thus teaching my post-graduate students about how I do what I do has always been a source of inspiration and feedback for my work. This is a broader frame within which I understand post-graduate teaching in general: as an exchange between researchers at different stages of their life and work. Bringing life into the teaching is indeed important particularly when one teaches narrative methodological strategies of ‘documents of life’ (Plummer 2001) such as autobiographies, memoirs, journals, diaries and letters. The point we always start from is the recognition and discussion of the fact that we are part of the storyworlds we seek to understand

 Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire & Maria Tamboukou

and therefore there can never be a clear-cut separation between ‘the subject’ and ‘the object’ of the research process. This starting point raises a series of epistemological and ontological questions around narratives: how do we know what we know on the plane of epistemology and problematizing whether and how we can define ‘what is narrative’ on the ontological plane. It goes without saying that ontological and epistemological questions around narratives are always interrelated and can never be thought-of separately: their separation is simply heuristic, serving the economy of teaching. Having recognized the fact that relations of interiority and exteriority always co-exist in narrative research, this does not mean that the approach cannot be rigorous and systematic, creating of course its own norms, rules and taxonomies that work within particular contexts, what drawing on the work of feminist theorist Karen Barad (2007), I have called ‘narrative phenomena’. What is at the heart of Barad’s theorization is the recognition that entities can never be pre-defined, they always emerge through ‘intra-actions’ within phenomena. Drawing on quantum physics, Barad has introduced the neologism of ‘intra-actions’ as a theoretical juxtaposition to the usual notion of interactions. In doing this she denotes a significant difference: while interactions occur between already established and separate entities, ‘intra-actions’ occur as relations between components. Entities – both human and non-human – actually emerge as an effect of these intra-actions, without having stable points or positions. In this light the task of the narrative researcher is to map ‘the narrative phenomena’ she is working with and trace the emergence of entities, be they stories, themes, discourses, modes and of course narrative figures. In my teaching [and research] this question is explored on two interrelated planes: a theoretical plane wherein Foucauldian, DeleuzoGuattarian and feminist lines of thought are making connections and a post-narratological plane where I chart how conventions of classical narratology are bent and how differentiations within different sub-genres of life writing namely autobiographies, diaries and letters, emerge. Many of the stories I have worked with and which I draw on in my teaching, were fragmented, unfinished and incomplete. Discussing the problem of coherence, sequence and closure has thus emerged as central in the analysis and teaching of methods with auto/biographical narratives: how can one do narrative research when the Aristotelian condition of a plot with a beginning, middle and end is simply not there? Indeed, an important strand in the early periods of narrative theory has been the narratologists’ focus on coherence, sequence and a continuant subject. Auto/biographical narratives are well placed in this tradition. To write about your life or about the life of others requires a coherent organization of otherwise fragmented, incomplete and chaotic stories. As Jens Brockmeier has aptly argued,



Chapter 2.╇ Interfaces in teaching narratives 

“narrative is a forceful way to give human life an order in time.” (2001, p. 247) In this light, authors of auto/biographical narratives often rely on fiction and literary texts to represent the always-fragmented lives and subjects they are writing about. The discussion of the various auto/biographical sub-genres has thus been deployed in relation to literary genres and in my case the conventions of the epistolary novel. Two themes have emerged as central in this analytical approach: (a) the importance of the I/you relationship in structuring the form, the content and the discursive framework of the narrative and (b) the effects of writing to the moment, about life events whose end cannot be seen, which is the case with diaries and letters; this has been identified as an important difference with what Brockmeier has configured as the “retrospective teleology” (2001) of autobiographical writing, the narration of a life from the end to the beginning. To go back to the problem of coherence (see Hyvarinen et al. 2010a), postmodern approaches to narrative analysis have foregrounded this hybridity and have argued that coherence and sequence are literary constructions, since lives can be nothing more than entanglements of “moments of being.” Moreover the imperative of sequence and coherence is framed by a chronological conception of time as a linear and divisible unity. Virginia Woolf ’s novels however, poetically express a different conceptualization of narrative time, wherein linear divisions of past, present and future are dissolved and time is experienced as duration (Bergson 2002): the coexisting moments where the virtual past – what was – inheres in the experience of the present – what is – and opens it up to virtual and radical futures – what will be. In this different image of thought, auto/biographical narratives are analysed as stories in becoming, discursive sites where meaning is constantly deferred, representation is problematized and the subject is decentred. Instead of being coherently articulated, narrative sense emerges as an effect of an endless process of difference and repetition with its own rhythm and refrains. How should then narratives be conceptualised and analysed within an image of time as duration? What I suggest in my research and teaching is that women artists’ journals, diaries and letters revolve around the here and now and it is stories carrying traces of “moments of being” that have become the focus of the analysis. What is interesting about these narratives, is not only the moments they freeze, but also their lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari 1988), the ways they move away from established and rigidly codified systems of representation: women artists writing to become other. In this light, it is to the consideration of this process of becoming other through writing that my interest in the analysis of auto/biographical narratives has shifted. Narratives can only hold together a limited set of “moments of being”; but what is not actualized or expressed in a narrative form – the virtual, the silenced, the non-said – inheres in what has been recounted, creating within

 Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire & Maria Tamboukou

the narrative itself a depository of forces that can always take it elsewhere, divert it from its initial aim or meaning, create bifurcations, sudden and unexpected changes, discontinuities and ruptures in the sequential structure. Moving away from the imperative of narrative sequence and coherence inevitably creates new problems and questions. What certainly emerges as an issue is the subject herself, both as a researcher and as a research object. In my research, I have never been interested in capturing the subject, getting to the essence, reaching the core of the narrative self. There are of course some inevitable tensions here, particularly in the light of how the study of the lives of “others” – women amongst them – has long become a powerful tool in the theoretical platforms of social and political movements such as feminism. I am well aware of this tension and my contention is that agency is a critical notion that needs however to be continuously problematized, particularly because causality can be too easily simplified and what is actually an effect can be erroneously taken as a cause. In taking this critical stance, I follow a long-standing tradition of criticizing history and historicism in particular, a strand that is most recognizable today in Foucault’s (1986) suggestion for doing genealogies. (See Tamboukou 2008a) In doing so, I have focused on minor processes of how narratives emerge and evolve as stories in becoming, taking unpredicted bifurcations, being interrupted or broken, remaining irresolute or open-ended. D.H Lawrence (1967) has argued that “the novel should seize the living moment of man’s subtle interrelatedness with his [sic] universe.” (in Gibson 1996, p. 52) This is exactly what I think narrative texts in the human sciences can do: grasp the living moments of the subject’s subtle interrelatedness with the world. In this light narratives are analyzed as textual effects of specific socio-historical and cultural material milieus and discourses, but also as forces shaping the social as well as our historical understanding of it. In this context the subject does matter in narrative research and not merely as a textual effect, but as embodied and embedded. Indeed, I see narrative research as a site for the deployment of embodied knowledges and as a stage for narratable selves to make connections. Here I have drawn upon Adriana Cavarero’s (2000) articulation of the narratable self, one which emerges in the process of the auto/biographical exercise of memory, and in the embodied and unreflective experience that the self has of being narratable; the narratable self has a unique story without being reducible to the content of this story. (See Tamboukou 2008b, 2010a, 2010b) This final argument opens up an important site in my research and teaching: the conceptualization of narratives within the political. Indeed a central focus of my teaching and research is that narrative research is immanently situated within the political, an argument that is exemplified in the history of how feminist research has heavily drawn on, discussed and problematized women’s narratives and narratives about women. As the political is configured in Hannah Arendt’s thought, speech and action are the modes par excellence “in which human beings



Chapter 2.╇ Interfaces in teaching narratives 

appear to each other” (1998, p. 177), revealing as it were the uniqueness of the human condition. Action in the presence of others is a sine-qua-non condition for the emergence of the political subject. However, Arendt has pointed out that action as a fleeting moment in the passage of time is lost, if it is not transformed into a story. Following Foucault and Arendt, for the narrative researcher, stories cannot be conceived as merely discursive effects, but also as recorded processes wherein the self as the author/teller of his/her story transgresses power boundaries and limitations and follows lines of flight in its constitution as a political subject. (See Tamboukou 2010c) For me, it is this very process of storied actions revealing the “birth” of the political subject that is the political in narrative research. My particular interest in the political dimension of narrative research has been integrated in the teaching of the distance learning module ‘Narrative Force’, which is part of the MA course in Narrative Research that we run at the University of East London; there are actually two lectures focusing on the political: ‘Narratives and the Political’ and ‘Narrative Imaginaries’. What we particularly highlight and discuss with my students in these lectures is the point that I have already raised above: rather than being considered as representing reality, narratives should be seen as productive: narratives do things, they constitute realities, the social and the subject herself. In this light, narrative research is particularly concerned with the processes, procedures and apparatuses, whereby truth, power/knowledge and desire are interrelated in the production of narratives and in their effects. 5.â•… Conclusion Many of our students come to narrative research with a strong interest in a story or stories they have come across in their own or others’ research. Sometimes, this is their own story. In addition, many students feel that mainstream methods for obtaining or analysing narratives do not do justice to that kind of material. Beyond this, students’ interests and experiences are diverse. They may come to narrative with an interest in the linguistic structures of stories; in stories’ associations with subjectivities; in the links between narrative and cognition; in the microsocial and larger social significance of stories; in narratives that are expressed visually, or in performance, rather than in spoken or written signs. They may have a variety of methodological expertise, in quantitative methods, semiotic analysis, interviewing, thematic analysis, life history work, visual art production, discourse analysis, the therapeutic uses of stories. How can teaching about narrative do justice to this diversity? We try to work with all the students’ interests and experiences, even when they contradict each other. Our own plurality of approaches enables this inclusiveness. The Centre for Narrative Research is strongly committed to being an inclusive intellectual environment in research as well as in teaching. It is also

 Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire & Maria Tamboukou

committed to an understanding of narrative as itself multivocal – ambivalent, contradictory and broken up (Hyvarinen et al. 2010b). At the same time, the Centre’s work is, like that of many of its students, strongly engaged with the broader social contexts of personal narratives, and frequently with social, cultural and political narratives themselves. Just mapping and understanding narrative complexity is not what we or our students want to do. Often, such work leads them to ask the ‘So what?’ question. Imagine that we have studied how some narrative material was obtained, how it was analysed and theorised, what its more general implications seem to be. All this has been done in a thorough and thoughtful way. What is the broader significance of this work, though – ‘So what?’ students still ask. We, and they, are interested also in how narratives express, embody, catalyse and effect change. In our pedagogy, this is a constant subtext. We are not expecting or mandating any particular relation between narrative research and its broader contexts. But these contexts, are, alongside the ‘nuts and bolts’ of how to do the work, and the explorations of theoretical and methodological commonalities and differences, consistent points of reference for a continuing, pragmatic politics.

References Andrews, M. (2007). Shaping history: Narratives of political change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Andrews, M. (1991 re-issued 2008). Lifetimes of commitment: Aging, politics, psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arendt, H. (1998) [1958]. The human condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Auster, P. (Ed.). (2002). True tales of American life, New York NY: Faber and Faber. Bamberg, M., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis. Text & Talk, 28(3), 377–96. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barthes, R. (1977). Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives in Image-Music-Text. London, Fontana. Barthes, R. (1982). Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative. In S. Sontag (Ed.), A Barthes reader (pp. 251–95). London: Jonathan Cape. Barthes, R. (1980). Image music text. London: Methuen. Barthes, R. (1981). Camera lucida. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. Bergson, H. (2002) [1893]. Matter and memory. Translated from the French by N. Paul & W.S. Palmer. New York, NY: Zone Books. Brandon, L. (1972). Betty tells her story [VHS/16mm]. Harriman, NY: New Day Films. Brockmeier, J. (2001). From the end to the beginning: Retrospective teleology in autobiography. In J. Brockmeier & D. Carbaugh (Eds.), Narrative and identity: Studies in autobiography, self and culture (pp. 247–282). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Butler, J. (2005). Giving an account of oneself. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Cavarero, A. (2000) [1997]. Relating narratives: Storytelling and selfhood. Translated from the Italian by P. Kottman. London: Routledge.



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Craib, I. (2000). Narratives as bad faith. In M. Andrews, S.D. Sclater, C. Squire & A. Treacher (Eds.). Lines of narrative: Psychosocial perspectives (pp. 64–74). London: Routledge. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988) [1980]. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Translated from the French by B. Massumi. London: The Athlone Press. Foucault, M. (1986). Nietzsche, genealogy, history, translated from the French by D. Bouchard & S. Simon. In P.Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault reader (pp. 76–100). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freeman, M. (1997). Why narrative? Hermeneutics, historical understanding, and the significance of stories. Narrative Inquiry 7, 169–176. Gibson, A. (1996). Towards a postmodern theory of narrative. Edinburgh: EUP. Hyvärinen, M., Hydén, L–C, Saarenheimo, M., & Tamboukou, M. (2010a). Beyond narrative coherence: An introduction. In M. Hyvärinen, L–C Hydén, M. Saarenheimo & M. Tamboukou (Eds.), Beyond narrative coherence (pp. 1–16). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hyvärinen, M., Hydén, L–C. Saarenheimo, M., & Tamboukou, M. (Eds.). (2010b). Beyond narrative coherence, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black English vernacular. Oxford: Blackwell. Labov, W. (1997). Some further steps in narrative analysis. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(1–4), 395–415. Lawrence, D.H. (1967) [1955] D.H. Lawrence.: Selected literary criticism. Edited by Anthony Beal. London: Heinemann. Mishler, E. (2004). Historians of the self: Restorying lives, revising identities. Research in Human Development I, (1&2): 101–21. Memorable quotes for ‘Planes, trains and automobiles’. Retrieved on 13 Julyl, 2010 from: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093748/quotes. Patterson, W. (2008). Narratives of events: Labovian narrative analysis and its limitations. In M. Andrews, C. Squire & M.Tamboukou (Eds.), Doing narrative research (pp. 22–40). London: Sage Plummer, K. (2001). Documents of life 2. London: Sage. Plummer, K. (1995) Telling sexual stories. London: Sage. Ricoeur, P. (1991). Life in quest of narrative. In D. Wood (Ed.), On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and interpretation (pp. 20–33). London: Routledge. Riessman, C. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ryan, M.-L. (2004). Narratives across media. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. Seale, C. (2000). Resurrective practice and narrative. In M. Andrews, S. Sclater, C. Squire & A. Treacher (Eds.), Lines of narrative: Psychosocial perspectives (pp. 36–47). London: Routledge. Squire, C. (2007). HIV in South Africa: Talking about the big thing. London: Routledge. Squire, C. (2005). Reading narratives. In Group Analysis, 38(1), 91–107. (Special issue Contemporary social theory, E. Burman & S. Frosh (Eds.)). Tamboukou, M. (2008a). A Foucauldian approach to narratives. In M. Andrews, C. Squire & M. Tamboukou (Eds.), Doing narrative research (pp. 102–120). London: Sage. Tamboukou, M. (2008b). Re-imagining the narratable subject. Qualitative Research, 8(3), 283–92. Tamboukou, M. (2010a). Nomadic narratives, visual forces: Gwen John’s letters and paintings. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Tamboukou, M. (2010b). In the fold between power and desire: Women artists’ narratives. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Tamboukou, M. (2010c). Relational narratives: Autobiography and the portrait. Women Studies International Forum, 33, 170–9.

chapter 3

Becoming a narrative inquirer Learning to attend within the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space D. Jean Clandinin, Janice Huber, Pam Steeves & Yi Li Universities of Alberta/Manitoba and Regina

Our teaching of narrative inquiry, shaped by a conceptualization of narrative inquiry grounded in a Deweyan theory of experience, works from a view of experience as embodied, always in motion, and shaped and reshaped by continuous interaction among personal, social, institutional and cultural environments. Given this experiential grounding, narrative inquiry is much more than telling or analyzing stories. Our focus is on learning to think narratively, that is, on learning to think with stories. Learning to think with stories highlights the relational, multiperspectival processes in which participants and narrative inquirers inquire into their lived and told stories attentive to the dimensions of temporality, sociality and place and with a focus on retelling and reliving lived and told stories in more thoughtful and responsive ways in the future. Through a series of storied moments, we show ways in which we intentionally create small responsive communities of sustained conversation enabling students to tell aspects of their lives through engaging in diverse narrative inquiry activities. We then illuminate the transformational power of response as lives meet within the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space and each teller is supported in retelling his/her stories in more attentive ways. As students learn to attend to their experiences in narrative ways each teller awakens to new ways of knowing and becoming a narrative inquirer.

1.â•… Introduction Our teaching of narrative inquiry is deeply rooted and congruent with our conceptualization of narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly 2000; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). Working from our view of narrative inquiry grounded in a Deweyan (Dewey 1938) theory of experience, we understand experience as the “fundamental ontological category from which all inquiry – narrative or otherwise – proceeds” (Clandinin & Rosiek 2007, p. 38). We see experience as “a changing stream that is characterized by continuous interaction of human

 D. Jean Clandinin, Janice Huber, Pam Steeves & Yi Li

thought with our personal, social and material environment” (Clandinin & Rosiek 2007, p. 39) and, in this way, we see Dewey’s ontology as transactional, with revolutionary epistemological implications. This ontological commitment highlights the importance of understanding our ways of teaching narrative inquiry within the larger frame of the ontological commitments of narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Murphy 2009). Because of this underlying view of experience, we understand narrative inquiry as much more than telling or analyzing stories. We draw on Morris’ (2002) distinction between thinking about stories and thinking with stories. When we speak of learning to think narratively we are speaking of learning to think with stories. The concept of thinking with stories is meant to oppose and modify (not replace) the institutionalized Western practice of thinking about stories. Thinking about stories conceives of narrative as an object. Thinking with stories is a process in which we as thinkers do not so much work on narrative … [but allow] narrative to work on us. (Morris 2002, p. 196)

Thinking with stories is thinking relationally as a narrative inquirer (Clandinin 2007). Thinking with stories runs counter to the dominant way of thinking which focuses on thinking about stories as objects rather than thinking about stories as living. When we begin to engage in narrative inquiry, we need to be attentive to thinking with stories in multiple ways: toward our stories, toward others’ stories, toward all the social, institutional, cultural, familial and linguistic narratives in which we are embedded as well as toward what begins to emerge in the sharing of our lived and told stories. In order to come to understand what it means to think with stories as a narrative inquirer, we need to begin experientially. We share with Lieblich this view of the importance of learning how to think narratively, that is, to engage in narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Murphy 2007). This thinking with stories as a narrative inquirer is intimately connected to our understanding of narrative inquiry as an educative process that begins in, and unfurls through, relational experiences (Clandinin & Connelly 2000; Caine & Steeves 2009; Craig & Huber 2007). Narrative inquiry is grounded in relationships that offer both researcher and participants a narrative space for telling and retelling experiences they have lived, and are living. As stories are retold, that is, inquired into, possibilities emerge for reliving in more thoughtful and responsive ways in the future (Clandinin & Connelly 1998). The narrative space shaped in the meeting of storied lives is a “threedimensional narrative inquiry space” (Clandinin & Connelly 2000) which draws our attention in multiple directions simultaneously: temporality to past, present and future; sociality to the dialectic between inner and outer/the personal and social; and place to the concrete physicality of the place or places in which experiences are lived out and told (Connelly & Clandinin 2006). As participants and



Chapter 3.╇ Becoming a narrative inquirer 

researchers work together within this three-dimensional narrative inquiry space, they attend to their lived and told stories of experience and, thus, experience openings for composing lives with greater promise and added possibility. In teaching narrative inquiry, we create spaces for students of narrative inquiry to learn to attend to their own experiences in narrative ways, that is, by telling and retelling their own stories within the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space. As students work alongside one another and us, we tell and retell, that is, inquire into, stories of our experiences of teaching, learning and researching in experiential, relational ways in university courses. We intentionally create small responsive communities of sustained conversation, enabling students to have opportunities to tell aspects of their lives through engaging in diverse narrative inquiry activities. We then show the transformational power of this response process as we engage within the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space, supporting each teller to retell her/his story in restoried ways. This responsive process changes not only the one who tells but each person in the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space as they are each stretched, individually and collectively, toward retelling with the possibility of reliving their experiences in the future. It is a process vibrating with much potential for personal, social and institutional change (Connelly & Clandinin 2006). In our chapter, through a series of storied moments represented in a different font, we show ways in which we engage in our classes. We create a fictionalized account of experiences composed over many years of teaching in this way to show some of what we mean by teaching narrative inquiry. We use a collaborative “I” in our writing. Our showing of our living of the classes is mostly shaped through our stories as teachers but also through our stories as participants or students in the classes. In the Appendix, we attach a recent course outline that details course readings and assignments. The course outline is the planned curriculum around which the lived curriculum is negotiated (Connelly & Clandinin 1988). 2.â•… It matters how we begin I nervously stand at the doorway to the Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development where our class will meet. I look at the big “put together” table and then I look down the corridor. The official class time is not for more than 30 minutes but I have already made a pot of tea, sorted out the cups and put the cookies I bought on a plate. I also have the course outline and have a story in my head for how I will begin. I have read the list of students’ names on my class list. I know it matters how we begin. The graduate students already know the dominant story of graduate school. They know the stories of school and the stories of university. They know the university is about expert knowledge and research. In graduate school, they know they are entering

 D. Jean Clandinin, Janice Huber, Pam Steeves & Yi Li

as characters into a plotline where they will learn to be just like other experts. Living a story of being a graduate student means reading articles and participating in scholarly debates and arguments about important theories. They know they will write scholarly papers and that there will be competition for the highest grades and the sharpest critiques. My nervousness comes from knowing I have to interrupt this story they are coming to participate in and begin, alongside them, to co-compose a new one. I cannot let the dominant story of graduate studies get started here. I need to be particularly wide awake (Greene 1995). As the students arrive, I greet them, tell them I am Jean and that I teach the course. I invite them to pour a cup of tea and take a cookie. They smile and sit down uncomfortably. Sometimes they know another student in the class and they say hello. There is an uneasy quiet. I sit down, smile and pull out a book. The book I have chosen is Crow and Weasel (Holstun Lopez 1993). I have carefully marked the pages I will read. I see quizzical looks as the students come from a variety of faculties: Education, Nursing, Social Work, Psychology, Sports and Leisure, Disability Studies and other places. I see them looking at each other with puzzled looks. “Is she going to read us a children’s book?” their faces say. “What kind of class is this”? The book is about two characters, Crow and Weasel, who are on a journey and they are speaking to Badger. I read a bit about the telling of their stories and end with Badger saying, ‘I would ask you to remember only this one thing,’ said Badger. ‘The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. Learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memory. This is how people care for themselves. One day you will be good storytellers. Never forget these obligations.’ (Holstun Lopez 1993, p. 60)

I put down the book and smile and say that tonight we are going to start by having each of us tell a story. I tell them that stories are always partial, contextual, temporal, embodied and are filled with emotion. Our stories matter to us, I say. I also tell them we have lots of time tonight for telling our stories. I tell them that I will go first. I do not tell them of the many theories (Miller 1994; Bateson 1989, 1995; Greene 1995) in which my knowing is grounded. I weave a story of growing up and speak of my early landscapes and then slide forward in time to going to university, to teach, to university as a graduate student and to my work as a professor. I weave in places like the farm and community where I grew up and the farm on which I now live, naming cities like Edmonton, Toronto, Calgary. I talk of emotions, fears of living in between spaces, the joys of being a mother and of events that happened as I composed a life, my life. I am intentional in what I am doing for I want to tell the story attentive to what Michael Connelly and I call the “three-dimensional narrative inquiry space” with its



Chapter 3.╇ Becoming a narrative inquirer 

dimensions of temporality, sociality and place. When I end my story 6 minutes later, I know they are carefully thinking about how long to tell, what to tell, how safe the place is. They have noticed I talked of childhood, of education, of the personal and the professional. They know I have allowed my feelings to show. I smile. “Who would like to go next?” There is a dis/ease in the room. They have all been in classes or professional development sessions where there are ice breakers such as the one where you listen to someone else for a couple of minutes and then introduce them saying something about them. They are figuring out something different is at work here. People take turns telling their stories until we are around the circle. Everyone takes a turn. There is silence as everyone attends to each story, each person. Lives start to become visible. Depending on how many of us there are, sometimes we take a break, fill our teacups, go to the washroom. When we have each had a turn, I smile and say what an amazing group of people have come to class. I talk again about stories as co-compositions, as contextual, as partial, as always in the making, as embodied. Again, I do not talk long for I know if I start to theorize, the pencils will come out and the class will become one more that follows the wellknown story of graduate studies. In this class we are trying to learn to think narratively, to think with our stories, and we can only do that if we begin with our stories. I smile again, saying, “For next week please write a story, the one you told tonight or a different one. It can be any story but you must be a character in it. I am going to ask you to share it so make sure it is one you can tell to someone else.” A hand usually goes up, accompanied by questions: “How long should it be? Do you want it typed? Do we hand it in?” The story of being a good student in a graduate course takes over and I resist it with words like: “You decide … your story … handwritten or typed or drawn or painted if you like.” I see we have only half an hour left. I distribute the course outline and we talk our way through it. I ask them to sign up to bring snacks to class and to put their email or phone number on a sheet of paper so they can contact each other. I open a book; usually something from bell hooks (1997) and start to read to the students. First class is over.

3.â•… Learning to think narratively We teach narrative inquiry in an experiential way where we start with the telling of our own lived stories. These lived and told stories become the ground for learning to narratively inquire into our stories. Without each of us knowing what it means to think narratively, we cannot go forward. We cannot learn to become narrative inquirers by studying theories of narrative or identity or inquiry although we do all of that in the course. We need to start with ourselves,

 D. Jean Clandinin, Janice Huber, Pam Steeves & Yi Li

with engaging in autobiographical narrative inquiries (Clandinin & Connelly 2000). Learning to think narratively involves learning to interrupt the dominant narrative of university. And the interruption needs to begin in the first class. Our understanding of narrative inquiry as a kind of research for people means it is vital that class participants experience the profound possibilities of relational narrative inquiry in their own lives and works-in-progress as they attend this class. We therefore attempt to create situations that will enable students to have the experience of learning and researching in relational ways, to prepare students (Dewey 1938) to live out their lives as narrative inquirers. There is much to take into account. We gather together around a large ‘table place’ intentionally placed to create a kind of circle so that we, participants and instructor(s), are not separated one from the other. Our joined together table holds the promise of a kitchen table where stories will be shared and lives inquired into. We mark the relational space we are creating by readings to begin and end the class. We call these readings “bookends.” This place we create, signified within bookends, is a place we will breathe our lives into as the weeks unfold, a place that will come alive in unique dynamic and layered ways, ones that are generative and regenerative (Casey 1996), filled with memories and expectation. Framing the class meeting with bookends allows us to hold open and support the possibility of a safe educative place, a place where a responsive community might begin to come together, a place where we might become otherwise, transitioning towards ways of thinking narratively as researchers. It is within this space that the workings of the class take place which include reflective activities such as narrative inquiry into photographs, composing annals, chronicles and memory box work (Clandinin, Steeves & Chung 2007; Connelly & Clandinin 1988) and other work of the class described in this chapter.

4.â•… Bookends: The centrality of story The ‘bookends’ practice invites a space within our newly configured class group where I can be more comfortable with relational playfulness and improvisation, where a sense of adventure, tension and hopefulness begin to enter our knowing as narrative inquirers. Beginning and ending our narrative inquiry class with ‘bookends’ has become a kind of protocol, a bow of respect to the sacredness of the place we create together. And so I begin. It is almost time. Looking around with anticipation I say the opening words of a book I love. Remembering the profound shifting I myself felt as I began to realize my life anew as a narrative inquirer I read What You Know First by Patricia MacLachlan (1995). Our class place hushes. Our learning in this narrative inquiry class will first call us to attend through the heart of story, together as human beings, opening our attention



Chapter 3.╇ Becoming a narrative inquirer 

to the wholeness of life, our lives. Relationality is foregrounded in the books I choose, illuminating threads that weave us together. It is too early to articulate the three-dimensional inquiry space in narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly 2000) yet, I believe the bookend readings offer a subtle summoning of our imaginations and our hearts to begin to sense the layered space of temporality, the personal and social dimensions of experience along with the physicality of place. As we, for example, listen to Whale Song (Sheldon 1991) we become once again the young child waiting on the shoreline listening for the whale’s song; our imaginations begin to run, triggering our attention spider like. Our knowing spins outward toward people, places and things in our pasts, in our presents and in our futures, evoking a web of imaginative threads. And so … Together now as the weeks go by we feel the loneliness of Soloman Singer (Rylant 1992). We are with Soloman as he tries to negotiate his present day apartment with no view in a new city and then we travel back with him as he moves in his imagination to his long ago farm in the Kansas wheat fields. We are pulled forward by the hope that the waiter, Angel, at the Westway café, the place Soloman walks to every night for some supper, might someday become his friend. We are touched by the story that begs us to listen. And, we wonder, deeply, about Soloman’s life. The final bookend reading at the end of class brings all of us once more together in a shared experience. Perhaps the reading will affirm still fragile stories of becoming narrative inquirers. Maybe the reading will give us courage to remember and believe in what has happened in the class … so different perhaps from many university classes. Or it could be that the reading acts as a way to reconnect us all and build our hope and wonderment, to pull us to return again in another week. Or maybe something else again … the story of the The Rag Coat lingers in the air as class departs, “All you need is people,” it implores (Mills 1991).

Our bookends are chosen with care and they vary from class to class and include commercially available international storybooks, memoirs and scholarly texts. A piece from the autobiography, Long Quiet Highway (Goldberg 1993), evokes the emotional journey of a writing life. An illustrated book of children’s literature releases our imaginations (Greene 1995). As we listen to the stories shared in the books, people’s lives become visible and “we find ourselves actually entering into their realities by means not solely of our reasoning power but of our imagination” (Greene 1995, p. 3). For example, in Owl Moon (Yolen 1987), we are pulled temporally and spatially back to the landscapes of our childhoods (Greene 1978) as a young child and her Pa venture out in the moonlit snow to the woods in back of their Maine farm to go owling. Their outing draws us into both interior and exterior landscapes (Marmon Silko 1996). We are asked to imagine hope: “The kind of hope that flies on silent wings under a shining Owl Moon” (Yolen 1987).

 D. Jean Clandinin, Janice Huber, Pam Steeves & Yi Li

The bookend stories are an immediate stretching open of our emotions, our aesthetic and spiritual senses and our moral imaginations, inviting a fuller attention and participation in this narratively constructed classroom space. The bookend readings provide a safe ‘way in’ to attending in relational ways within our works-in-progress groups (Appendix). Tentative relationships amongst all of our stories and us begin to inter-lap (Sweetland, Huber & Keats Whelan 2004), a new story unfolding … a counterstory (Lindemann Nelson 1995) to the dominant narrative, the story of our narrative inquiry class.

5.â•… L  earning to become narrative inquirers through storytelling, response and dialogue As we gather back around the table circle, we are in the midst of our third class. Students have just finished meeting in their first works-in-progress groups where each person in a small group read a story she/he wrote for tonight’s class. After each person shared her/his story the other group members responded. As this storytelling and response unfolded in small groups formed at the edges of the table circle and out into the hallway, I have only been able to participate peripherally, spending a few moments with each group. And, yet, I sense this beginning of storytelling and response has been powerful and valuable. As I moved between groups I sometimes heard a storyteller sharing her story, her voice cautious as she started. In other groups I listened as a group member hesitantly responded to a story shared, sometimes by asking a question, sometimes by telling a story from her/his life, sometimes by expressing emerging wonders shaped as earlier lived experiences became entangled with the story just shared. Before returning to our table circle a few students stop to fill their cups with tea and, as they do, they linger with one another, still talking about or feeling a story shared. Other students continue sharing in their small groups; their conversation becomes gradually muted by the swell of voices returning to the circle. When I earlier read fragments from The Bat Poet (Jarrell 1997) of the mockingbird’s response to the little bat’s poem, there was much laughter: “Why, I like it,” said the mockingbird. “Technically it’s quite accomplished. The way you change the rhyme-scheme’s particularly effective” (p. 15). As I now try to shape a space where we can talk together about what the students just experienced I re-read the little bat’s sense of the complexity of sharing and receiving response to stories of experience: ‘Why, I might as well have said it [my poem] to the bats. What do I care how many feet it has? The owl nearly kills me, and he says he likes the rhyme-scheme!’. … After a while he said to himself: ‘The trouble isn’t making poems, the trouble’s finding somebody that will listen to them’ (p. 15)



Chapter 3.╇ Becoming a narrative inquirer 

Tentatively, I ask how students experienced the sharing and response process in their small works-in-progress groups. What are they thinking about? What are they feeling? It is quiet for a few moments and then one student speaks, talking about the fear she felt as she shared her story and how this shifted as the members in her group responded. After a few more moments of quiet another student expresses his wonder at what just happened; he does not think he has ever before experienced this kind of attentiveness to his stories; he says because he is still somewhat in the midst of trying to understand all he’s just experienced in his work-in-progress group he feels he cannot yet say anything more. Another student wonders aloud about shaping these kinds of spaces in her work alongside youth.

The Bat Poet (Jarrell 1997), shared as it was as a bookend at the beginning of a class, shaped an invitation for students to carefully attend to their life and to one another’s lives as they moved into what became weekly works-in-progress groups for sharing their autobiographical narrative inquiries. 6.â•… Composing works-in-progress As I open the big two-inch thick blue binder I have carried around, but not looked through for years, the first thing I see is the official letter signed by Jean and Janice on the letterhead of the Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development, Faculty of Education, University of Alberta, indicating that I received credit for this course. The note, written to me as Lisa, indicated that I was given credit for the course and referred to the last class. ‘Our last evening together was truly a celebration of the possibilities created when we work together negotiating spaces where we can engage in work that is meaningfilled for each one of us. Thank you for living and telling stories that helped to make this possible.’ Tears well up in my eyes as I read this letter, remembering what happened ten years ago. I did not go to that last class on April 10, 2000 to celebrate our learning alongside the other 13 course participants by sharing our works-in-progress papers. I stayed away, far away from the university campus. In an email to Jean and Janice before this last class, I told them I was reconsidering finishing my master’s degree. By then, I already knew it was impossible for me to complete my programme at the end of April. With my hopes dashed, my dreams broken, things no longer made any sense at that point in my life and I had to stop.

 D. Jean Clandinin, Janice Huber, Pam Steeves & Yi Li

When I handed in my half-a-page works-in-progress proposal on January 24, 2000, during our third class, I indicated my intention of writing the thesis as my workin-progress. In her penciled response, Jean wrote the following: ‘Have you found Ming Fang’s1 work helpful? I am so interested in your work – I hope that you will get the support in our class to do this, Lisa/Yi Li. Over the next 10 weeks, I shared my work-in-progress with Janice and another course participant, who listened and responded to my writing. As narrative inquirers, we were encouraged to write “narrative beginnings”, stories of our own experiences that were related to our research puzzles and allowed us to speak to the personal, practical and social justification of our studies (Clandinin & Connelly 2000). As my research puzzle for my master’s thesis centred around the transitional experiences of Chinese international students from China to Canada, each week I wrote stories of my schooling experiences in China, or stories of my teaching experiences in China, or stories of my coming to Canada. Never before in my life did I write so many stories in either Chinese or English until I took that course! Initially, I was not comfortable sharing my stories. Personal experiences were never valued or seen as a source of knowledge in my previous formal education. However, through storying my past experiences and sharing them with my works-in-progress group members, I began to see and understand my stories in new and different ways, sometimes because of the questions, comments or wonders they had about my stories. In her written response to my first story The Rocky Road to Becoming a Certified School Teacher in Alberta, Canada (dated January 15, 2000), Janice wrote the following: ‘Your story helps me to recognize the huge borders the people who come to this country experience. I wonder what the possibilities might be if you talked with some of the school districts or other teachers from China who received an Alberta Teaching Certificate. How did they do it? I continue to learn so much from your stories.’

At that time, I was frustrated and angry with the slow application and evaluation process of becoming a certified teacher in Alberta. However, Janice’s questions made me pause and wonder. I began to ask my Chinese friends, who told me that I probably needed a B.Ed. degree. Since I did not have one, I eventually decided to pursue a doctoral degree instead of a teaching certificate upon completion of my master’s. As I engaged in dialogue writing with the course readings, doing the narrative dissertation review assignment (Connelly, Clandinin & Chan 2002)2 with a partner and

1.â•… This was a reference to Ming Fang He’s (1998) doctoral dissertation, Professional knowledge landscapes: Three Chinese women teachers’ enculturation and acculturation processes in China and Canada. 2.â•… We do not describe this assignment in detail in this chapter. The dissertation review is an ongoing paired or small group assignment and is described in detail in Clandinin, Connelly & Chan’s chapter in Lyons and LaBoskey’s (2002) book.



Chapter 3.╇ Becoming a narrative inquirer 

writing my own works-in-progress, gradually I became more “wide awake” (Greene 1995) to the kind of life I was living. I came to Canada with a single vision that I wanted to finish my master’s degree within two years and then return to China to teach and live happily ever after. I was all alone in Edmonton, trying to focus and concentrate on my studies while my husband Guoji was working in Jasper and our baby daughter, Yan Yan, was living with my parentsin-law in Shanghai, China. Without these two “distractions”, I thought I would finish my studies sooner. However, toward the end of my second year, my fragmented heart could no longer continue or focus on the work I was trying so hard to complete. I flew back to Shanghai and brought Yan Yan to Edmonton. Five months later, in midOctober 2000, Guoji joined us. It was not until then that I decided to go back to my thesis writing. I had already gone too far to give it all up.

Multiple layers of complexity and possibility shape the differing forms of storytelling, response and dialogue that live in our courses. One form with which course participants become familiar is similar to what Hoffman (1994) describes as “resonant remembering”, a process in which people attend both to what has happened in their lives and, also, to ways in which living through these events shaped “what happened within themselves” (p. 2). As earlier noted, as we read the bookends and students share their autobiographical narrative inquiries our intentions are to shape spaces where course participants develop a kind of inner dialogue and wakefulness as they attend to what they feel, imagine or remember of experiences in their lives that resonate with the stories read or shared. As course participants grow in trust with one another and us, another form of storytelling, response and dialogue begins to take shape as each person’s resonant stories are shared aloud. Participants are called to both carefully listen, and respond, to one another’s lived and told stories. Listening to another’s story is an ongoing process of discovering the “unfolding of a lived life rather than the confirmation such a chronicle provides for some theory” (Coles 1989, p. 22). In this way, listening to another’s story is a process threaded by much responsibility (King 2003; Clandinin & Connelly 2000; Huber, Clandinin & Huber 2006), a complex process through which we, both as story tellers and story listeners, are necessarily called toward changing ourselves (Basso 1996), toward retelling and reliving our stories (Clandinin & Connelly 1998). For these reasons, responding to another’s story is profoundly complex. Part of this complexity is shaped by the ways in which human lives are composed on landscapes shaped by dominant social, cultural, linguistic, familial and institutional narratives in which stories are understood only in terms of their usefulness in relation with casting blame, justifying actions

 D. Jean Clandinin, Janice Huber, Pam Steeves & Yi Li

and, sometimes, solving problems. What this shaping influence often means as we become narrative inquirers is that learning to respond to another’s story involves both unlearning and relearning. A central part of this reshaping or restorying of ourselves involves shifting from “arrogant to loving perception through ‘world’-travelling”: The reason why I think that travelling to someone’s ‘world’ is a way of identifying with them is because by travelling to their ‘world’ we can [begin to] understand what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes. Only when we have traveled to each other’s ‘worlds’ are we fully subject to each other.  (Lugones 1987, p. 17, italics in original)

Engaging in this relational way with one another requires careful, quiet listening, a kind of stilling of our voices so as to be as present as possible to what a person is sharing in his/her story. It is within this quiet attentiveness to someone else, to her/his life, that story listeners are called, compelled, to respond. Neither in our narrative inquiry courses nor in narrative inquiries is staying at the co-composition of these processes of storytelling, response and dialogue nonchalant; they are never about simply shaping smooth, harmonious, happily-ever-after relationships (Steeves et al. 2009). Both resonance and dissonance between storied lives shapes the relational in narrative inquiry and it is in this way that attention to tensions is vital, uncomfortable and ongoing work (Clandinin, Murphy, Huber & Murray Orr 2010; Sweetland, Huber & Keats Whelan 2004). We are intentional when we set up the works-in-progress as one of the key course experiences in our teaching of narrative inquiry. Thinking narratively about a phenomenon, central to undertaking narrative inquiries, entails thinking and attending within the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space – temporality, sociality and place. The works-in-progress groups encourage course participants to learn to become narrative inquirers in an experiential way as they begin to tell their own lived stories and inquiries. As course participants begin to respond to the bookends and to one another’s stories they are supported in this process through their simultaneous engagement with course readings (see Appendix) intended to strengthen their understanding of, and inquiry into, these significant and deeply human interactions within narrative inquiries. Long before meeting course participants we organize our course readings (Appendix) around what we have learned are significant aspects of narrative inquiry, such as: connecting our emerging research puzzles with our lives; being in the field; composing and/or co-composing field, interim and research texts; the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space; the relational, unfolding and longterm ethics within narrative inquiries; attention to tensions; relational voice and signature and so on (Clandinin & Connelly 2000). We ask students to engage with



Chapter 3.╇ Becoming a narrative inquirer 

the course readings attentive to the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space so that, as they respond, their embodied experiential knowledge does not become denied or distanced by the laying on of abstract theories or generalizations. As students engage weekly in this kind of reading, they compose a written text which, during class time, they are invited to share, both in small groups and at the table. Each course participant’s individually composed written dialogues with the readings are also shared with us. It is in this way that another kind of storytelling, response and dialogue between each course participant and us, as instructors, takes shape. Each week we read and respond in the margins of the pages of course participants’ written dialogues, asking questions and puzzling with them over ideas. Often we encourage them to “say more” about the lives they are composing in relation with the readings. These two kinds of responses to these written dialogues, both the in-class oral response and our written response, is important as we all need to be careful to not slip into the dominant research narratives of living as all-knowing critics or experts. Instead, our goal is to support the narrative inquiry, the narrative thinking with stories, of course participants, and ourselves, as we engage in a kind of narrative dialogue with the authors whom we are reading; a dialogue that gradually spirals and becomes threaded with each of our lives as these texts are shared and responded to. 7.â•… Last class … new beginnings As we gather one last time around our kitchen table place, a tangible energy permeates the space; it is filled with excitement and tension around the sharing of our works-inprogress pieces. We have grown toward this time … We listen with gratitude and anticipation as one by one each participant speaks, revealing new perspectives, new questions and new wonders around their work. Gradually over thirteen weeks, threads of tentativeness and grace – a willingness to live with uncertainty, have entered our knowing as narrative inquirers, acknowledging our moving world, one in which we will always find ourselves in the midst, one in which we will always be on our way. Significantly, in retelling our works-in-progress in this class, we are pulled to imagine becoming otherwise.

References Basso, K. (1996). Wisdom sits in places: Landscape and language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Bateson, M.C. (1989). Composing a life. New York, NY: Grove Press. Bateson, M.C. (1995). Peripheral visions: Learning along the way. Toronto: Harper Collins.

 D. Jean Clandinin, Janice Huber, Pam Steeves & Yi Li Caine, V. & Steeves, P. (2009, September 29). Imagining and playfulness in narrative inquiry. International Journal of Education and the Arts, 10(25). Retrieved 23 June, 2010 from: http://www.ijea.org/v10n25/index.html. Casey, E. (1996). How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time. In S. Feld & K. Basso (Eds.), Senses of place (pp. 13–52). Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Clandinin, D.J. (Ed.). (2007). Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, F.M. (1998). Asking questions about telling stories. In C. Kridel (Ed.), Writing educational biography: Explorations in qualitative research (pp. 245–253). New York NY: Garland. Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, F.M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in educational research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Clandinin, D.J., Connelly, F.M., & Chan, E. (2002). Three narrative teaching practices – One narrative teaching exercise. In N. Lyons & V. LaBoskey (Eds.), Narrative inquiry in practice: Advancing the knowledge of teaching (pp. 133–145). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Clandinin, D.J., & Murphy, S.M. (2007). Looking ahead: Conversations with Elliott Mishler, Don Polkinghorne and Amia Lieblich. In D.J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology (pp. 632–650). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Clandinin, D.J., & Murphy, M.S. (2009). Comments on Coulter and Smith: Relational ontological commitments in narrative research. Educational Researcher, 38(8), 598–602. Clandinin, D.J., Murphy, M.S., Huber, J., & Murray Orr, A. (2010). Negotiating narrative inquiries: Living in a tension-filled midst. The Journal of Educational Research, 103(2), 81–90. Clandinin, D.J., & Rosiek, J. (2007). Mapping a landscape of narrative inquiry: Borderland spaces and tensions. In D.J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology (pp. 35–75). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Clandinin, D.J., Steeves, P., & Chung, S. (2007). Creating narrative inquiry spaces in teacher education. In B. Johnston & K. Walls (Eds.), Voice and vision in language teacher education: Selected papers form the Fourth International Conference on Language Teacher Education (pp. 17–33). Minneapolis, MN: CARLA Working Paper Series. Coles, R. (1989). The call of stories: Teaching and the moral imagination. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Connelly, F.M., & Clandinin, D.J. (1988). Teachers as curriculum planners: Narratives of experience. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Connelly, F.M., & Clandinin, D.J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19(5), 2–14. Connelly, F.M., & Clandinin, D.J. (2006). Narrative inquiry. In J.L. Green, G. Camilli & P.B. Elmore (Eds.), Handbook of complementary methods in education research (pp. 477–487). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Craig, C.J., & Huber, J. (2007). Relational reverberations: Shaping and reshaping narrative inquiries in the midst of storied lives and contexts. In D.J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology (pp. 251–279). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York, NY: Macmillan. Goldberg, N. (1993). Long quiet highway: Waking up in America. New York NY: Bantam Books. Greene, M. (1978). Landscapes of learning. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social Change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.



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He, M.F. (1998). Professional knowledge landscapes: Three Chinese women teachers’ enculturation and acculturation processes in China and Canada. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, OISE/University of Toronto. Hoffman, E. (1994). Let memory speak. New York Times Book Review, January 23, 1994. New York, NY: The New York Times. Holstun Lopez, B. (1993). Crow and weasel. New York, NY: Harper Perennial. hooks, b. (1997). Bone black: Memories of girlhood. Toronto: Holt Paperbacks. Huber, M., Clandinin, D.J., & Huber, J. (2006). Relational responsibilities as narrative inquirers. Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue, 8(1–2), 209–223. Jarrell, R. (1997). The bat poet. Toronto, ON: Harper Collins. King, T. (2003). The truth about stories: A native narrative. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press. Lindemann Nelson, H. (1995). Resistance and insubordination. Hypatia, 10(2), 23–40. Lugones, M. (1987). Playfulness, “world”-travelling, and loving perception. Hypatia, 2(2), 3–19. Lyons, N., & LaBoskey, V. (Eds.). (2002). Narrative inquiry in practice: Advancing the knowledge of teaching. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. MacLachlan, P. (1995). What you know first. Pasadena, CA: Harper Collins. Marmon Silko, L. (1996). Yellow woman and a beauty of the spirit: Essays on native American life today. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Miller, J.L. (1994). “The surprise of a recognizable person” as troubling presence in educational research and writing. Curriculum Inquiry, 24(4), 503–512. Mills, L. (1991). The rag coat. Toronto, ON: Little Brown and Company. Morris, D.B. (2002). Narrative, ethics, and pain: Thinking with stories. In R. Charon & M. Montello (Eds.), Stories matter: The role of narrative in medical ethics (pp. 196–218). New York, NY: Routledge. Rylant, C. (1992). An angel for Soloman Singer. New York, NY: Orchard Books. Sheldon, D. (1991). The whales’ song. Toronto, ON: Puffin. Steeves, P., Yeom, J.S., Pushor, D., Nelson, C., Mwebi, B.M., Murphy, M.S., Murray Orr, A., Glanfield, F., Huber, J., & Clandinin, D.J., (2009). The research issues table: A place of possibilities for the education of teacher educators. In C.J. Craig & L.F. Deretchin (Eds.), Teacher learning in small-group settings: Teacher education yearbook XVII (pp. 303–320). Toronto, ON: Rowman & Littlefield Education. Sweetland, W., Huber, J., & Keats Whelan, K. (2004). Narrative inter-lappings: Recognizing difference across tension. Reflective Practice, 5(1), 45–74. Yolen, J. (1987). Owl moon. New York, NY: Philomel.

Appendix EDES 601: Narrative and story in research and curriculum studies Course outline Class tasks/purposes: The key term is narrative inquiry. Within that, the terms for our interest are social justification, narrative truths, and positioning the inquiry within traditions of inquiry. Some useful terms in thinking about these are memory, fact and fiction, narrative form, and inquiry at the edges/boundaries (fluid inquiry in Schwab’s terms or paradigm shifts in Kuhn’s).

 D. Jean Clandinin, Janice Huber, Pam Steeves & Yi Li The following are my preliminary thoughts on the class. We will, undoubtedly, modify this. 1. 2.

3. 4.

Common core of class readings. A set of readings can be purchased at the University Bookstore. You will need to read Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research (Clandinin & Connelly 2000). It is available at the University Bookstore. Dissertation review. Review, recover meaning and discuss one or more narrative dissertations in the context of educational inquiry generally. I would like you to work with at least one other class participant on this task. Reviewing the dissertation is not to be a criticism: it is to be seen as positive dialogue within a narrative community. Your task is both to study the journey of a narrative inquirer and to share your understandings of that journey in a class presentation. Dissertations should be selected early in the course. This will allow time for correspondence with researchers and meeting with them if possible. Where possible, read the dissertation proposal as well as the dissertation. Undertake a works-in-progress. Participate in class discussions focused on readings or other issues.

Assignments: 1.

Written Dialogue with the Text: Each participant will engage in a written dialogue with the assigned readings. Suggested structure:

2. 3.

a. Begin with your experience in relation with the readings … What does this reading bring forward from your experience? b. Recovery of meaning. … What is the author saying? c. Reconstruction of meaning. … What do I make of the author’s text? Do I agree with what the author is saying? What difference would this text make to my research? d. Reading at the edges. … What are the rubbing points with other works, values, and methodologies in the field? Working with at least one other person, class presentation of a dissertation journey. The purpose of the presentation is to highlight the narrative inquiry of the researcher. We will discuss options for this in class. Works-in-progress. Write a half page proposal for w-i-p, due early in course. These works-in-progress will be shared on April 12, 2010. You will need to submit your worksin-progress at the end of the course.

Each class: 1. 2. 3.

Small group discussions of written dialogues. Large group discussion will focus around one or two questions emerging from the assigned readings. Works-in-progress groups where each participant’s ongoing research is shared within a sustained conversation group.



Chapter 3.╇ Becoming a narrative inquirer 

Evaluation: The course is evaluated on the University of Alberta’s grading system. The following grading system will be used. For A╇╅completion of WIPs (includes final paper), dissertation assignment, 11 written dialogues, class participation. For A–â•…completion of WIPs (includes final paper), dissertation assignment, 9 written dialogues, class participation. For B+â•…completion of WIPs (includes final paper), dissertation assignment, 5 written dialogues, class participation. For B╇╅completion of WIPs (no final paper), dissertation assignment, 2 written dialogues, class participation.

Readings January 11 First day of class.

January 18 1.

Clandinin & Connelly Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research (chs. 1–10)

January 25â•… (Narrative identity/becoming a narrative inquirer) 1. 2. 3. 4.

Coles “Stories and Theories” (ch. 1 in The Call of Stories). Bateson “Emergent Visions” (ch. 1 in Composing a Life). Sarris “Peeling Potatoes” (Prologue in Keeping Slug Woman Alive) Gergen “Once Upon a Time: A Narratologist’s Tale”

February 1â•… (Experience as a narrative construction) 1. 2. 3. 4.

Crites (a cartoon) Bruner Lindemann Nelson

“The Narrative Quality of Experience” “Phi Delta Kappa” “Life as Narrative” “Resistance and Insubordination”

February 8â•… (Personal/social in narrative inquiry) 1. 2. 3.

Zinsser “Writing and Remembering” (in Inventing the Truth) (a cartoon) “For Better or For Worse Cartoon” hooks Introduction to Wounds of Passion

 D. Jean Clandinin, Janice Huber, Pam Steeves & Yi Li 4. 5. 6.

Bateson “Attending a World” (ch. 7 in Peripheral Visions) Lugones “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception” Chamoiseau Preface, “Longing” (in School Days)

February 22â•… (Place in narrative inquiry) 1. 2.

Bateson “Full Circles” (ch. 10 in Full Circles, Overlapping Lives) Silko Introduction to Yellow Woman and Beauty of the Spirit

March 1â•… (Temporality in narrative inquiry) 1. 2. 3.

Carr “The Self and the Coherence of Time” (ch. 3 in Time, Narrative and History) Kerby “Time and Memory” (in Narrative and the Self) Torgovnick “On Being White, Female, and Born in Bensonhurst”, Afterword (in Crossing Ocean Parkway)

March 8â•… (Composing field texts) 1. 2. 3. 4.

Goldberg “A Deep Source of My Writing” (ch. 6 from Living Color) (a cartoon) “For Better or For Worse” Coles “The Person as Documentarian: Moral and Psychological Tensions” (ch. 2 from Doing Documentary Work) Clandinin & Rosiek “Mapping a landscape of narrative inquiry: Borderland spaces and tension” (ch. 2 in Handbook of Narrative Inquiry)

March 15â•… (Composing research texts) 1. 2. 3. 4.

Ely “In-Forming Re-Presentations” (in Handbook of Narrative Inquiry) Neumann “Ways without Words” (in Learning From Our Lives) Lorde “Poetry is Not a Luxury” (in Sister Outsider) Dillard “To Fashion a Text” (In Inventing the Truth)

March 22â•… (Imagination and memory in narrative inquiry) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Greene “The Shapes of Childhood Recalled” (ch. 6 in Releasing the Imagination). Heilbrun “The Rewards of Liminality” (ch. 4 in Women’s Lives) Hoffman “Let Memory Speak” Huber & Whelan “Entangled Lives: Enacting Transient Social Identities” (ch. 2 in Stories Within and Between Selves: Identities in.Relation on the Professional Knowledge Landscape). McMillen “Entangled Stories”. Sarbin “The Role of Imagination in Narrative Construction” (in Narrative Analysis).



Chapter 3.╇ Becoming a narrative inquirer 

March 29â•… (Ethics in narrative inquiry) 1. 2. 3. 4.

Clandinin & Connelly “Studying Teachers’ Knowledge of Classrooms: Collaborative Research, Ethics, and the Negotiation of Narrative”. Schulz “Issues of Care” (in Interpreting Teacher Practice). Josselson “On Writing Other People’s Lives” (in Ethics and Process in the Narrative Study of Lives). Clandinin & Murphy “Looking Ahead: Conversations With Elliot Mishler, Don Polkinghorne, and Amia Lieblich” (in Handbook of Narrative Inquiry).

April 12 Works-In-Progress presentations

chapter 4

The circle game Narrative inquiry as a way of life in ACE, a teacher education programme Ariela Gidron, Bobbie Turniansky, Smadar Tuval, Ruth Mansur & Judith Barak* The Kaye Academic College of Education/Beer Sheva

ACE (Active, Collaborative Education), a post-graduate teacher education programme (pre-school -12 and special education), is based on the Aristotelian understanding of ‘Phronesis’, that sees teaching as a profession based on practical knowledge and ways of being that are context related and learnt through practice and the study of practice, rather than a profession based on ‘implementing theory’. Thus the everyday situations of being in schools with children grow to be the major texts which are written and interpreted. In this context the narrative inquiry approach has become a way of life in the programme, serving as a framework that invites both students and teacher educators to purposefully bring their stories, personal and professional, into the different learning communities and construct personal and shared wisdom of practice. However, like the teaching profession itself, we claim that narrative inquiry is an artful skill, a practical wisdom. Although it can be taught theoretically, it cannot be learned without being engaged in it in practice. In this chapter we tell three stories related to circles of narrative inquiry as a way of life in ACE.

1.â•… Introduction Teaching is a complex profession though it looks easy to many. Our view is that a good lesson cannot be taken apart and handed over as a recipe to be followed step by step. As teacher educators, some major questions that concern us are: How can practice turn into meaningful experience? When does experience become meaningful? And, how can we help our students turn their practice into meaningful, professional experience? *╇ Authors’ names appear in random order.

 Ariela Gidron, Bobbie Turniansky, Smadar Tuval, Ruth Mansur & Judith Barak

Dewey wrote almost 100 years ago (1938) that in order to learn how to teach one has to teach, be in school and live the learning situation from within. However, experience alone is not necessarily educative. To make our experience meaningful, we need to carefully reflect on it and study it with two principles in mind (Dewey 1938): the principle of interaction and the principle of continuity that together help define the complexity of the experience. Based on Dewey’s theory, Connelly and Clandinin developed the concepts of “professional knowledge landscape” and “practical professional knowledge” (1985, 1995), as part of their narrative approach to teaching and teacher education, and have marked narrative inquiry as a preferred way of both learning its complexity and navigating within it. The narrative approach views people’s stories as the next closest expression to the lived experience itself, and at the same time as an expression of the personal interpretation formulated by the cultural and social context of the teller’s life (Bruner 1987, 1996; Polkinghorne 1995; Gergen 1995). As such it is both a sequence of events and an implied evaluation of the events recounted. The events recounted in the story take their meaning from the story as a whole, but the story as a whole is something that is constructed from its parts. Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, & Zilber (1998) see personal stories as one’s identity: “… created, told, revised, and retold throughout life. We know or discover ourselves and reveal ourselves to others, by the stories we tell” (p. 7). The narrative approach to teacher education is grounded in the theoretical stance that people are story-tellers by nature and that stories provide coherence and continuity to their experiences and play a central role in their communication with others (Elbaz 1991; Goodson 1992; Lieblich et al. 1998). Connelly and Clandinin (1998) define narrative work of teachers as a process of sense making with story telling as its main reflective tool. The professional landscape of the authors of this article is ACE, (Active Collaborative Education), a two-year, post-graduate teacher education programme in Israel, preparing teachers to work in kinder garten, elementary and high school and special education. Our heterogeneous student group includes men and women, Jews, Christian Arabs and Moslem Arabs, recent immigrants and Israeli-born, secular and religious, ages 25–45, single and married, with and without children, from big cities, small towns and rural areas. The ACE curriculum is a learning environment that is a set of intertwined workshops, most of them co–taught by the programme team of educators, not an aggregate of courses. We believe that like the teaching profession itself, narrative inquiry is an artful skill, a practical wisdom. Although it can be taught theoretically, it cannot be learned without engaging in it in practice. In order to turn their practice teaching into experiences of educational value, we invite our students to turn their elusive lived experiences into a text that they can tell others, study and interpret



Chapter 4.╇ The circle game: Narrative inquiry as a way of life in ACE 

from the aspects of the two principles described above. In our experience, this complex learning process cannot be taken for granted for the following reasons: –â•fi Learning situations occur in the present but we can only talk about them in retrospect. –â•fi Any teaching-learning situation is comprised of context and time dependent multiple actions that happen simultaneously and therefore, cannot be taken apart without losing the grand picture. –â•fi To study a given teaching-learning situation one has to go out of it and look at it as an outsider. It means being both involved and objective at the same time. Looking for a meaningful way to overcome the difficulties presented above, we have turned the narrative inquiry approach into a way of life in the programme. It serves as a framework inviting both students and ourselves to bring their personal and professional stories into our learning communities, facilitating the development of personal and shared wisdom of practice. Our approach enables reflecting upon the process of learning, both from the perspective of the single situation with its unique context and interactions, and from the chronological stance of time and continuity (Dewey 1938). It allows us to bring into the fore, in a non-threatening way, otherwise hidden, taken for granted beliefs and norms of culture in one’s ‘personal baggage’. It facilitates an intimate, though non-invasive, opportunity for students, and even more so for teacher educators, to widen their horizons of knowing with worlds of meaningmaking that might be different than their own. And finally, our use of stories and narrative inquiry enables the students to read a complex, multi-faceted class situation, think with alternatives and look at a given situation from several possible points of view – educational as well as cultural and personal. In this chapter we tell three stories related to overlapping circles of narrative inquiry as a way of life in ACE: 1. Telling identity stories: The story of teaching narrative inquiry through telling cultural stories on the way to developing future teachers’ professional identities. 2. From stories to learning texts: The story of teaching first-year students narrative inquiry through using their stories from the field to build a learning space where they can study their practice. 3. From learning texts to self-study: The story of teaching second-year students narrative inquiry and self-study as professional tools they can use to explore their teaching experiences and develop their individual professional roads.

 Ariela Gidron, Bobbie Turniansky, Smadar Tuval, Ruth Mansur & Judith Barak

2.â•… Telling identity stories – “cultural identity – personal and professional” From the personal identity course I learned to understand the other. I understood that there are other lives and they are certainly normal, even though they are very different from my life and the things that I take for granted. In the course I heard stories that had I heard in other places I would have been shocked, felt pity or been judgmental because they are not like my life. In the workshop I heard the story teller and his feelings and opinions and for him this is the real life. These things gave me a new perspective, to see things that are unacceptable to me beyond the stereotypes, understand them and even accept them.  (S – Religious Jewish student)

The first circle in our narrative inquiry is “Cultural Identity – Personal and Professional”, a workshop we developed in light of our understanding that personal and professional identity develops within social-cultural contexts and is influenced by those contexts. This is a mandatory workshop for all first year students in the ACE programme. Questions of identity cannot be isolated from other professional questions and those are discussed in all of our programme’s components, however this workshop focuses intentionally on cultural aspects of personal and professional identity and places professional questions within a specific cultural context. The workshop groups are intentionally structured so that each group includes all of the heterogeneity of the student group. Widening our horizons to include the other in our realm of understanding is crucial for everyday interactions and is even greater in professional contexts. In practice, the problem with such a multicultural attitude is embedded in our limited ability, as individuals, to grasp the other in terms different than our own, and as ‘cultural beings’ (Lurie 2000), to extend our cultural horizons of understanding beyond the boundaries shaped by our own contextually situated life stories. Understanding the other person’s culture demands extra effort and a certain amount of risk-taking on the part of the knower as Delpit (1988, p. 297) reminds us: We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs. To put our beliefs on hold is to cease to exist as ourselves for a moment – and that is not easy.

As explained to the students, the goals of the workshop are to help them understand their own cultural identities and their influence on their professional practice and to help them develop intercultural sensitivity through learning to see life from more than one perspective. Another, tacit goal is socialization into a teacher education programme that relies heavily on storytelling and narrative inquiry. This workshop takes place during the first semester of our two-year programme. As a result of timing, it is the first workshop in which the students tell stories. Not only



Chapter 4.╇ The circle game: Narrative inquiry as a way of life in ACE 

do they tell stories, the stories they tell are very intimate stories of their past – their families, their religion, their life. While some students easily invite others into their life, for others telling these stories requires acts of great courage. The experience of listening to stories told by their peers and seeing and hearing the reactions of the group to these stories often provides the support that the more reticent participants need in order to allow themselves to self-disclose. In one of our class meetings C talked about school and her experiences and how they rebelled against their teacher. I immediately remembered something that I was involved with in junior high. This is a story that I didn’t mean to tell but there was something comfortable in this wonderful group of ours that let me tell it all.  (R – Bedouin student)

Based on an exercise developed by Jane Zeni (undated personal communication), the workshop revolves around students’ personal stories relating to universal cultural dimensions such as gender, race, generation, place of residence, religion, ethnic heritage, education, class and family. As a first step into narrative inquiry, the workshop follows a fairly standard framework although each group and each group facilitator obviously puts their own stamp on the weekly meetings. The meetings are dynamic, and change in response to the needs of the moment, but in general, they can be described as a series of ‘spirals’ that emerge from each other: –â•fi Story writing – Ten minutes of writing personal stories relating to the specific dimension. –â•fi Story sharing – Students tell their stories and others in the group respond by mirroring (which will be explained later) or asking clarifying questions. –â•fi Conceptualizing – After hearing several stories the group tries to conceptualize their learning about the specific cultural dimension. –â•fi Re-telling – The students look back at their own stories, beliefs, and attitudes in light of the stories of the others and the discussion. We call this “your story – my story”. At the end of the semester the students write a personal culture article on the cultural background that they bring to their work. This personal article tells the student’s story through the prisms of three or four dimensions of their choice and includes insights stemming from the processes of telling and discussing cultural identity stories in the group. As opposed to the weekly in-class writing, in this article the students put together the cultural mosaic in which they were raised and explore the meanings it has on who they are today and what they bring with them to their professional situations. Students receive extensive feedback on their article but no letter or number grade.

 Ariela Gidron, Bobbie Turniansky, Smadar Tuval, Ruth Mansur & Judith Barak

The workshop that had affected me the most was ‘identity’ because for me it was emotional, unifying and added to the personal value of each of us. From this workshop I learned to listen to others more than ever and I also learned to respect and accept others no matter what background they come from. The workshop also help me express what was inside of me and include others in what was in my heart, in personal details that were very hard and that was something I never did in a big, heterogeneous group before. And it help me feel good and released pressure although in the beginning it was hard. But in the end I felt that all of us in the group opened ourselves up and became good friends who were part of all of each other’s feelings – joy, sadness, anger, loss …  (N – Bedouin student, personal journal, 2007)

Narrative inquiry – and the teaching of it create space for dialogue, often uncomfortable but dialogue nonetheless, between people from different contexts and traditions. This process uses materials that come from experiences in the past and the present that are told as stories that, in turn, redesign these experiences (Sfard & Prusak 2005). Telling stories about our culture helps us become conscious of our experiences and the ensuing dialogue invites further study and examination of the meaning it bears on who we are. As the stories are told within a multicultural environment, the dialogue allows the participants to actually live the experience of being part of a diverse learning community. In this way the workshop provides experience in ‘telling and listening’ and helps build confidence and an expanding comfort zone around these activities that help build the groundwork for moving into the next circle: ‘from stories to learning texts’. 3.â•… From stories to learning texts – Wisdom of Practice 1 ‘My story from last week’ I told this story to some of you, anyhow it is a story I learnt a lot from. I prepared a poem for a Hebrew class titled: “When it rains outside”, written by Jonathan Geffen. I gave them [second grade pupils] the poem, asked a few questions about the rhyming, the meaning, other things that we can discover in the poem and … that’s it! I finished, I thanked the class for listening to me and wanted to pack my things and go. Orna, my mentor teacher, looked at me as if she was going to strangle me right there and then: “You have to end the lesson properly and explain what you have been doing today”, she murmured hardly moving her lips. Oops! I pulled myself together and found some ending to the lesson. I discovered a serious problem that I have … I still miss beginnings and endings, that is, the process of leading my pupils into the lesson and then letting them out with understanding of what they have done, that is the closing of a circle. That’s my story for today. Tomorrow there will be more. (Ayala 2004)



Chapter 4.╇ The circle game: Narrative inquiry as a way of life in ACE 

Ayala’s story is an example of a story from the field, written by one of our student teachers in our electronic discussion forum during the first semester of class. In our work with our first year students, we explore narratives that they write and tell about their lived experiences in the field. As we mentioned earlier, we found the narrative approach helpful in turning our stories of practice into a text for professional learning. It is our claim, then, that putting the stories of our practice at the heart of our work creates a learning environment that confronts the complexity of varied educational situations, and offers alternatives for action. This narrative study constitutes transformative learning. It uses telling and re-telling, writing and re-writing of stories of practice as means for generating possible interpretations of the stories to be negotiated with the participants in the process of reframing their personal and professional storied identities (Sfard & Prusak 2005).

Teaching narrative inquiry in action Wisdom of Practice, a weekly four-hour, year-long workshop, is the central workshop that accompanies the students’ field practice. The first-year student group is divided into two main groups: students studying to teach in junior and senior high school and students studying to work in kindergarten, primary school or special education. Each of these groups is co-taught by two or three members of the ACE team. During each four-hour session the group structure changes in response to the needs of the group. Sometimes the entire group of students will discuss a subject together and other times they will divide into sub-groups to work on field stories. This second part, narrative inquiry of field stories, is our focus here. This workshop has a two-fold goal: learning narrative inquiry tools and using these tools to learn to read the professional field. From a very early stage of their practicum we ask our students to take time at the end of the day and write stories from their practice. They then choose which ones they want to share with the group or send to one of us for a more personal dialogue. We chose to bring Ayala’s story because it is seemingly ordinary, taken for granted. We found her story encouraging as it reassured us that ‘ordinary’ everyday issues will show up in the stories as well as more dramatic events. In the early stages of working with stories from the field we focus on identifying what a story is, practising the skills of writing a story, learning the skills involved with sharing stories in a study group and building a common narrative language. This process is not linear and learning the language and discussing the content that arise from the stories occur simultaneously.

 Ariela Gidron, Bobbie Turniansky, Smadar Tuval, Ruth Mansur & Judith Barak

The way we work a Collecting and writing down stories from the field b Sharing stories in face-to-face group discussions or discussion forums c Learning how to study our stories with narrative tools such as: –â•fi –â•fi –â•fi –â•fi –â•fi –â•fi

eliciting titles for the story from group members re-reading a given story through those titles relating to the story through lenses of structure and content identifying characters and interactions playing with points of view – the narrator’s and other’s suggesting possible end points – where does the story seem to lead the audience?

Re-framing and re-telling: What was the story I thought I was telling and what is the story telling me now?

As mentioned above, the workshop changes form from time to time. In one particular year, during the second semester the narrative work took place in small, permanent study groups while the three workshop facilitators joined different groups each time. Each week one of the participants was responsible for bringing a written story from the field and leading the discussion about it. To illustrate some of the ways we teach narrative inquiry tools and use them to ‘read’ the field, we bring a story written by Muhammad, a student-teacher in a special education school, and some of the group discussion that followed. A perfect imitation – Muhammad One of my students arrived in the morning with a slight wound on her face … after she got treated I sent a letter to her parents to continue the medical care … As she entered the class the other students started to ask her about the wound and how it happened … and of course the girl told them how she fell at home … one of the other girls had a long conversation with her and asked her a lot of questions like: How did you fall at home? Did you go to the hospital … what did the doctor do? After that long conversation to which I listened with interest … the girl who asked the questions caused herself a slight wound on her face and asked to be treated like her friend … when I asked her why she did this she answered: I fell at home yesterday … and my parents took me to the hospital … and she developed a whole imaginary story with details very similar to her friend’s story.

Working on the story Muhammad’s story was handed out to the group and was read aloud in the group. The first stage in the analysis of the story was to ask the group members to suggest titles. Several of those titles related to the wound: “The wounded pupil”,



Chapter 4.╇ The circle game: Narrative inquiry as a way of life in ACE 

“Adventures of a wound”; other to the imitation: “Me too!”, “Like in the movies: an excellent actor”, “The little actress”; and a third group to the motives behind the imitation: “What fun”, “Why only you?”, “She wants attention”. The group then moved into a discussion of the story and immediately, attention was focused on an unusual structural aspect. Transcript of group analysis of the story [The study group: Ira, Smadar (facilitator), Laila, Muhammad, Ma’ayan & Pazit] –â•fi Ira: Why do your sentences close with a series of dots and not with one? Do you have more to say than you’re actually telling us? –â•fi Muhammad: I wanted to tell a story not a medical report. –â•fi Smadar: Those dots arouse our curiosity –â•fi Muhammad: The dots stand for more details like how she fell and so on. –â•fi Smadar: Did you really believe that the first girl just fell at home? Without the dots we could have two stories here – “a facial wound” and “true imitation”. But here we have many stories hiding behind the dots. It seems to me that the dots also stand for Muhammad’s doubts as to what really happened. –â•fi Laila: We have a suspense story here. –â•fi Muhammad: The kids in my class are retarded with serious problems. I’m afraid that someone might have beaten the girl –â•fi Ma’ayan: Do you want to know the truth? Will you treat the girl differently if you know? –â•fi Muhammad: In our (Bedouin) society they treat the retarded child differently. They are less tolerant towards him at home, and this girl often arrive with wounds or bruises on her nose. We have the law but there is the custom that allows beating. –â•fi Smadar: And you, do you side more with the law or with the custom? –â•fi Muhammad: I am bothered by how my pupils are treated at home and whether they are treated well or badly. [The discussion continued and went deeper in the direction of dilemmas and conflicts that teachers can find themselves in such as opposing demands of the law and customs.] –â•fi Smadar: When you brought us this story did you know that it would take us where it did? –â•fi Muhammad: No –â•fi Smadar: This is the strength of a story – it takes us to new and interesting places. Working on the story helped us expose the existence of a story within a story. The overt story dealt with children with special needs imitating each other. The covert

 Ariela Gidron, Bobbie Turniansky, Smadar Tuval, Ruth Mansur & Judith Barak

story dealt with possible parental abuse of a helpless child. Exposing the covert story brought the deliberations of the teacher into the forefront. Should he bring up the issue of maltreatment, the issue that was partially concealed from himself before the discussion? It seems that when Muhammad initially told the story, he really meant to tell the explicit story. Ira’s narrative sensitivity led her to put her finger on the three dots and to ask questions about their meaning thereby helping Muhammad realize that while he was telling one story, apparently he was really concerned with a second one. His underlying concern for his pupils and how they are treated suddenly became the focus of his attention and moved aside the question of imitation that he thought was his main interest when he began his story. At this point in their studies, our students are learning how to read the field and themselves within it. While there is no distinct course in the programme that teaches narrative inquiry, it seems that the systematic use of narrative tools in the process of studying our stories from the field enables the students to gradually develop skills that will let them use it as a tool for professional development. They are beginning to feel comfortable with this approach that helps them see the complexity of educational situations, widens the alternatives for understanding and action and lays the foundation for the narrative inquiry work they will do in their second year.

4.â•… From learning texts to self-study – Wisdom of Practice 2 During the former circles we are mainly concerned with walking along with our students, letting them get safely acquainted with the road of narrative inquiry. The emphasis of the third circle takes place in the second year and shifts to exploring the students’ teaching experiences through narrative self-studies of their practice. They accompany their teaching experience with a study done in a workshop called: Wisdom of Practice 2, in which we further explore the use of narrative self-study processes as paving tools for an emergent professional road of our students. As Shiri puts it in her final paper: In the beginning I could not understand the relation between telling stories and teaching math. It took me some time to realize that these stories were a rich source of elements regarding teaching and learning. In the second semester of the first year what was pain became enjoyment, and the stories became a valuable text for learning. In the second year it was only natural for me to begin my selfstudy with stories. (Shiri 2010)

The nature of this research is an endeavor that is oriented towards the goal to develop an adaptive and yet activist professional educator (Sachs 2003,



Chapter 4.╇ The circle game: Narrative inquiry as a way of life in ACE 

Darling Hammond & Bransford 2005). For the students, participating in this process and being responsible for its advancement, enhances creative construction of professional tools and sharpens the role of stories in an emergent professional identity. In the workshop, we start with stories of discomfort, or ‘unfinished business’, that the students write from their practice, then ask why are those stories bothering them, how can they better understand their problem and how might they want to improve this ‘bothersome’ practice. These stories are analyzed using the narrative tools learned in the previous circles. The process then moves on to clarification and critical examination of underlying assumptions and values behind the stories and continues with framing questions that serve as the basis for self-study. The next step concentrates on designing and carrying out a mini research project that consists of: –â•fi Looking at their personal assumptions, beliefs, values, sensitivities, strengths etc. –â•fi Gathering a variety of data such as observations, questionnaires and interviews from the field –â•fi Focusing on their actions and interactions with children and colleagues, parents and authorities –â•fi Reviewing relevant research literature. Through reflection on the stories, the data analysis and their insights, they then build a new perspective on their practice. The study groups, the facilitators, a critical friend, all serve as resources for learning through negotiation of meaning (Wenger 1998). Through this process the group turns into a learning community that helps one another clarify personal assumptions hidden behind the stories and examine alternative ways of action. We found that the learning community plays a crucial role in the individual learning process of its participants. Many moments of personal insight occur during the group’s discussions as a direct product of the clarifying conversation. Listening to the different stories during the first round of work helps students widen the scope of their own stories, see them through different perspectives and be aware of hidden, implicit assumptions at the basis of their actions. For example Ella refers to her research process: Telling stories and looking at them allowed me to look at more than one component regarding my teaching. On the one hand I could refer to more than one child at once on the other hand to the context of the whole class. I told my stories from my point of view. My friends in the group could show me points of view I could have missed without them. After rewriting the stories from several points of view I was able to look critically at my assumptions. The result of this

 Ariela Gidron, Bobbie Turniansky, Smadar Tuval, Ruth Mansur & Judith Barak

process created a new understanding of my research questions and I had to reframe the questions several times. (Ella 2010)

At the basis of their research is the question: how can I improve my practice (McNiff 2002)? In order to do so we have to be able to unpack the problem in ways that could lead to the expected improvement. This reflective process is accompanied by an on-going practicum in the classroom that turns into a dialectic process of learning that goes back and forth between the classroom and the workshop. In their self-studies, the students are mainly engaged in exploring their interaction with their pupils and getting to know themselves in the context of their practice. Most of the stories start with what seemed like a random story of dissatisfaction, situated in the day it was told. Guided group discussions gradually helped elicit personal, often implicit, assumptions behind the stories, and bring them into the open; a process some of the students find quite difficult at times. By telling and re-telling their stories, they gradually reframe their understanding of the reality in which they act and the possibilities for future action. In Michal’s final paper she reflected on the learning process: Today while summing up my research, I can say that it was not a simple process for me. It was a break-through I reached only lately. Each part in the process was meaningful: writing stories, finding hidden assumptions, my unease, the titles to the stories, the literature I found, my critical friend, they all pushed me forward. I just realized the essence of the role of the stories and their analysis, their contribution from a professional point of view … In the mini research I conducted about boundaries of children behavior, I learnt for example, that I can be more flexible and change my rules without feeling weak. During telling the stories more questions arose and I would like to study those along my professional road … (Michal 2009)

5.â•… Linking up the circles Up to this point we have told condensed versions of the stories of our three circles of teaching and learning narrative inquiry. Each story tells part of our student teachers’ process of developing personal and shared wisdom of practice. Looking at each of these stories separately only tells part of the story so now we’ll take a look at narrative inquiry as a way of professional life in ACE as a whole. Though we focused on our students’ stories in this chapter, this process engages us all, teachers and students, in active inquiry of our beliefs and attitudes about the essence of teaching. This is a dynamic, ongoing story, with newly created knowledge opening up further questions to be studied. In ACE we are trying to build an environment in which the narrative inquiry is an integral part. As opposed to teaching it as a distinct subject we try to make



Chapter 4.╇ The circle game: Narrative inquiry as a way of life in ACE 

it part of our whole learning landscape. Sometimes it is called by its name like in “Wisdom of Practice 1” and “Wisdom of Practice 2”. In other workshops, not presented here, it plays a part in the curriculum but remains anonymous. It is part of the culture for both students and faculty, who are involved in their own narrative research. The holistic nature of ACE and its networked structure are what allow almost seamless integration of narrative inquiry with the programme as a whole. The ten teacher educators making up the ACE team are all both pedagogical field tutors and workshop facilitators. Together, we teach most of the workshops in the programme and often teach in overlapping, co-teaching teams that change from year to year. The flow between the different activities and workshops is what enables both the students and us to experience a cohesive learning landscape.

 ifficulties D Working with students on narrative self-study is not without problems. We have identified at least two major categories of difficulties: assumptions about sources of knowledge and assumptions about relevancy. Many of our students visualize the professional road to teaching as well defined and have a fairly crystallized idea about the meaning of professional expertise, formed over their many years as students at school and in the university – ‘apprenticeship of observation’, as Lortie (1975) called it. They arrive with expectations of entering a training programme in which we, the ‘experts’, will teach them everything that teachers need to know. They expect us to be their knowledge source. This is the taken-for-granted background against which they construct and understand their present experiences. Bringing them to the point where they realize they and other group members can be equal sources of knowledge requires reframing deeply ingrained assumptions about learning, sources of knowledge, power and authority; often a difficult step to take. Although our students can usually clearly see the central role of the learning community in encouraging reflective thinking when their own story is being discussed, many of them have difficulty understanding how discussing another student’s story contributes to their own learning. Often they tire of listening to other people’s stories. I think there’s a benefit to personal stories but sometimes the story isn’t interesting and that makes me get lost. (Merav 2007)

At these stages, our involvement is crucial in helping the group understand that there are no small or irrelevant stories. In spite of these difficulties, by the end of the programme the contribution of the group to its members is often acknowledged by the students. Comments in their self-study papers make it very clear that the learning group pulls its

 Ariela Gidron, Bobbie Turniansky, Smadar Tuval, Ruth Mansur & Judith Barak

members out of the loneliness of the solitary learner and into collaborative processes of knowledge creation through narrative inquiry.

 uilding a safe space B Working with personal narrative inquiry within a learning community is very different from the situation in which an individual does narrative self-study with selected partners or when narrative inquiry is used to learn about the ‘other’. In our situation, dealing with sensitive issues connected to personal cultural life experiences and professional experiences necessitates creating a safe, inclusive space for its participants, a space that fosters trust and a feeling of belonging and neutralizes inhibiting elements such as judgment, stereotyping, inattentiveness or closing off of the other. This type of space usually does not develop by itself and must be carefully nurtured by working with our students on the basis of the principles of participation, non-judgment, legitimacy. Participation: Active participation is crucial. There can be no lurkers. In the beginning of the process, not everyone will be comfortable telling their stories and we often have to be flexible enough to find the setting in which each person feels comfortable. Some students may tell their stories to the whole group, some will tell them only to one or two others, but everyone has a voice and it has to be heard. Legitimacy: By our own reactions to the students’ stories we try to show them that there are no stories that are right or stories that are wrong, no good or bad stories. We work on developing the idea that stories can be interpreted from different perspectives but every story is legitimate. Non-judgment: A central principle of the programme is that commenting on the stories has to be done in a non-judgmental way. Judgment closes down the teller; asking questions, ‘mirroring’, and offering alternatives opens up thought.  utcomes O What is the outcome of this immersion in narrative inquiry? It is impossible to unravel the effects of narrative inquiry from the other experiences that the students have in our holistic programme but in addition to the recognition of the contribution of the group to learning, an analysis of 40 self-studies from “Wisdom of Practice 2” identified two turning points that seem meaningful for embarking on an educational professional road (Gidron, Tuval, & Barak 2008). De-idealization: We discovered that we could easily identify in each paper an image of an ideal teacher that coloured our students’ actions, expectations and dissatisfaction with themselves. We could then read each of the studies as stories of how the students de-constructed their ideal teacher image. The ideal teacher



Chapter 4.╇ The circle game: Narrative inquiry as a way of life in ACE 

embodies our students’ assumption that somewhere out there is a right way and we, their teacher educators, will show them the way to get there. Learning to identify and question this ideal enables the students to redefine it and develop the teacher they would like to become in a given context. This could lead to the paving of personal professional roads in which each of the travellers set their own goals and take responsibility for making them come true. Seeing alternatives: The turning point of understanding that each educational situation is unique, complex and context dependent is closely connected to the process of de-idealization, of letting go of the expectation that being professional means knowing the right answer that is out there waiting to be learned. Moving from viewing the professional road as leading to a pre-designed product to viewing the road as being paved by its travellers on the go, makes it possible to grasp the complexity and context dependency of teaching. This understanding means accepting that there are several possible ways of action and being at any given moment. At this stage students start to come up with alternative interpretations and ways of coping with the problems discussed.

An ethical perspective Making personal stories the centre of learning and putting them on public display raises ethical questions about what is forbidden and what is permissible, worthwhile or not, possible or blocked. A workshop mainly based on students’ personal stories is by its nature dynamic and presents the group with many potential tensions. Some of these tensions and dilemmas were discussed earlier but there are a few more we would like to open up for further thought. Encouraging students to look at their cultural background and explore its influence and significance for the persons they are today has its risks. Encouraging them to tell their stories from the field and think in possibilities can lead to disenchantment with the profession they are planning to enter. Are we, as higher education practitioners, ready to support those students who stand up and ask difficult questions, who are not happy with what they discover about themselves, their society, or its institutions? How can we support those students who would like to change things but learn that there is very little chance they can? Are we ready to be there for them in those situations, and what are the limits of our readiness, ability and responsibility to do so? In spite of all of the ‘safe space’ factors mentioned earlier, we must confess that as educators, we do have an agenda. We want our students to express themselves, to tell their stories in public. We want them to ask questions about them and make sense of them. To what extent do we have the right to do so? Narrative inquiry in our teacher education programme, ACE, is not inquiry for the sake of inquiry. It is inquiry for the sake of professional development. In

 Ariela Gidron, Bobbie Turniansky, Smadar Tuval, Ruth Mansur & Judith Barak

the long run, we hope that our students see the benefits of narrative inquiry as a professional road and will turn it into their road taken.

References Bruner, J. (1987). Life as narrative. Social Research, 54(1), 11–32. Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clandinin, D.J. & Connelly, F.M. (1995). Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, F.M. (1998). Stories to live by: Narrative understandings of school reform. Curriculum Inquiry, 28(2), 149–164. Connelly, F.M., & Clandinin, D.J. (1985). Personal practical knowledge and the modes of knowing: Relevance for teaching and learning. In E. Eisner (Ed.) Learning and teaching ways of knowing: The eighty-fourth yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (pp. 174–198). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Darling-Hammond, L. & Bransford, J. (2005). Preparing teachers for a changing world: What teachers should learn and be able to do. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Delpit, L. (1988). The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people’s children. Harvard Educational Review, 58(3), 280–298. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York, NY: Collier books. Elbaz, F. (1991). Research on teachers’ knowledge: The evolution of a discourse. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 23(1), 505–526. Gergen, K. (1995). Social construction and the educational process. In L. Steffe & J. Gale (Eds.), Constructivism in education (pp.17–39). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gidron, A., Tuval, S., & Barak, J. (2008). Studying to teach with our student teachers: Learning towards open professional road. In M.L. Heston, D.L. Tidwell, K.K. East & L.M. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Pathways to change in teacher education: Proceedings of the seventh international conference of teacher education practices (pp.143–147). Cedar Falls, IA: University of Northern Iowa. Goodson, I. (1992). Studying teachers’ lives – an emergent field of inquiry. In I. Goodson (Ed.), Studying teachers’ lives (pp. 1–17). New York, NY: Teachers College, Columbia University. Lieblich, A., Tuval-Mashiach, R., & Zilber, T. (1998). Narrative research: Reading, analysis and interpretation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lortie, D.C. (1975). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Lurie, Y. (2000). Cultural beings: Reading the philosophers of genesis. Amsterdam: Rodopi. McNiff, J. (2002). Action research for professional development: Concise advice for new action researchers. Available from: http://www.jeanmcniff.com/booklet1.html#2. Polkinghorne, D.E. (1995). Reporting qualitative research as practice. In G. Tierney & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), Representation and the text: Reframing the narrative voice (pp. 3–22). New York, NY: State University of New York Press. Sachs, J. (2003). The activist teaching profession. Buckingham, PA: Open University Press. Sfard, A., & Prusak, A., (2005). Telling identities: In search of an analytic tool for investigating learning as a culturally shaped activity. Educational Researcher, 34(4), 14–22. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

chapter 5

Teaching narrative inquiry in the Chinese community A Hong Kong perspective Yu Wai Ming & Lau Chun Kwok The Hong Kong Institute of Education

While narrative inquiry has become a significant voice in the educational field in Europe and North America, its development is just beginning in the Chinese communities including Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. It is interesting to see how narrative inquiry has been developing in these places with different language and cultural backgrounds in recent years. In this chapter, we will examine this development from our vantage point in Hong Kong and share our own experience in using and teaching narrative inquiry in teacher education. We have tried to promote narrative inquiry in three ways: as a tool for research or inquiry, as a medium for teacher professional development, and as a teaching strategy. In the light of our experience on teaching narrative inquiry in the teacher education context, we also share our reflections and concerns in creating a space for its development in both Hong Kong and other regions in the Chinese landscape.

1.â•… D  ifferent development of narrative inquiry in three Chinese communities Although narrative inquiry has almost thirty years’ history in European and North American educational research, it is just beginning to gain different levels of attention in recent years in the Chinese communities such as Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It is interesting to see that narrative inquiry, as a new research or teaching methodology, has developed quite separately in the three Chinese societies. The relatively new methodology is gaining different levels of popularity or acceptance in academia and is being used in different contexts. We begin below by giving a portrayal of the development of narrative inquiry in the Chinese landscape. 1.1â•… In Taiwan In Taiwan, the first translated version of the book by Clandinin and Connelly (2000) – Narrative Inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research – was

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published in November 2003. The following year, several universities and colleges of education in Taiwan jointly organized an ‘International Conference on Narrative Inquiry’. From these events, it can be said that around or before 2003, narrative inquiry gained a certain extent of attention within academia in Taiwan. Also, research on the internet resources shows that within the past ten years or so, many teachers in Taiwan have used narrative inquiry as their research method in their master and doctoral theses. Such related research blossomed like a garden after rain, as scholars working in or outside of the educational field, such as in the fields of religion, art, counselling, social work and feminism studies, adopted narrative inquiry in their research. However, the majority of these master and doctoral theses have not been published, so scholars from outside Taiwan may find their navigation in the current situation rather difficult. And as most of these works are in Chinese, they are virtually unknown in the Western world because of the language barrier. 1.2â•… In Mainland China At the same time, narrative inquiry has also met with great interest within Mainland China. However, in contrast with the situation in Taiwan, the development of narrative inquiry in Mainland China seems to have a clearer starting point and focus. Professor Ding Gang from the East China Normal University is probably the earliest scholar to take an interest in narrative inquiry within Mainland China. Starting to experiment with the new methodology in 1999, he founded and edited the first academic journal in narrative inquiry in China: China’s Education: Research and Review. Between the years 2001 and 2009, the journal published 13 issues, providing a forum and an important documentation of work in narrative inquiry into educational practice in China. Contributions to this journal are generally of high quality and it has enabled the attention of this relatively new methodology from many scholars within Mainland China. Apart from this journal, Ding Gang also installed a series of five monographs in narrative inquiry from 2007 to 2008, including Voice and experience: Narrative inquiry in education by Ding Gang (2008); Portraits of influential Chinese educators by Ruth Hayhoe (2008); Culture, gender and education: Women college students in China from 1900 to 1930 by Zhang So-ling (2007); Landscape of lives of college students by Sun Sung-wen (2008); and Teacher’s traces: a narrative research of classroom life by Wang (2008). Again, all these publications are in Chinese. While these publications in Chinese are mostly inaccessible to Western readers, they were instrumental to promoting the awareness of this methodology in the Mainland. Apart from traditional scholarly journals (e.g. Chang 2004; Liu 2005) and book publications, there are numerous personal or institutional websites, online discussion forums and online journals where one can find work that claims to adopt narrative inquiry as the research approach. Although it is obvious that the



Chapter 5.╇ Teaching narrative inquiry in the Chinese community 

quality of this work will differ, it is also not unusual to come upon pleasant discoveries of thoughtful and insightful discussions. Some educational periodicals have opened special columns for teachers to share their stories from the classroom. At the same time, scholars in curriculum reform and teacher development have encouraged teachers to use narrative inquiry as a way of professional development. Furthermore, there are also thoughtful discussions on various theoretical and methodological issues to explore the future development for narrative inquiry. While this profusion of publications is welcomed by some scholars, there are others who see this as a flashy and unhealthy phenomenon. For instance, Xu (2004) from the Guangdong Institute of Education in southern China cautioned that narrative inquiry has become a convenient way for some secondary and primary teachers to follow the fashion in doing educational research with the aim of gaining personal promotion or more funding, with the unfortunate consequence of discounting their fundamental teaching duty. Another respectable scholar in Chinese education, Chen (2003, p. 8) also expressed grave worries on this unhealthy phenomenon: The blooming of educational research in secondary and primary education has in effect opened up many business opportunities for publishers and research units in the universities. Some educational journals have begun to solicit “publication fees” from intended authors. Some publishers are selling ISBN. Many educational experts have become so tied up with publishing that they reduce the time to see their students.

While Chen’s comment refers more generally to the educational scene in Mainland China, narrative research has become a convenient target. The unhealthy phenomena as noted above might root from a misunderstanding of the deceptively simple methods of telling stories or observation in narrative inquiry. Recounting an event or telling a story seems relatively simple; they are things that everyone does. Since narrative inquiry does not require the use of sophisticated statistical methods or the conducting of large-scale research, it seems that all one has to do is to interview several persons (or oneself), and then simply string together records, diaries and stories to complete a research paper. But is that so? Soong Wen-li (2002, p. 161) of the Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan has expressed the following concerns about narrative inquiry: Narrative inquiry has no doubt become a new lighthouse within the array of research methodologies in the educational field, but sometimes, telling stories in the name of narrative inquiry can become a black hole. Many researchers claim to use narrative inquiry, but are actually only collecting stories. In fact, the biggest users of this “research method” are the countless journalists. Every day we are exposed to the tons of rubbish reporting from the media, and in turn our

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research students and even academics imitate this kind of rubbish production. Apart from using a few simple puns, there is usually nothing new in this type of work.

We agree with Soong’s observation that while both journalists and narrative inquirers listen to and write stories all the time, they should have their different missions and methods. If one is to adopt narrative inquiry as a research methodology, it is necessary to have a firm grasp of the theoretical foundation and debates in the social sciences. We need this theoretical foundation to inform us of the whole research process of data collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation in order to have a strong foothold within academia. From the limited literature on narrative inquiry that we have reviewed in Chinese, there is indeed some that is inspiring and of a high quality. However, especially in those online forums and journals, there are some that merely copy and paste from different sources, or borrow the name of narrative inquiry to use classroom anecdotes as the footnotes of their arguments. This work may not be worthless, but donning the name of research for all of these narratives would simply take away the meaning of the name. 1.3â•… In Hong Kong Narrative inquiry was made known to the Chinese community in Hong Kong when a group of teacher educators began their doctoral programme at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT) in 1998. Several of them started learning about narrative inquiry and completed their theses under the direction of Professor Michael Connelly at the OISE/UT. Since our graduation from the programme several years ago, we have started to try out narrative inquiry in our teaching, research, and have organized several workshops for both pre-service and in-service teachers. Compared to the vibrant development of narrative inquiry in Mainland China and Taiwan in the past decade, the progress in Hong Kong is relatively slow and limited. One reason might be the relative sizes and populations of these three places. There are over 2000 tertiary institutions in Mainland China, compared to about 100 in Taiwan and ten in Hong Kong. The relatively small academic circle in Hong Kong might pose stronger challenges for the junior colleagues with alternate methodologies that are not inline with the more established quantitative paradigm. However, number does not necessarily determine the path of development. This could also be due to the complicated and delicate political and language contexts in these three places. Without going into detail, we need to point out that instead of a common Chinese language in all three societies: people are actually using two different written forms and two different spoken forms of



Chapter 5.╇ Teaching narrative inquiry in the Chinese community 

Chinese used in three different places, creating some awkward communication obstacles between people. We propose that this complicated language context might have created obstacles for the development of the narrative methodology in Chinese communities. In our experiences of learning and teaching narrative inquiry in different contexts, we see that a higher command of skills and sensitivity in language are required in the writing of narrative research texts. More importantly, for narrative inquiry to take root and grow as a teaching, research, or professional development approach in a community, we need to create enough awareness from and establish connections with the local teacher practitioners, in a language most commonly and competently used by them. We can see from the discussion above that the Mainland and the Taiwan scholars are riding on this advantage: they are mostly publishing their research and promoting their ideas in Chinese, in a form which is in concord with that of the local teacher practitioners. When the languages used by the local practitioners and the academics are the same, narrative works are more accessible to the frontline teachers. From our observation in academic conferences in Taiwan and in Mainland China, we notice stronger interest from the graduate students and school teachers. We also note that there are more dialogues between the teachers and the academics in professional journals. The situation in Hong Kong is somewhat different. Having been a British colony for over 150 years, English has been the only official language used in the government in Hong Kong for a long time. This has made Hong Kong a unique place among the three Chinese societies where the official language is not the language of the common people. At the same time, most universities in Hong Kong are established following the British or American models. In order to be recognized in the international arena, it is an unstated mandate for our academic colleagues in Hong Kong that their publications are only counted if they are published in international English journals. Following this rule of the game, however, we sacrifice establishing connections with the local teachers. This language divide might not be consequential for other academic disciplines. But for narrative researchers who need to work closely with teacher practitioners, we have experienced extra challenges and difficulties whether using narrative inquiry as a research tool or a way of professional development or a teaching strategy. 2.â•… Application of narrative inquiry in teacher education in Hong Kong Despite the difficulties we discussed above, we are eager to promote the use of narrative inquiry in teacher education in the Chinese community in Hong Kong. The interest and learning our students and teachers showed in the experiential

 Yu Wai Ming & Lau Chun Kwok

process has fuelled us to think about the significance and prospect of carrying out such teaching in the local community. In the formal teacher education curriculum, there is no such course as narrative inquiry. Our experience shared below thus comes from the experience we have had in promoting narrative inquiry in the occasions we created outside the formal curriculum. Our conceptualization of narrative inquiry is grounded in Dewey’s (1920, 1938) educational philosophy that respects us as knowers who may reflect on and grow in experience. Narrative inquiry therefore as we understand it, has become useful in three ways in teacher education. It has become, first, a tool for research into teaching, second, a medium for professional development of teachers, and third, a strategy of teaching. 2.1â•… Narrative inquiry as a research tool Narrative inquiry has been a recognized research methodology in fields ranging from anthropology to psychology to education and writing studies (Schaafsma et al. 2007). It has been a tool for research in funded research projects and in dissertations by doctoral students in North America for almost thirty years (Conle 2000). It belongs to the qualitative research orientation, and most qualitative methods used in other approaches such as observation, interviews and journal writing are also used in the data collection process in narrative inquiry. Narrative researchers often approach their inquiry by autobiographical study and participant observation (Clandinin & Connelly 1991). They follow the narrative spirit, and use narrative for data representation in order to keep the temporal quality and contextual detail of the study (Fenstermacher 1994). In addition, along with the spirit of inquiry, an important quality of narrative inquirers is the acceptance and awareness of the open-endedness of the field notes or data that pervade the inquiry. The most important idea of using narrative inquiry to research is to retain the open-ended, experiential and quest-like qualities (Conle 2000) in the study. Similarly, Carter (1993) also pointed out that narrative inquiry helps researchers to inquire into and safeguard the personal, the particular, the temporal, the experiential, and the moral quality of the phenomena under study. 2.2â•… Teaching of narrative inquiry as a research tool As a research methodology, the above discussed characteristics of narrative inquiry are in general not in line with the dominant quantitative paradigm in the small research community in Hong Kong. In one of the main sources of funding, the General Research Fund (GRF) in Hong Kong, over half of the funded projects were quantitative research. Other research orientations such us phenomenology or narrative inquiry are not yet accepted as viable research methodologies. These



Chapter 5.╇ Teaching narrative inquiry in the Chinese community 

research proposals are sometimes still judged by a different set of criteria such as the sample representation of the small number of participants. In the Institute where we teach, there is only one course on research methodology in the four-year Bachelor of Education Programme. Narrative inquiry is not usually taught and at most is briefly introduced as one of the many qualitative approaches, as one small topic under the big umbrella of qualitative research. Our main experience of teaching narrative inquiry came from the space created outside the formal curriculum. Here, we would like to make reference to a group of four student teachers with whom Yu (2005) worked together outside formal class time. Yu met the student teachers weekly in a doctoral project she designed for herself. These student teachers were asked to conduct a mini study where narrative inquiry was applied. In the mini study, student teachers conducted an inquiry into a person they found approachable. The persons they studied might include people with whom they have had connections in their daily life, for example, a family member like their father or mother whom they were attracted to or learnt as role models. They were requested to make connection with the targeted person in order to learn from their experience. Student teachers were encouraged to make closer contacts by interviews or casual encounters. The most important thing they needed to do was to build a good relationship from where they started to gain information on experience they could learn from in whatever aspect in the process of inquiry. At the end, they brought back a report to share in the weekly meetings. The four student teachers shared that they gained good experience from talking to the learning targets they chose. There seemed to be two ways they learnt: first, from the conversations in the visits they paid to their targets, they gained insights beyond their expectations. They said they learnt from their targets’ experience by sharing their stories. Second, learning also seemed to have taken place when they reported about their mini inquiry at the weekly meetings. In sharing the progress of their miniprojects, they were at the same time learning from each other in the interactions in the research meetings. Despite the positive experience the small group of student teachers gained from Yu’s experiment in her research during the doctoral journey, the biggest limitation in the teaching of narrative inquiry as a research tool seems to be the lack of a proper place to introduce and try out the method in the formal teacher curriculum. 2.3â•… Narrative inquiry as a medium for professional development The use of narrative inquiry, besides a research tool, has moved to becoming a vehicle for curriculum in teacher development. Its development in education has

 Yu Wai Ming & Lau Chun Kwok

been noted by Conle (2000) at the turn of the century. It is believed that teachers grow by constructing ‘personal practical knowledge’ (Clandinin 1985; Connelly & Clandinin 1985; Lau, Yu & Chan 2008) by telling and reflecting on personal stories and narratives. ‘Personal practical knowledge’ is a kind of knowledge that belongs to teachers, in contrast to knowledge-for-teachers. Teachers reflect through the process of telling their own life stories with the presence of scene and plot. As “the narrative insights of today are the chronological events of tomorrow” (Connelly & Clandinin 1990, p. 9), teachers learn from continual reflections on their daily events in the telling and retelling process. Teachers learn from their own life stories and create their own knowledge (Olson 2000). They do not only make sense of their professional worlds but make significant change within themselves and in their teaching practice through reflections in the narrative process (Johnson & Golombek 2002). It is important to distinguish teacher knowledge from knowledge-for-teachers. Knowledge-for-teachers refers to knowledge and skills taught to teachers for certification, a kind of knowledge transmitted by professors from universities or experts in the field. “Teacher knowledge refers to the ways teachers know themselves and their professional work situations. Teacher knowledge is a narrative construct which references the totality of a person’s personal practical knowledge gained from formal and informal educational experience.” (Xu & Connelly 2009, p. 221) Teachers learn and gain personal and professional knowledge from telling stories when they solidify what they know because “each time we tell stories, we teach ourselves the point of stories. The more stories we experience that share the same point, the more we can glean a larger lesson about the point itself, apart from the specific memories that illustrate it.” (Schank & Berman 2006, p. 221). 2.4â•… Teaching of narrative inquiry as a medium for professional development In applying narrative inquiry for teachers’ professional development, our experiences came from running tutorial meetings and workshops with interested teachers. In a project funded by the Internal Research Grant,1 we studied the effect of narrative inquiry in the process in training teachers of Religious Education (RE). In the meetings with RE teachers, we shared our own life stories to demonstrate the lessons we learnt from our own reflections on experience. Teachers were asked to take turns in telling stories of their own as a RE teacher or teacher in general. As facilitators, we listened to their stories, and helped teachers react to each others’ stories. The learning takes place when one reacts to the story through .â•… Funding granted by the University Grant Council for faculty members of the Hong Kong Institute of Education.



Chapter 5.╇ Teaching narrative inquiry in the Chinese community 

‘resonance’. Resonance, as explained by Conle (1996, p. 321), is an “educationally viable phenomenon”. It is a process that brings out personal connections between the story tellers and the audience. In addition, our narrative teaching experience also came from working with a group of postgraduate student teachers in a series of meetings during their teaching practicum in schools. We have already reported this experience in another article (Lau, Yu & Chan 2008). We made use of a “Duster Story” as told by Lau about a novice teacher and his clumsy way of handling classroom problems due to lack of experience, to stimulate thoughts from our student teachers. In the story, Lau lost his temper and threw the duster at a noise-making student. The incident happened in his first year of teaching. This particular story has invited participants to tell their own classroom stories from their teaching practice. During the tutorial meetings we had, we facilitated the story telling of critical incidents that happened and helped student teachers unpack the personal knowledge and experiences underlying their critical classroom incidents. We later discovered that the actual learning from experience, similar to the one Lau experienced, might not be able to happen within a short period of time. The meaning of the story will usually come at a much later stage than one would expect. Lau’s actual learning, as he reflected, did not come until he became a teacher educator.

The Duster Story It was 1983. I was in my first year of teaching. Kenny was sitting in the front row near the teacher’s desk. He kept talking back and making funny noises. I warned him several times but was not successful. I was annoyed but took no further action. I went on teaching and writing on the chalkboard. Then I reached a point when I could tolerate it no more. I turned round suddenly, holding a duster in my hand and slapped the duster right on his face. He was not wearing glasses. I could see the chalk mark of the duster on his face. Chalk dust was flying in the air in front of him. There was absolute silence. Everybody in the classroom was astonished by my sudden outburst. It was dead air. No one dared to utter a word. No one in the classroom knew what I was going to do next. I did not know either. I could feel my heart beating heavily. I knew I had done something unacceptable of a teacher. But what should I do next? What should be the next words I would say to the class? I could choose to defend my teacher ego, and go on to tell the class how naughty Kenny was and that he received the punishment he deserved. And anybody who dared to break the classroom rules would receive the same punishment. I knew I could gain control in this way. My words were backed up by my forceful action and the boys were just a class of 12-year olds anyway. Another action I could take was to admit that I was wrong, say sorry to the poor boy and apologize for what I had done. I did not know what to do next. I kept pondering during these two minutes of absolute silence. My mind kept switching back and forth between these two opposite lines of action.

 Yu Wai Ming & Lau Chun Kwok

I finally made up my mind. I explained to the class that although Kenny’s behaviour in the class was unruly, he did not deserve such a punishment, which was a violent act. And violence could never solve problems. Then, in front of the whole class, I asked Kenny to accept my apology. I asked him to go and wash his face and come back for the lesson. After this incident, I found that instead of losing face in my class, I seemed to have earned the students’ respect and had a better relationship with the students. And more importantly, I learned to respect my students, no matter how they behaved in class. One year later, Kenny left the school and went to study in the United States. I received Christmas cards from him for a few more years. (Lau, Yu & Chan 2008, p. 352)

Telling stories and learning from reflecting on our own experiences often take a long time. Besides the demand of the amount of time we spent, narrative inquiry has another difficulty for professional development among Chinese teachers. In comparing our experience in facilitating professional development among in-service and pre-service teachers, we found it much harder for in-service teachers to tell their own stories. The RE teachers we trained, took a much longer time to warm up and tell personal stories. In the workshop we designed, we asked the teachers to write a personal story to share with each other in the second stage in the workshop. In this simple task we gave them, among some 300 teachers who came to our workshop, only 30 stories were collected. Some of the teachers told us in their feedback that they came and intended to learn from educational experts’ bookish theories. They were unprepared to tell stories, especially personal life stories, in front of other teachers. In-service teachers, who have been teaching for some years before coming to the workshop, might need extra courage to tell personal stories in front of other experienced teachers. Fortunately, we managed to facilitate experience sharing by inviting teachers who submitted their stories and agreed to share. At the end of the workshop, the teachers who had shared their stories discovered new meaning in the stories they told when unpacking their own experience. 2.5â•… Narrative inquiry as a strategy of teaching In the Hong Kong context, we do not only use narrative inquiry as a research tool or a mode of professional development; we also use it as a strategy of teaching. We find story telling a very natural way to share experience. Human beings like to tell and listen to stories. Conle (2000) has the same experience, “We use narrative to communicate and understand people and events. We think and dream in narrative” (p. 50). Narrative as commonly understood, is a natural way of expression of our experience and has a special and significant place in our everyday life. The application of narrative as a teaching strategy means to tell stories in a narrative way in the process of teaching. “Narratives are about temporal events



Chapter 5.╇ Teaching narrative inquiry in the Chinese community 

and tell us where and when something happens, in which contexts, who said what to whom, with which feelings and in what mood, and under which moral constraints” (Conle 2000, p. 56). 2.6â•… Teaching of narrative inquiry as a teaching strategy Though we have encountered various constraints in teaching narrative inquiry in the Chinese community in Hong Kong, we did not give up using narrative inquiry in teacher education, but made attempts in applying narrative inquiry in our daily teaching. In different courses we taught, we tried to instil some narrative quality in our teaching. For example, in a course about “Teaching and Learning”, we started sprinkling narrative in our teaching. We changed from teaching those learning theories as some established facts and knowledge in the past to telling our students stories about the people behind the theories (e.g. Pavlov, Skinner, Bandura). We guide the students to look at the social and intellectual contexts when the theories were proposed. We also emphasize the temporal dimension of the succession of different theories. We make ample use of photos, historical notes, and archival videos from YouTube to contextualize our teaching and learning. We hope that in this way, students could acquire a more inquiring mind in their learning. Teaching narrative inquiry as a teaching strategy seems to have the greatest flexibility in our experience as it is not bounded by subject content. To promote such teaching, narrative inquirers become demonstrators using personal and social narratives in their own teaching. 3.â•… Core value of narrative inquiry: A narrative way of thinking Until this point, we have walked with you through the diverse experiences we have gained in using narrative inquiry in our teaching in the context of the Hong Kong Chinese community, where, in its teacher education, no formal curriculum place is provided for narrative inquiry. However, from our own learning and professional growth in both narrative research and teaching, we want to conclude that it is worthwhile to create a space for its development. We will explain in this section what this space is for – the core value of narrative inquiry. No matter how and what we intend to teach when we have a space for narrative inquiry, it is its way of thinking that has inspired us in the learning process, the most significant and core value of narrative inquiry. Narrative has been constructed as a way of thinking (Bruner 1991). What is it about in its thinking? It is a way of thinking about life (Clandinin & Connelly 2000; Connelly & Clandinin 1990, 2005). In the teaching and practicing of narrative inquiry, its content is less important than its way of thinking. In the limited space we created for teaching narrative inquiry in Hong Kong, we attempted to promote the idea that we narrate,

 Yu Wai Ming & Lau Chun Kwok

we inquire, and we learn from our experience in the inquiry process. What are we supposed to inquire? In the inquiry process, an inquirer is driven by “a sense of the whole” and is led by “tensions with a history” and “subconscious question marks” (Conle 2000, p. 52). That is to say, in whatever activities we do in using narrative inquiry, we first investigate our experience along the “historical sense” and view it as a “whole”. What becomes the core value, we see it, as the “inquiry mind” or the “questions marks” that is leading us into the personal experience. Most importantly, “it is essential that whatever sense of closure may convey the end of a narrative, it must remain open-ended and available for re-telling, by the inquirer or by others” (ibid, p. 53). In our attempts to use narrative inquiry in the local context in Hong Kong, we want to teach our student teachers to learn to think narratively. We consider learning how to think narratively more important than learning definitions, steps and methods of doing narrative inquiry. We echo Xu & Connelly, (2009): that “narrative inquiry is a conception of the phenomenal world in which experience is mediated by story” (p. 221). When we talk about narrative inquiry and its significance as a way of thinking, we argue for its importance philosophically, less about method than its phenomena studied via method. For this reason, narrative inquiry is defined as both phenomenon and method: Narrative is the phenomenon of inquiry because everything, including teacher development, is a phenomenon narrated through stories. The phenomena of narrative inquiry are, themselves, narrative in nature. In this, narrative inquiry differs from other methods, it would make no sense, for instance, to say the phenomena of factor analysis or ethnography were factor analysis and ethnography. But it does make sense to say that the phenomena of narrative inquiry are narratives (ibid, p. 220)

To think narratively, there is a framework proposed by Clandinin & Connelly (2000), a three dimensional life inquiry space: a temporal continuum (pastpresent-future orientation), a personal–social continuum, and place. This concept in thinking is further elaborated by Xu & Connelly (2009) as “using one’s mind to imagine life spaces that flow in time, that consist of personal and social interactions, and that move from place to place” (p. 225). Unfortunately, in our teaching of narrative inquiry, we have not yet been able to apply the teaching of this framework. The concepts are simple but bringing these concepts to life in actual research, teacher development, and teaching settings is difficult. Even so, it will never make such thinking less important. To conclude, to teach narrative inquiry, irrespective of the activities, methods and steps involved in the course of inquiry, the most important thing is to teach its way of thinking.



Chapter 5.╇ Teaching narrative inquiry in the Chinese community 

4.â•… Thorny problems in adopting a narrative approach In the beginning of this chapter, we briefly reviewed the development of narrative inquiry in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. We found that there were different paths of development and levels of acceptance in these three Chinese communities. In Mainland China and Taiwan, the scenes are quite vibrant, with blooming publications in academic journals and professional forums with different quality and rigour. In Hong Kong, we are taking small steps amid different constraints. We envisage our future paths as anything but easy. In this connection, it is worthwhile to learn from the experiences of some forerunners to see qualities we need to equip ourselves and the challenges ahead. Jean Clandinin and Shaun Murphy (Clandinin & Murphy, 2007) evaluated the development of narrative inquiry within the Western academic world by interviewing three significant scholars whose contributions to the field are widely acknowledged, including Elliot Mishler, Don Polkinghorne, and Amia Lieblich, in which each expressed their views on the historical development as well as the future of the field of narrative inquiry. In each of the interviews, they talked about the positive and vibrant growth of narrative inquiry that was evident from their own experience, as well as that of their colleagues and research students. On the other hand, they also expressed the view that narrative inquiry was still marginalized by quantitative positivist traditions, whether it is in the design of curricula in graduate programmes, the application of funds and teaching positions, the publication of research reports, and in tenure or promotion opportunities. Lieblich has even thought it necessary to remind her students to consider these possible consequences before adopting the method of narrative inquiry, telling her students that they could instead adopt a combined research method, or wait until they had a firmer position within academia before trying to adopt narrative inquiry as their main research method. At the same time, Lieblich and Polkinghorne both stressed that students should be exposed to and acquire different research methodologies, so as to build a broader basis, rather than only focusing on narrative inquiry. In their opinions, researchers adopting narrative methodology must have a mature personality and a rich array of life experiences in order to have the level of sensitivity in observing and understanding within their interviews and analysis that will allow them to write a good paper. The fact remains that these essential personal qualities are different from skills and knowledge – they cannot be taught in class, but rather, they must be accumulated through life. As these experienced scholars in narrative inquiry have pointed out, the techniques, personal qualities and life experiences that this process requires are far more difficult and require much more time to grasp in comparison with other quantitative research methods. This is not to say that narrative inquiry is a better

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and more valuable method than others, but only to say that to produce quality narrative inquiries is more difficult, yet this increased difficulty does not necessarily guarantee a greater value.

5.â•… Concluding remarks In this chapter, we have shared our experiences in working with our students and teachers in Hong Kong. The major difficulty we have experienced so far is the lack of a space to teach narrative inquiry in the local formal teacher education curriculum. We see that learning to tell personal stories and reflect on them can help teachers to value more their own experiences in the construction of their teacher knowledge. They also learn to think about the knowledge and theories and life in a more narrative way. No matter whether we use narrative inquiry as a research tool, a medium of professional development, or a teaching strategy, the core value in narrative inquiry is to think narratively, which is to think about life with due consideration of its personal-social, temporal and place dimensions. We hope our experience will shed light for those who want to do the same in teacher education in the Chinese community in Hong Kong.

References Bruner, J. (1991). The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry, 18(1), 1–21. Carter, K. (1993). The place of story in the study of teaching and teacher education. Educational Researcher, 22(1), 5–12. Clandinin, D.J. (1985). Personal practical knowledge: A study of teachers’ classroom images. Curriculum Inquiry, 15(4), 361–385. Clandinin, D.J. (Ed.). (2007). Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, F.M. (1991). Narrative and story in practice and research. In D.A. Schon, (Ed.). The reflective turn: Case studies in and on education practice. (pp. 258–281). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Clandinin, D. J., & Murphy, S. (2007). Looking ahead: Conversations with Elliot Mishler, Don Polkinghorne, and Amia Lieblich. In D. J. Clandinin, (Ed.). Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology. (pp. 632–650). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Conle, C. (1996). Resonance in pre-service teacher inquiry, American Educational Research Journal, 33(2), 297–325. Conle, C. (2000). Narrative Inquiry: Research tool and medium for professional development, European Journal of Teacher Education, 23(1), 49–63. Connelly, F.M. & Clandinin, D.J. (1985). Personal practical knowledge and the modes of knowing: Relevance for teaching and learning, NSSE Yearbook, 84(2), 174–198.



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Connelly, F.M. & Clandinin, D.J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry, Educational Researcher, 14(5), 2–14. Connelly, F.M. & Clandinin, D.J. (2005). Narrative inquiry. In J.I. Green, G. Camilli & P. Elmore (Eds.). Complementary methods for research in education (3rd ed., pp. 477–488). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Dewey, J. (1920). Reconstruction and philosophy. Boston, MA: Beacon. Dewey, J. (1933). How we think. Lexington, MA: D.C. Health and Company. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York, NY: Colliers. Fenstermacher, G.D. (1994). The knower and the known: The nature of knowledge in research on teaching. Review of Research in Education, 20, 3–56. Johnson, K.E., & Golombek, P.R. (2002). Inquiry into experience: Teachers’ personal and professional growth. In P.R. Golombek & K.E. Johnson (Eds.), Teachers’ narrative inquiry as professional development (pp. 1–14). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lau, C.K., Yu, W.M., & Chan, N.K. (2008). Helping beginning teachers shape their personal practical knowledge: An essential process in teacher education. In T. Huber-Warring (Ed.), Growing a soul for social change: Building the knowledge base for social justice (pp. 345–364). Charlotte, NC: IAP. Olson, M.R. (2000). Linking personal and professional knowledge of teaching practice through narrative inquiry. The Teacher Educator, 35(4), 109–127. Schaafsma, D., Pagnucci, G.S., Wallace, R.M., & Stock, P.L. (2007). Composing storied ground: Four generations of narrative inquiry. English Education, 39(4), 282–305. Schank, R., & Berman, T. (2006). Living stories: Designing story-based educational experiences. Narrative Inquiry, 16(1), 220–228. Xu, S., & Connelly, F.M. (2009). Narrative inquiry for teacher education and development: Focus on English as a foreign language in China. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25, 219–227. Yu, W.M. (2005). An experiential study on the application of narrative inquiry in teacher development in Hong Kong. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Toronto, University of Toronto.

References published in Chinese Chang, Y. (2004). Narrative inquiry and teachers’ professional development. Foreign Elementary Education, 12, 16–19. Chen, K.S. (2003). Should teachers write educational papers? Educational Reference, 1. Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, F.M. (2003). Narrative Inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. (M.L. Tsai, & H.W. Yu, Trans.).Taipei: Psychological Publishing. (Original work published 2000). Ding, G. (Ed.). (since 2001). China’s Education: Research and Review. Beijing: Educational Science Publisher. Ding, G. (2008). Voice and experience: Narrative inquiry in education. Narrative Research Series in China’s Education. Beijing: Educational Science Publisher. Hayhoe, R. (2008). Portraits of influential Chinese educators. Narrative Research Series in China’s Education. Beijing: Educational Science Publisher. Liu, T.F. (2005). Educational account and the teacher growth. Journal of Heibei Normal University, 7(6), 22–26.

 Yu Wai Ming & Lau Chun Kwok Sun, S.W. (2008). Landscape of lives of college students. Narrative Research Series in China’s Education. Beijing: Educational Science Publisher. Soong, W.L. (2002). Narrative and consciousness: Another dialogue position. Applied Psychological Research, 16, 157–185. Wang, D. et al. (2008). Teacher’s traces: A narrative research of classroom life. Narrative Research Series in China’s Education. Beijing: Educational Science Publisher. Xu, X.L. (2004). “Anything goes?” – A rational reflection on narrative research in education. Educational Research and Experiment, 1, 5–11. Zhang, S.L. (2007). Culture, gender and education: Women college students in China from 1900 to 1930. Narrative Research Series in China’s Education. Beijing: Educational Science Publisher.

chapter 6

Multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry Conversations between advisor and advisee JoAnn Phillion & Yuxian Wang Purdue University

In this chapter the authors, one an experienced narrative inquirer and one a novice narrative inquirer, engage in a dialogue about learning and teaching narrative inquiry across languages, cultures and geographic contexts. The focus is on the advisor and advisee collaborative learning that occurs as they discuss the advisee’s project. The primary purpose of the chapter is to explore the learning and teaching of narrative inquiry within research conducted with marginalized student populations in international, multicultural contexts. A form of narrative inquiry that builds on current work in narrative inquiry, termed “multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry” (Phillion 2008; Phillion & M. He 2009), is discussed within the dialogue and reflection on the dialogue. This form of narrative inquiry uses critical perspectives and has an explicit social justice orientation. Key issues that narrative inquirers engaged in this form of inquiry need to consider are discussed: role of researcher, context, theory, and representation. One narrative inquiry on Hui (Muslim) minority students in P.R. China is presented to demonstrate the particular qualities of this form of inquiry. Dilemmas and concerns associated with this form of inquiry are addressed within the context of learning and teaching narrative inquiry.

1.â•… Introduction One of the joys of working with doctoral students is the collaborative learning and teaching that is done as they engage in their dissertation research projects. The students that I, JoAnn Phillion, work with at Purdue University are from around the world: Honduras, India, Japan, Korea, Nigeria, P.R. China, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine, and more. My U.S. students are also diverse: African American, Asian American, Latino/a, Native American, and more. Most of my students focus on inquiries into the educational experiences of students who

 JoAnn Phillion & Yuxian Wang

are Â�marginalized due to race, ethnicity, immigration status, class, gender, sexual orientation and religion within an increasingly globalized context. Most of my students use Â�narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly 2000) in their dissertation projects; Â�others use narrative elements in their work. The unifying thread that links all my students to each other, and me to them, is that we are concerned with broad issues of social justice in education within a framework of multicultural education in local, national and international contexts. This nexus of multicultural education, social justice and narrative inquiry is the primary focus of my teaching. An added dimension of our work is that most of my students are not concerned solely with academic “products”, such as dissertations, articles or chapters, but also are concerned with an action/advocacy component of their work (see M. He & Phillion 2008, for multiple examples). The question that provides a backdrop to our work is “How do we make a difference in terms of directly impacting the lives of people, schools, and communities?” In this chapter we, JoAnn Phillion and Yuxiang Wang, explore issues that are at the forefront of our thinking about narrative inquiry. To do this, we first briefly present our personal narratives about how we came to this method and the evolution of our thinking about learning and teaching narrative inquiry. Woven into these personal narratives are approaches and texts used to learn and teach a new form of narrative inquiry; one that incorporates critical perspectives, considers power relations, and has explicit research agendas focused on social justice. This new form of narrative inquiry, one that builds on existing narrative work, Phillion and M. He (2008) term multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry. After our introductory narratives we focus on a series of questions and responses that highlight key issues in multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry: role of researcher, role of various contexts, role of theory and representation of participants’ voices and views. These issues are explored in much of the work done in narrative inquiry; however, it is our contention, illustrated with the content of this chapter, that research with marginalized populations requires a more critical approach, a deeper recognition of power relations, and a greater use of critical theories, such as critical multicultural theories, critical Indigenous theories, feminist theories or postcolonial theories, than is typical in many narrative inquiries. The reflection that follows the questions and responses highlights important elements of learning and teaching multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry and brings forward dilemmas and concerns associated with this form of inquiry. Yuxiang’s inquiry into the experiences of Hui students (a Muslim minority group) in P.R. China is used as a means to probe our developing understanding of how to address these key issues. Two questions from the work of Cortazzi and Jin (2006, p. 28) that deal with these issues specifically from an international and comparative perspective also provide a thoughtful background for our



Chapter 6.╇ Multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry 

exploration: (1) “How does a researcher from a different cultural background … get access to participants’ narrative accounts of learning experiences”? and, (2) “How do researchers get, translate and represent voices authentically in narrative research”? 2.â•… T  wo narratives of the evolution of learning and teaching narrative inquiry 2.1â•… JoAnn’s narrative As a graduate student I found that there was a synergy between narrative inquiry and multicultural education (Phillion 2002). I was thrilled to find narrative inquiry to be the ideal method to use in working with marginalized populations such as the immigrant teachers I worked with in Toronto, Canada. I also found the goals of multicultural education, that is addressing issues of inequality in classrooms, schools, communities and societies were compatible philosophically, epistemologically and methodologically with narrative inquiry as it is a method that seeks to bring forward the voices and concerns of participants and that seeks meaning in relationship with, and through dialogue with, participants. As I began to teach (and hence learn) about narrative inquiry as faculty advisor to doctoral students, I found that, for the purposes of my students, something was missing from much of the work in narrative inquiry – specifically a critical perspective and a social justice orientation. Working with my students in inquiries about Native American educational issues, young children who are homeless, immigrant teachers, adolescent suicide, children of Roma heritage, and children who are from minority populations throughout Asia, amongst other inquiries, led me to see that we needed to develop a critical lens for examining the broad socio-political context that led to conditions in which their participants were marginalized in schools. Initially I found that a critical perspective and social justice orientation derived from critical multicultural theories (Sleeter & McLaren 1995) filled in some of the pieces that I felt were essential to my students’ inquiries. As time went by, I learned, partially through reading in other fields and tracing trends in qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln 2003), but primarily from my students, about other critical theories, some that honoured a narrative approach; in particular those engaged in research by, for, and with African Americans who used critical race theory (Ladson-Billings 1998), and Indigenous peoples who used critical Indigenous methodologies (Smith 1999) and Tribal Critical Race theories (Brayboy 2006). These theoretical and methodological perspectives enhanced my students’ understanding of the experiences of marginalized groups and individuals they worked with in contested cultural, linguistic and socio-political milieus nationally and internationally.

 JoAnn Phillion & Yuxian Wang

Phillion and M. He (2008) have termed this significant turn to a critical perspective and social justice orientation within narrative inquiry multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry. Multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry, as a form of inquiry, and as a method of representing understandings of inquiry, is being developed by my students, like Yuxiang Wang (2010), to portray the way marginalized minorities’ lives are lived, expressed, and addressed in national and international contexts. Multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry, evolving in response to the need to portray the shifting dynamics of experience of those caught up in, and often lost in, the global context, is also being developed in response to the blurring lines between research and advocacy, and in response to the call for research that is more relevant to pressing issues of social justice (Ayers 2006). As I engaged in inquiries with my students, I learned about and explicitly taught, key aspects of doing multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry. One was the exploration of self in relation to the participants in the inquiry and the context of the inquiry, or what is often termed the role of the researcher. As an advisor I found that many of my students struggled with this idea. This was particularly difficult for those who had been “trained” in other methods of research, ones in which the researcher is all-knowing and relies on what they think of as facts to represent their findings in their studies. An additional layer of consideration is the disparate power relations often at play in an inquiry. Majority populations’ members from around the globe are often the ones who are able to attend U.S. universities; in many cases they have not been exposed to thinking of themselves as having forms of privilege that need to be acknowledged in inquiries, particularly when they engage in research with minority populations in their home countries as my students do. Contextual factors of the inquiry, such as the historical contexts and policy contexts, and others, are also often not taken into consideration in training my students have received. The role of theory is also something we discuss; we acknowledge its place and the importance of a critical perspective, but also want participants’ experiences and their views of their experiences to be privileged in writing. These aspects of multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry can often be somewhat “countercultural” (Trahar, personal communication, 2010) and as such something we struggle with as we learn and teach narrative inquiry. In the remainder of the chapter we explore these aspects of multicultural and cross cultural narrative inquiry in Yuxiang’s personal narrative and the dialogue and reflection that follows. 2.2â•… Yuxiang’s narrative I am a Han Chinese; a member of the majority population in China. As a school teacher and university academic in China, I was informed that minority people in



Chapter 6.╇ Multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry 

China are happy; the following statements exemplify this ideology: “56 nationalities are a family,” “Minority groups live a happy life,” “Minority groups love the country” (Wang & Phillion 2010). Furthermore, minority peoples’ language and cultural rights are officially protected by the Constitution of 1982. After I came to the U.S. and started my doctoral studies in the field of multicultural education, I became unsure of the above statements; were minority groups in China really one big happy family? As I was questioning what I had been taught about minority groups in China, I began to be interested in narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly 2000), particularly multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry (Phillion & M. He 2008). Although I was trained in China to use figures and technical results to support my views and I believed that the researcher was the sole authority in interpreting data, I started to focus on participants’ stories and experiences and their roles in interpreting data. During my course work and research, I was inspired by the narrative inquiry done by Phillion (2002, 2008) on minority teachers and students’ experiences in Canada and in Hong Kong and wanted to do this kind of research with minority groups in China. I began my research by examining minority policy and practice in China (Wang & Phillion 2009) and analyzing elementary textbooks in China (Wang & Phillion 2010). I found that there were not only large gaps between policy and practice but also little representation, and even misrepresentation, of minority cultures and knowledge in textbooks. I realized there was a need to explore minority students’ school experiences and stories as they were left out of the curriculum and, consequently, they were silenced. I particularly wanted to inquire into Hui (a Muslim minority group) students’ cultural recognition and identity construction and how mainstream Han teachers interpret Hui culture and knowledge in school in P.R. China. To do this research, I engaged in a narrative inquiry into the experiences of two Hui students – Lingling and Bai Lan – both in school and at home (students’ and teachers’ names and the school name are pseudonyms). Through interviews with Lingling and Bai Lan, their parents, and their teachers, Mr. Ma and Mr. Wan, and through school and class observations and family visits, I tried to find out how Hui culture and knowledge were represented in school curricula, textbooks, and in the teachers’ classroom instruction. I also attempted to assess the impact of these factors on the Hui students’ identity. In contrast to everything I had learned about doing research in China, I found I had a small “sample size” and was focused on in-depth understanding of experience rather than on the accumulation of data from surveys and test scores. A framework based on multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry (Phillion & M. He 2008) guided my exploration of the two Hui students’ experiences; helped me “live” their experiences through class observations, family visits, and interviews with the Hui students, their teachers, and their parents; and enabled

 JoAnn Phillion & Yuxian Wang

me to understand their experiences through developing relationships with the Hui students and their parents. M. He (2003) stated that people’s experience should be understood within community, socio-economic, political, and historical contexts; the ways in which people interact with other cultures, and are influenced by other cultures, provide opportunities for researchers to understand their lives and work beyond labels and stereotypes; and such inquiry helps people “cultivate hope and possibilities for better lives in a multicultural society” (p. 19). These characteristics of multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry provided a framework for me to examine Hui students’ stories within socio-political, historical, and cultural contexts and to understand Hui students’ lives in relation to past experiences to contribute to an understanding of current issues related to their language, culture, and identity. Multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry not only helped me position myself as an inquirer, but it also helped me position the participants, the Hui students, their parents, and their teachers, as collaborative inquirers, which, I hope, created a more equitable environment for both me and the participants to negotiate the meaning of the participants’ lived experiences. These and other characteristics of multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry required an epistemological shift for me from a view of knowledge as objective, concrete and neutral, to a view of knowledge as co-constructed, fluid, and often contested. I was challenged to think of research in new ways that diverged from my past training: as engagement with people, as immersion in lives, as listening to stories of experience. I was also challenged to think about issues within research that I had never faced in China: who I was in the inquiry, who I was in relation to my participants, and how being from a different cultural background might enable or inhibit access to my participants’ narrative accounts of experiences; how historical and other contexts impacted my participants’ present experiences; the role of theory in the inquiry; and how I could represent voices authentically in my research. At the same time that I was challenged, I was also excited at the possibilities this kind of research opened up for me and my participants. 3.â•… Questions and responses; Conundrums and challenges In engaging in a multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry, there are many issues that need to be explored in depth. For the purposes of this chapter, we discuss the role of the researcher, role of context, role of theory, and representation. We use the form of questions and responses between JoAnn and Yuxiang, followed by a final reflection, to highlight the learning and teaching of multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry within the advisor-advisee relationship. While we recognize the value of collaborative group conversations focused on our work, and



Chapter 6.╇ Multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry 

engage in these kinds of endeavours through classes and research group meetings, we also believe that within conversations focused on probing questions, done with an individual student, learning and teaching of narrative inquiry occurs. 4.â•… Role of the researcher JoAnn: Yuxiang, as you engaged in your inquiry how did you deal with your role as researcher? From what I have learned about your background, I know that you have not had to think about this issue in your research projects when you were in China. I know you had studied this role in an abstract way in readings on qualitative research, but you were doing your own inquiry and this made it tangible and urgent. You are a member of the majority Han, the participant students and parents are members of minority Hui; how do you feel this impacted your work? In narrative inquiry, we rely on developing relationships with our participants; how do you feel your participants related to you? Yuxiang: Yes, I am a Han Chinese and as such represent the majority population and also the population that has historically held power in China. This power imbalance made me feel somewhat like a colonizer who was studying the lived experiences of the “other” – the Hui students. However, I feel that my educational background, life experiences, experiences of multiple cultures, and especially multicultural education theories and postcolonial theories, inspired me to continuously reflect on my perspectives throughout the research process. During the process of data collection, data analysis, and dissertation writing, I was an interviewer, a class observer, and a visitor to Hui students’ families. I tried to guard against the stereotypical views of Hui that I held, which I could be bringing into interviews, analysis, and writing, through using my researcher journal as a place to explore these issues. I tried to make my views transparent through informing the participants of who I am, my educational background, and the purpose of conducting the research. I also talked to other researchers, my colleagues and my advisor, and discussed my views about Hui students’ experiences in eastern China. I positioned myself as an inquirer, and my participants as collaborative inquirers, so that we could negotiate the meaning of their stories and views. I asked participants to confirm whether my interpretations were what they meant. My participants, therefore, became inquirers, interpreters, and negotiators during the process of data analysis and writing. I also think that a rigourous exploration of various contexts (discussed later) enabled me to understand my identity as researcher. These issues were not discussed in the research I did before coming to the U.S so I constantly had to think about them. I found work in narrative inquiry useful (e.g. M. He & Phillion 2008); it was helpful to know that other researchers, even those not trained in a positivistic tradition as I was, struggled with their role in their inquiries.

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4.1â•… Interpretation in the inquiry JoAnn: In what other situations did your identity impact your research? I know that is a broad question because we have discussed how the researcher’s identity impacts every stage of the inquiry from deciding on the research topic, to representing what was learned in the inquiry, and everything in-between. I also know that you have written extensively about who you are in the inquiry in terms of you being Han majority, a person obtaining a degree in the U.S., doing research with Hui minority girls and their parents and teachers. But, given that, was there any particular stage of your work that you struggled with understanding the impact of who you were on your research? Yuxiang: I was particularly concerned about my role in interpretation of my data, something I did not have to consider in my previous research. I used to think I was like an “instrument”, neutral and objective and would simply analyze data and create a report on my findings; in narrative inquiry the dynamics of interpretation change completely! While Lather does not do narrative inquiry, I found her work useful in helping me see how to examine issues like the role of the researcher in interpreting data. In order to guard against biased views that she might bring to the process of interpreting her data, Lather (2000) challenged herself on how she assessed the truth in participants’ stories and the credibility of interpreting her data. I challenged myself about how I assessed the truth of my participants’ stories and my credibility in interpreting my data for the purpose of faithfully negotiating and interpreting my participants’ stories or views. How do I know that my participants told me the truth in their stories? By that I mean that since I am Han Chinese who went to Dongsheng Elementary School to conduct research about Hui students’ cultural experiences and identity construction in eastern China and my brother is a teacher there, I was not sure whether the Hui students and their parents told me the truth or hid things from me. As Lather (2000) stated, “she [Rigoberta Menchu] will not tell the whole truth. She has her secrets. She also is strategic, wanting certain outcomes for her people” (p.154). Bai Lan’s father asked me a question that made me think about this issue, “Why are you interested in our [Hui] life since you are in the U.S.?” My answer to Bai Lan’s father’s question was that I wanted to have their voices heard in the U.S. and in China as well. The parent looked puzzled after he heard my answer. For those who suffered from persecution in the Cultural Revolution because of criticizing the government and the Chinese Communist Party (M. He 2003), they dared not tell the truth by criticizing school practices, Chinese government minority policy, and/or the Chinese Communist Party. However, through “pay[ing] attention to the way stories are told, to the presentation of the object that is a perfomative registration of how history courses through us in the scene of writing”



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(Lather 2000, p. 145), I emphasized the process of how data were collected under certain conditions and how the participants’ stories were told. 4.2â•… Truth in inquiry JoAnn: Can you tell me more about what you mean that you were concerned that the participants did not tell you the truth? I am not accustomed to using this word in narrative inquiry and would not consider using it when discussing what my participants told me. Yuxiang: This is a complex issue; again, I never had to deal with this in the kind of research I engaged in before and I felt overwhelmed at times. Mainly it comes down to power differentials; simply put, I am Han and they are Hui. Historically and in the present Han have had control. I am an outsider to Hui students and their parents. Since I am in the U.S. for my doctoral study, I am even an outsider to the Han teachers as well. After I interviewed one teacher, Mr. Ma, he said to me, “Please do not interpret my answers to your questions at your will. Be honest.” I promised that I would be honest in interpreting his views and experiences and that I would ask for his feedback on my findings and interpretation. In addition, my brother is a teacher at the research site school and he helped recruit the participants. Between me and the Hui students and parents, there is an issue of power differences. Hui students and their parents might be cautious about their language while they commented on or criticized teachers’ teaching, school practices, and local government policies. The teachers dared not criticize the school practices and minority policies because minority issues are sensitive and political as well. Political correctness is one of the requirements that teachers have to follow in their teaching practice (Action plan for patriotic education, 2006). Those are some of the types of issues I had to deal with when thinking about truth. I think that the focus I had on truth was because of the political situation in China and because I was interested in minority student education, a controversial topic in China today. While I recognize that truth in inquiry is something everyone has to think about, I feel there were added layers of concern in my inquiry. 5.â•… The impact of context JoAnn: Yuxiang, as we meet in our research group we have discussed the various contexts that can impact our work. We have noted that every inquiry requires a thoughtful examination of factors that we need to consider to understand our participants’ experience and that positioning within various contexts can deepen and broaden the meaning of individual experience. What contexts do you think were

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significant to explore in your work with Hui? Why were these particular contexts fundamental to your work? How did an understanding of these contexts contribute to your understanding of your participants? Yuxiang: I found it was important to position my work within China’s history, minority policies, and school and curriculum contexts. Without these contexts, I would have been unable to understand Lingling’s and Bai Lan’s experiences. As I engaged in my inquiry, I gradually realized that understanding the history, in particular, of the Hui in China was essential to understand what was going on with the two Hui girls, and their parents, in the present. What they had to say about language, culture and identity took on deeper meaning when examined in the light of Han/Hui relationships in the past. Let me briefly explain why I feel this context was so important. 5.1â•… Historical context The Hui is one of 10 Muslim groups in China. The presence of the Hui people in China can be traced back to the Tang Dynasty (618–907). During the Tang Dynasty, Persian and Arab traders brought Islam to China, and some traders stayed. Over time, the Hui have experienced what I term a transition from Muslims in China to Chinese Muslims. When Muslims first came to China, they lived as they chose in their communities and kept to themselves (Israeli 2002; Lynn 2004). They were Muslims in China. After the Tang, Song (960–1279), and Yuan (1271–1368) Dynasties, Muslims not only developed communities such as those in Ningxia, Xinjiang, Henan, and Yunnan but also scattered all over the country (Israeli 2002; Lynn 2004; Mi & You 2004). However, things changed in the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644); that was when the acculturation and assimilation of Muslims occurred. Intermarriage between Han and Muslims was encouraged, and Muslims were forced to have Han Chinese names, wear Han clothes, use the Chinese language, and learn Chinese culture and Confucian ideology as well as the Islamic faith (Lynn 2004; Mi & You 2004). Muslims gradually lost their native language, which had a great impact on their cultural and religious lives (Israeli 2002; Lynn 2004). During the Ming Dynasty, the Han used the terms “Hui” or “Huihui”; these terms indicate that Muslims in China had become “Chinese Muslims” (Israeli 2002, p. 119). The historical position of the Hui provided an important context for me to understand the two Hui girls’ stories and experiences. I understood why the two Hui girls spoke Chinese rather than Arabic and why they do not read the Quran and do not go to mosque to pray. I understood why the two Hui girls were comfortable with their Chinese identity. I saw the power differences between the Hui and Han: the Han controlled almost all the institutions and the Hui had little power; the Han teachers interpreted Hui culture and knowledge and constructed the two



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Hui girls’ identity while the Hui students accepted their Han teachers’ interpretation of their culture and identity. I could see that what was happening today in the girls’ school and classrooms was connected to what had occurred historically. 5.2â•… Minority policy context I also found that minority policy and practice in China helped me, and I hope also my readers, to understand the Hui students’ and their parents’ stories and experience. My research and that of others demonstrated that there are gaps between government policy and practice. Officially, the rights and interests of China’s minority nationalities are protected by the Constitution (1982). Meanwhile, above all, China values the unity of the nation, and any split or secession of minority nationalities from the nation is illegal. Articles 111–122 in the Constitution (1982) regulate autonomous regions, prefectures and counties, and stipulate that the head of every autonomous region must be from that specific ethnic group. However, Han officials at various levels in autonomous regions play the decisive role in decision making and central government policy implementation (B. He 2005; Nima 2001). Genuine self-government and autonomy are absent because unity is the top national priority (B. He 2005; Israeli 2002; Mackerras 1994). While the Constitution mandates various forms of equality, the actual situation for minority groups is different. The border areas that 55 minority nationalities inhabit are rich in natural resources (Mackerras 1994; Veeck, Pannell, Smith, & Huang 2007). But poverty in minority regions in China is becoming worse because of the unbalanced educational and economic development between Han dominant eastern regions and minority dominant western regions (The developmentoriented poverty reduction programme for rural China, 2004). Schools in minority rural areas lack basic educational resources and quality teachers (Liu 2007; Zhu 2008). The following figures from a survey of schools in western rural areas, conducted by the State Education Department Research Centre in 2003, show that these schools did not have even basic resources: “37.8 percent do not have enough desks and stools; 22.3 percent have unsafe classrooms or offices; and about 32.5 percent do not have enough funds to buy teaching aids, ink, chalk, and other supplies” (as cited in Yang 2005, p. 20). These inequalities exist within the Hui group. My research on minority policy made me aware that large gaps exist between China’s minority policy and its practice; what is stated in the Constitution of P.R. China and minority laws is absent from what happens in minority groups’ daily life. This had a direct impact on my participants’ experiences. I understand why there was little Hui culture and knowledge in the school curriculum. That the two Hui girls could not speak the Arabic language and were comfortable with their Chinese identity demonstrates that minority language and identity are less important than Mandarin Chinese and national identity. Because the Chinese Communist Party

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(CCP) controls all the institutions, the instillation of Han dominant ideologies, reproduction of the dominant Han culture, and maintenance of national unity (Postiglione 1999) are part of the practices of the CCP. 5.3â•… School and curriculum context JoAnn: Yuxiang, I see the importance of looking at the history of the Hui in China and minority policy and practice in understanding your participants’ stories and experiences. Traditionally, if we are looking at educational issues in a narrative inquiry, the school plays an important role in understanding participants’ experiences. Does the school context help your readers understand Hui students’ and parents’ stories? Yuxiang: Yes. A critical examination of the school context and the curriculum offered in the school are essential aspects of understanding Hui experiences. The unified “curriculum standardization mirrors the macro-trend towards cultural homogenization” (Pinar 1991, p. 166). Han Chinese-centred culture and knowledge constitute the contents of the National College Entrance Examination. Little attention has been given to the culture and knowledge of minority groups in this examination, which passes information to minority students that the mastery of Han culture and knowledge means everything: a good university to attend, a good job after graduation, and a better life in the future. Discriminative practice is also demonstrated in the treatment of minority languages. For example, the promotion of Mandarin Chinese as the official language in the 1950s; the recognition of Tibetan, Mongolian, Korean, Uighur, and Kazak writing systems and the consideration of other minority language writing systems as incomplete in 1950s (Zhou 2004); and only six minority language versions of the National College Examination: Tibetan, Uighur, Mongolian, Korean, Kazakh, and Kirghiz. Educational practice in Xinjiang Province is also worth examining. Minority students who belong to the same minority language were put in one school (Xing 2003). Minority students in the segregated schools had no chance of learning from students from other cultures and of experiencing other cultures (Spring 2007). The curriculum context also needs to be considered. The national unified school textbooks in China make it possible for the mainstream Han group to reproduce mainstream ideology and culture. Wang and Phillion (2010) found that minority culture and knowledge were misrepresented and under-represented in textbooks and other curriculum materials. Upton (1996) stated that Tibetan history in Tibetan school textbooks was different from what Tibetan people experienced or knew. The dominance of Mandarin Chinese in school induced minority



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students and parents to prefer learning Mandarin Chinese to minority home languages (Ma 2007; Upton 1996). Although bilingual education has been provided in most minority regions, its quality is difficult to control because of bilingual teachers’ quality (Xing 2003). Bilik (1998) argued that bilingual education in Inner Mongolia served as a transition for Inner Mongolians to better master the official language – Mandarin Chinese, which is a means of socioeconomic mobility, while the Mongolian language is used only for family communication. Consideration of the school and curriculum context allowed me to understand the kind of students mainstream Han people wanted to make out of the two Hui girls through exclusion of Hui culture and knowledge from the school curriculum. I realized that it is impossible to represent Hui culture and knowledge in the school curriculum and to construct Hui identity without reconceptualizing the school curriculum in China and implementing multicultural education into teacher Â�education courses in China. 6.â•… The role of theory JoAnn: Yuxiang, I am always interested in how students see the role of theory in their inquiries. I recall as I did my dissertation research how I struggled with what I was seeing, or thought I was seeing, in my participants’ classroom and what I thought of as “good multicultural practices” that I had learned from theoretical readings in multicultural education. As you engaged in your inquiry, how did you envision the place of theory in your work? Yuxiang: I was interested in theoretically analyzing my participants’ experience; I saw theory as a tool that I could use to deepen my understanding of their stories. Theory was particularly useful as I tried to place my participants’ experiences in broader contexts of history, policy and school practices. While I was engaged in my inquiry I was exposed to a variety of different theoretical viewpoints from readings in courses and also from my own reading. Due to the nature of my inquiry and the minority population I was working with, I found postcolonial theory and multicultural education theory to be the most useful. 6.1â•… The infusion of postcolonial theory Postcolonial theory was a useful tool to critically examine the discriminative and assimilative policies and practices that affect Hui students’ lived experience. Postcolonialism provided a theory not only to examine literary and philosophical texts that support colonialism and related practices (Said 1978; Spivak 1988,

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1999) but also to study and analyze the unbalanced power relations demonstrated in knowledge production (Kanu 2006). These elements were useful as I analyzed government policies and school textbooks for not only what they included, but what they excluded. I also viewed postcolonialism as a position from which I could challenges the given history, ideology, language, culture, and stereotyped interpretation of Indigenous knowledge and culture (London 2006); this was useful as I examined Hui in China. Although China has not been colonized by any western country, postcolonialism provided a tool for me to examine how the Han group manipulates ideologies, denigrates the culture and knowledge of 55 minority groups in China, and eradicates the language, culture, and identity of minority groups for the purpose of maintaining the status quo. Postcolonialism helped me position in a larger context what the Hui students feel about their identity since they have lost their home language and use Mandarin Chinese. I examined whether the Hui students believe that their identity is “in-between” or, as Bhabha said (in Rutherford 1990), in a “third space.” In my dissertation I discussed whether or not the Hui have the possibility of negotiating a third space with the Han group. Postcolonialism also helped me guard against a biased understanding of the Hui students’ experiences. In doing so, the line between me as the researcher and my participants was blurred, and Hui students, their teachers, and their parents were in, what I hope, was a collaborative position with me in the process of interpreting their experiences. I would ask participants to elaborate what they meant by using certain terms or stories and I would give my interpretation of their stories to them for their approval. If they disagreed with my interpretation, I would ask them to explain what made them think that my interpretation did not match their stories and experiences. In doing so, I tried to figure out the meaning behind their stories and experiences. I think that my participants felt that their stories and experiences were valued. 6.2â•… The infusion of multicultural education theory JoAnn: Yuxiang, how did you integrate multicultural education theory into your narrative inquiry? In what way was it most useful for you to understand your participants? Yuxiang: I found multicultural education theories useful throughout my inquiry, for example, as I examined school textbooks and classroom curriculum, as I observed interactions between teachers and Hui students and, particularly, as I discussed the implications of my inquiry. One of the goals of multicultural education is to reform minority students’ education through the innovation of school curriculum, teachers’ pedagogical approaches, and administrators’ views about minority students’ language, culture, and knowledge (Gay, 2000). The mainstream



Chapter 6.╇ Multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry 

Han teachers in my inquiry excluded Hui students’ beliefs, culture, and knowledge from class instruction and school curriculum, and used teaching approaches that allowed mainstream ideology to be reproduced. Therefore, I contended that in China, cultural and linguistic diversity are urgent challenges that teachers, administrators, and curriculum designers need to address if they want to provide quality education to minority students through culturally responsive teaching (Gay 2000). School teachers and administrators in China need multicultural education training to increase their cultural awareness and reduce their prejudice in order to protect and value minority students’ culture and knowledge. Chinese multicultural education theories need to be developed to help create culturally friendly school environments and to provide culturally responsive teaching to minority students like the Hui students in eastern China. Using multicultural education theory and postcolonial theory I was able to articulate a position that challenged the normalization of mainstream Han culture and knowledge in school curriculum, the manipulation of mainstream Han ideology, and the construction of Hui students’ identity as Chinese. I was also able to challenge the assimilative nature of schooling in China, which took away Hui students’ culture and identity. I felt these challenges, generated within a narrative inquiry that had a strong theoretical basis of analysis, was a significant contribution to the literature on minority students. This study demonstrated that issues such as race, culture, language, knowledge, and identity – which are often discussed in North America in multicultural education – are also issues relevant to minority students in other parts of the world. 7.â•… Representation JoAnn: Yuxiang, one of the key issues in narrative inquiry, as in much qualitative inquiry, is representation of “findings”. In my own dissertation, I grappled with this; I never felt I was adequately representing what my participants told me and felt I was so selective in what I chose to write about. In the end, it seemed as though I could not do justice to my participants’ experiences and stories and could not faithfully render the spirit of the inquiry. How did you deal with this? Yuxiang: I did not struggle that much with representing the findings of my study. The interpretation was more difficult; once I felt I had a handle on what my participants meant, then I wrote about that. I followed a system that seemed to work for me. I tried to be accurate and exhaustive. I provided detailed information on historical and policy contexts. I created rich descriptions of Dongsheng Elementary School, the Hui students’ classrooms, curriculum, teacher-student interactions, their home environment, and the socio-economic environment in the community in the study. In addition, I described my Han background and

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possible bias that I might bring to the process of data analysis and interpretation so that readers might judge my possible misrepresentation. I did think about the purposes of presenting findings; I was doing a dissertation, but what were my participants getting from being in my study? I felt that I benefited more from the research than my participants. I went to the school to interview the Hui students, their teachers, and their parents for the purpose of my dissertation writing. Since my brother is a teacher in that school and I am a Han Chinese and came from a university in the U.S., it seemed that I had more power than the Hui students and their parents. The power differences determined that I might misinterpret my participants’ stories and experiences, reinforce some mainstream Han ideology, and impose my worldviews on the Hui students and their parents. I did struggle with that. One major area of concern arose in discussing my findings with my participants. Perhaps because of my theoretical orientation, I interpreted the purpose of schooling as control of knowledge. I saw a denigration of Hui knowledge in the lack of representation of this knowledge in the curriculum, textbooks, and classroom discourse. Meanwhile, Lingling’s and Bai Lan’s parents’ expected Lingling and Bai Lan to concentrate on the study of mainstream Han knowledge and culture that their teachers transmitted to them. Lingling and Bai Lan had little choice of what the teachers assigned and what their parents required them to do at home. In school, Lingling and Bai Lan had to follow class rules and school regulations to learn Han culture and knowledge and to work hard to earn high scores on examinations or standardized tests. Teachers were the authority in knowledge transmitting and students could not challenge their teachers (B. He 2005). Han knowledge and culture in the textbooks were regarded as truth (Wang & Phillion, 2010), which Lingling and Bai Lan had to learn. Lingling’s and Bai Lan’s parents and teachers expected Lingling and Bai Lan to learn the required school curricula and Han knowledge and culture for the purpose of entering a better high school and better college. Their parents and teachers did not believe that it was necessary for Lingling and Bai Lan to learn Hui culture, beliefs, and knowledge. Parents and teachers thought that what I proposed – including Hui culture, beliefs, and knowledge into school curricula – sounded good but not practical because Lingling and Bain Lan lived in the Han dominant region in eastern China. The conflicts between my interpretation of their stories and experiences and their values and beliefs about Lingling’s and Bai Lan’s education made me think of my values and ideology and my participants’ ones. I chose to focus on Lingling’s and Bai Lan’s parents’ and their teachers’ understanding of school education. Then I provided my comments on the nature of the mainstream group’s control of school knowledge and culture.



Chapter 6.╇ Multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry 

8.â•… R  eflection on learning and teaching multicultural, cross-cultural narrative inquiry In the above opening narratives and question and response dialogue between advisor and advisee on teaching and learning multicultural, cross-cultural narrative inquiry, issues related to researcher role, context, place of theory and representation were explored. While these issues are discussed in much of the work done in narrative inquiry, there are significant differences when working with marginalized populations. In the following sections, we summarize some of the essential elements of multicultural, cross-cultural narrative inquiry. Cortazzi and Jin’s questions (2006, p. 28), used as a backdrop for the dialogue above, also provide a thoughtful background for this further exploration: (1) How does a researcher from a different cultural background … get access to participants’ narrative accounts of learning experiences; and, (2) How do researchers get, translate and represent voices authentically in narrative research? 8.1â•… The necessity for critical self-examination First and foremost in multicultural, cross-cultural narrative inquiry there is a necessity for critical self-examination (Nussbaum 1997). This requires an in-depth examination of who we are in the inquiry in relation to our participants, a key feature of many narrative inquiries; in particular multicultural, cross-cultural narrative inquiry requires on-going, vigilant examination of the privilege researchers hold because of their race, class, ethnicity and/or position in the society in which they are engaged in their work. This self-examination occurs at all phases of the inquiry and is explored in a variety of ways: the primary means is the researcher’s journal where on a daily basis these issues are brought forward; dialogue with participants about who they are and how they are understanding what participants are telling them, and dialogue with colleagues, other researchers and advisors about their role in the inquiry and the views they hold about their participants; and readings about engaging in research, particularly those done by other inquirers concerned with issues of social justice who are working with marginalized populations, and theoretical readings such as those in postcolonial theory or multicultural education that help researchers understand their position. This process is often difficult to engage in as researchers can sometimes resist seeing themselves as having any forms of privilege and because many have not been exposed to the idea that the researcher is part of the process of an inquiry. In Yuxiang’ s inquiry, he found that on-going critical self-examination assisted in dealing with views he held about Hui minorities and in discussing his relationship with his participants.

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8.2â•… The necessity for rigorous methods Second, in multicultural, cross-cultural narrative inquiry, as in other narrative inquiries, there is a necessity for using rigorous methods. In addition to researchers’ journals, dialogue with participants and others, and reading deeply and broadly in narrative inquiry and theory, a wide range of methods are used. Document analysis is important to develop a context for understanding participant perspectives and experiences; these can range from historical documents, to government, minority provisions, and school policies, as well as curriculum documents. Observations take on new meaning when they are thought of as immersion in the lives of the participants and are key to developing understanding of self and others in the inquiry. This immersion often takes place over a long period of time; in Yuxiang’ s case, this involved several trips to China to investigate the various phases of his inquiry, from textbook analysis, to government document analysis, to onsite research. Multiple sources for exploring participants’ stories and perspectives are essential: interviews, field notes on observations, conversations, and school and home visits, rich, detailed descriptions of schools and classrooms; using these methods is time consuming. In the inquiry Yuxiang engaged in, he observed in the school, in classrooms in which teachers taught various subjects, in parents’ homes, and in students’ out of class environments as well. Using multiple sources and investigating multiple contexts enabled Yuxiang to create an authentic narrative of the experiences of his participants. In addition, he used a critical lens to examine the texts he collected from his research. The application of a critical perspective, discussed in the dialogue above, is essential in multicultural, cross-cultural narrative inquiry. 8.3â•… The necessity for careful interpretation and representation Third, in multicultural, cross-cultural narrative inquiry, as in other narrative inquiries, there is a necessity for careful, contextualized interpretation and representation. Interpretation and representation need to be thought of as the researcher’s responsibility, but also as a collaborative process engaged in with participants. Multicultural, cross-cultural narrative inquiry requires careful consideration of critical theories that can help best interpret and contextualize individual experience. When working with minority populations, critical theories, such as postcolonialism and multicultural education theories discussed above, can contextualize experience in ways that deepen understanding of the meaning of being a minority in schools and societies. As demonstrated in Yuxiang’s inquiry, this kind of orientation can also create differences in interpretation. To authentically represent his participants’ meaning, Yuxiang presented their views and ideas on the education of the Hui students and then presented his perspectives.



Chapter 6.╇ Multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry 

9.â•… Summary In the opening narratives, question and response dialogue between advisor and advisee on teaching and learning multicultural, cross-cultural narrative inquiry, and reflection, issues related to researcher role, context, place of theory and representation were explored. Significant differences when working with marginalized populations were described. Within the narratives, dialogue, and reflection, an argument was advanced for the development of a more critical approach to narrative inquiry, particularly in working with minority populations. The specific case of the Hui narrative inquiry highlighted the importance placed on understanding the researcher’s position as related to power differentials, of digging into significant, varied, contexts such as minority policies and historical documents, and positioning the work appropriately theoretically, as well as the meaning making with participants and resulting representation of understandings derived from the inquiry. The reflection on this dialogue, and additional conversations that you as a reader can imagine occurs in these kinds of exchanges, tells us about learning and teaching multicultural, cross-cultural narrative inquiry and some of the conundrums and challenges that engaging in this form of inquiry entail.

References Action plan for patriotic education. (2006). Chinese Education and Society, 39(2), 7–18. Ayers, W.C. (2006). Trudge toward freedom: Educational research in the public interest. In G. Ladson-Billings, & W.F. Tate, (Eds.). Education research in the public interest: Social justice, action and policy (pp. 81–97). New York, NY: Teachers College. Bilik, N. (1998). Language education, intellectuals, and symbolic representation: Being an urban Mongolian in a new configuration of social evolution. In W. Safran (Ed.), Nationalism and ethnoregional identities in China (pp. 47–67). Portland, OR: Frank Cass. Brayboy, B. (2006). Toward a tribal critical race theory in education. The Urban Review, 37(5), 425–446. Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, F.M. (2000). Narrative inquiry. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (1982). Retrieved January 13, 2007 from http://english.people.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html. Cortazzi, M., & Jin, L. (2006). Asking questions, sharing stories and identity construction: Sociocultural issues in narrative research. In S. Trahar (Ed.), Narrative research on learning: Comparative and international perspectives, (pp. 27–46). Oxford: Symposium Books. Denzin, N., & Lincoln, Y. (2003). The landscape of qualitative research: Theories and issues (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Development-oriented poverty reduction programme for rural China. (2004).Retrieved January 6, 2007, from http://news.xinhuanet.com/employment/2002–11/18/content_633166.html. Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

 JoAnn Phillion & Yuxian Wang He, B. (2005). Minority rights with Chinese characteristics. In W. Kymlicka & B. He (Eds.), Multiculturalism in Asia (pp. 56–79). Oxford: Oxford University Press. He, M.F. (2003). A river forever flowing: Cross-cultural lives and identities in the multicultural landscape. Greenwich, CT: Information Age. He, M.F., & Phillion, J. (Eds.). (2008). Research for social justice: Personal, passionate, participatory inquiries. Greenwich, CT: Information Age. Israeli, R. (2002). Islam in China: Religion, ethnicity, culture, and politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Kanu, Y. (2006). Introduction. In Y. Kanu (Ed.), Curriculum as cultural practice: Postcolonial imagination (pp. 3–29). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(1), 7–24. Lather, P. (2000). Reading the image of Rigoberta Menchu: Undecidability and language lessons. Qualitative Studies in Education, 13(2), 153–162. Liu, Y. (2007). Life, culture, and education in a border region. Chinese Education and Society, 40(1), 60–77. Lynn, A.M. (2004). Muslims in China. Indianapolis, IN: University of Indianapolis Press. London, N.A. (2006). Ideology and politics in English-language education in Trinidad and Tobago: The colonial experience and a postcolonial critique. In Y. Kanu (Ed.), Curriculum as cultural practice: Postcolonial imagination (pp. 33–70). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ma, R. (2007). Bilingual education for China’s ethnic minorities. Chinese Education and Society, 40(2), 9–25. Mackerras, C. (1994). China’s minorities: Integration and modernization in the twentieth century. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Mi, S., & You, J. (2004). Islam in China. Beijing: China Intercontinental Press. Nima, B. (2001). Problems related to bilingual education in Tibet. Chinese Education & Society, 34(2), 91–102. Nussbaum, M. (1997). Cultivating humanity: A classical defense of reform in liberal education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Phillion, J. (2002). Becoming a narrative inquirer in a multicultural landscape. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 34(5), 535–556. Phillion, J. (2008). Multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry into understanding immigrant students’ educational experience in Hong Kong. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 38 (3), 281–293. Phillion, J., & He, M.F. (2008). Multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry in educational research. Thresholds in Education, 34(1), 2–12. Pinar, W.F. (1991). Curriculum as social psychoanalysis: On the significance of place. In J.L. Kincheloe & W.F. Pinar (Eds.), Curriculum as social psychoanalysis: The significance of place (pp. 165–186). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Postiglione, G.A. (1999). Introduction: State schooling and ethnicity in China. In G.A.Postiglione (Ed.), China’s national minority education: Culture, schooling, and development (pp. 3–19). New York, NY: Falmer. Rutherford, J. (1990). The third space: Interview with Homi Bhabha. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community, culture, difference (pp. 207–221). London: Lawrence and Wishart. Said, E.W. (1978). Orientalism. New York, NY: Random House.



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Sleeter, C., & McLaren, P. (1995). Multicultural education, critical pedagogy, and the politics of difference. Albany, NY: State University of New York. Smith, L.T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. New York, NY: St. Martin’s. Spivak, G.C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grosssberg (Eds.),Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Spivak, G.C. (1999). A critique of postcolonial reason: Towards a history of the vanishing present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Spring, J. (2007). Deculturalization and the struggle for equality: A brief history of the education of dominated cultures in the United States (5th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Upton, J.L. (1996). Home on the grasslands? Tradition, modernity, and the negotiation of identity by Tibetan intellectuals in the PRC. In M.J. Brown (Ed.), Negotiating ethnicities in China and Taiwan (pp. 98–124). Berkeley CA: Institute of East Asian studies, University of California. Veeck, G., Pannell, C.W., Smith, C.J., & Huang, Y. (2007). China’s geography: Globalization and the dynamics of political, economic, and social change. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Wang, Y. (2010). Language, culture, and identity: Hui students’ cultural recognition and identity construction in eastern China. Unpublished doctoral disserrtation, Purdue University. Wang, Y., & Phillion, J. (2009). Minority language policy and practice in China: The need for multicultural education. International Journal of Multicultural Education, 11(1), 1–14. Wang, Y., & Phillion, J. (2010). Whose knowledge is valued? A critical study of knowledge in elementary school textbooks in China. Intercultural Education, 21(6), 567–580. Xing. H. (2003). Minority language planning of China in relation to use and development. Retrieved October 14, 2008, from http://www.sil.org/asia/ldc/parallel_papers/huang_ xing.pdf. Yang, D. (2005). China’s education in 2003: From growth to reform. Chinese Education and Society, 38(4), 11–45. Zhou, M. (2004). Minority language policy in China: Equality in theory and inequality in practice. In M. Zhou & H. Sun (Eds.), Language policy in the People’s Republic of China: theory and practice since 1949 (pp.71–95). Boston, MA: Kluwer. Zhu, Z. (2008). Reflections on basic education under the “Three guarantees” policy in Tibet’s pastoral districts, Chinese Education and Society, 41(1), 44–50.

chapter 7

Scrapbooks and messy texts Notes towards sustaining critical and artful narrative inquiry Malcolm Reed & Jane Speedy University of Bristol

In this reflective piece we draw directly on our experience of teaching a variety of methodological approaches to narrative inquiry at doctoral level. We take a tentative approach in which we draw out temporal, contextual and relational threads of what it may mean to be doing narrative inquiry. This deliberate lack of fixedness and engagement with messiness in our approach displays our intention to develop and promote artful inquiries in which we are mindful of how aesthetic, ethical and personal responses both shape and are shaped by our explorations. We draw on examples and images of our students’ work as well as our own to illustrate aspects of the nomadic journey we venture on and the texts of the field we make. Excerpts of discussion between us are woven into our account to voice dialogically our agreement and difference and show the manner in which inquirers usefully bump up against each other as we collaborate.

There are times in my life to which I return like a cat scratching, licking, worrying at an old sore, a long since exterminated nest of fleas behind my ear I am sure that if I keep poking and rubbing that old itch will finally be quelled.

(Piercy 1983, p. 30)

It is just an observation but we like to start our programme notes with excerpts from novels or poems. We have this in common, although we have never discussed it. This isn’t for prettification, it’s more like bracing a leg so we don’t fall. It’s a particular act of mind that sees with words and through words. We have a tendency to resist describing the thinking behind the courses we teach. This is similar to the resistance one feels if asked to explain stories and poems. So however this turns out, it will be a suggestion of practice and an attempt to form a palette of ideas, not to colour in already-drawn forms. Think

 Malcolm Reed & Jane Speedy

of this chapter as a sketchbook in which various observations and imaginings are collected. We don’t want to offer a model of our teaching (indeed, no such template exists and every time we work together we work differently) but rather to get a feel for the process in which we are engaged, in the company of others who begin as our students and seem quickly to become fellow travellers. One of the qualities of insiders exploring a “process view” (Barton 2007, p. 166) is that of prospectivity, of looking forward and of incompletion. Our process involves nomadic inquiry, of travelling across intellectual landscapes without surrendering to fixity, or of “travelling in the thinking that writing produces in search of the field” (St Pierre 1997, p. 365). It’s the day before Armistice Day 2009 and we are sitting in a small room in the space of silence following a 90-minute film documentary made as part of a dissertation by an ex-Royal Marine and Falklands’ War veteran. No one has applauded. We are racked with crying (Jackson 2010). A book is being returned to another Narrative Inquiry doctoral student in the USA. It is her assignment – a psychology textbook that has been altered. Midway through the erasures and repainted surfaces and cut-throughs and palimpsests and marginalia an envelope falls out of the leafed pages. It contains the pieces a dyspraxic child has collected for his mummy’s assignment. After the book has been posted we continue to run the slideshow we have kept on our computers. It is mesmerising, layer upon layer of life history, speculation, repositioning, anguish (Percy in press). The thesis that caused so much institutional concern – the first collaboratively and conjointly written doctoral dissertation in the faculty – has arrived hard-bound, the authors’ names (Gale & Wyatt 2008) in gold letters glistening proudly down the spine. A huge parcel from Dorset appears in our office, oddly shaped and Â�crinkly. It is opened to reveal knitting wool, threaded, unthreaded, juxtaposed with autumn leaves, fragments of written text, family photographs, scraps of Â�garments and old tablecloths (Bell 2008). So, what do these examples of our students’ work reveal about the values and approaches that we explore in our doctoral teaching? How have these troubling, reflexive, crafted and inquisitive outcomes been nurtured? This chapter will reflect on the processes we believe we are exploring and developing in the approaches we learn and teach together. Our work at the University of Bristol is situated within the Centre for Narrative Inquiry and Transformative Learning within the Graduate School of Education. This Centre (CeNTraL) has become an international and interdisciplinary focus



Chapter 7.╇ Scrapbooks and messy texts 

for the generation of new work within narrative inquiry and operates as a site for the development and dissemination of innovative and artful educational research methodologies. CeNTraL’s activities are many and varied and we research and publish extensively across various disciplines, but we also provide ‘meandering’ community opportunities for personal inquiry and do not always expect that the outcomes of all these inquiries will become published academic texts. If you want to picture CeNTraL in psycho-spatial terms it is our playground and conversation space not our workroom or schoolroom. One of the threads that both shapes and is shaped by this climate of creative narrative endeavour is a partially ‘taught’ doctoral programme in Narrative Inquiry. It is this particular thread of the tapestry of our work together that we are tracing in this chapter – a thread pulled out of a jumble of other threads or lines of inquiry and endeavour in which it would more usually sit enmeshed and entangled. We pull on this thread and set it down here as if linear and smoothed out, in order to illustrate a particular meeting place within the field, where arts-based and social inquiry practices rub up against each other and constantly generate new ways of working (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). In terms of our university’s higher degree programme, this doctorate in education pathway attracts an international group of students from a range of professional and practitioner backgrounds, such as school teaching, higher education, medical education, nursing, counselling and psychotherapy, social and community work, religious leadership, management studies and community and political activism. They form a rich learning community as they complete, in a variety of personally negotiated timescales, seven taught units and a dissertation. The units comprise two generic department-wide modules on educational research and on writing research dissertations and five from a rolling programme that includes narrative inquiry, narrative interviewing, auto-ethnography, writing as inquiry, collective biography and visual inquiry. What this programme description does not portray, and we hope to reveal at least traces of in this chapter, is the vibrancy of the spirit of artful narrative inquiry that we nurture, and the accumulation of conceptualisations that are traced and troubled in our work, regarding issues of subjectivity, identity, relationality, positionality, post-coloniality, criticality, time, space and landscape, conversation, voice, silence, presence, engagement, experimentation, transformation, imagination, creativity and performativity. 1.â•… Approaching and critically inhabiting narrative inquiry spaces Saleem Sinai, Salman Rushdie’s narrator in Midnight’s Children (1981, p. 126), declares: “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world, do you

 Malcolm Reed & Jane Speedy

wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?” And we are similarly mindful of the amount of ‘swallowing’ required of narrative inquirers. Our community owes much to Jean Clandinin and her colleagues (2000, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c and Chapter 3 this volume) and their conceptualisations of the spatial, relational and temporal dimensions of narrative inquiry. We do not necessarily always draw on their more phenomenological philosophical frameworks, because we bring our own allegiances to thinking that is more overtly feminist/poststructuralist (Speedy) and located in cultural-historical activity theory (Reed). Nonetheless, we find that the juxtaposition of these commonplaces, as Clandinin, Pushor and Murray Orr (2007) describe them, outlines a space: a concept described by Massey (2005, p. 9) as the “simultaneity of stories told thus far”. Borrowing from Patti Lather’s (1997) experiment with the intermittent voices of researcher/writer, it is this sharing of space that the following conversations try to animate in our work. Malcolm:

Jane:

Shall we start with our shared interest in arts-based pedagogy? This book is not about defining narrative inquiry but about teaching it. We are both teachers, so we should perhaps first speak of our desire for a more quest (ion) ing pedagogy. Shouldn’t we make evident our understanding of education as a cultural endeavour by which humanity nurtures itself?

But do we ‘teach’ narrative inquiry? I suppose we do in bell hooks’ (1994) sense of ‘teaching to transgress’, but terms like ‘teaching’ (and even education, regardless of its Latin origins in ‘educare’ (to lead forth) have been captured by more formulaic agendas. I would say that we seek to ‘facilitate a climate of narrative inquiry’, rather than teach it.

Narrative inquiry often appeals to practitioner researchers, perhaps because it speaks to their interest in the particularities rather than generalities of people’s lives, but perhaps also because they imagine that this will involve them in a familiar and not too distant or difficult practice of ‘telling stories’. We approach narrative inquiry as an arts-based genre that requires consideration of aesthetic and performative aspects and of the shifting considerations of audience and context over time. We like to work with Clandinin’s three dimensions and also trouble them by exploring and experiencing how they jostle with each other and in so doing expose ways in which other narratives bump up against them (Clandinin, Huber, J., Huber, M., Murphy, Murray Orr, Pearce 2006). We have found that working in this way practitioner researchers move swiftly from ‘just telling stories’ to becoming mindful from the outset of the demands, complexities and tensions of this form of inquiry.



Chapter 7.╇ Scrapbooks and messy texts 

Malcolm:

Jane:

And already we are concerned with issues of voice and with what Halliday (1985:â•›44) calls “tenor”: the ways that language varies according to “who the people are who are taking part in whatever is going on.” In our work together, we are typically concerned with expressing who we are and helping to bring out who our students are, but we also explore how we extend beyond past experiences to figure out how other understandings might emerge.  (cf. Valsiner 2008)

I agree, but I also notice that we started by disagreeing, which we often do – or at least we often communicate our ideas through dialogue and through quest (ion) ing, as you would put it. We may construct similar identity narratives, but we can differ widely in our thinking and in the language we use. We bump up against each other and as a result complex, interwoven, empathically-situated counter-narratives emerge.  (cf. Bamberg 2004)

Perhaps one of the differences in what we bring to this work is the way in which the narrative inquiry spaces we are developing are so overtly shaped by the bumping up of artful inquiry practices, such as performance, writing, poetics and visual representation, against social inquiry practices of conversation, observation, critical interpretation and reflection. There are always choices to be made about representation, positioning, evocation, innovation and verisimilitude (to name but a few examples) within these narrative construction sites. We cannot capture all of this in one chapter, but what we hope to give is a sense of how we inhabit, move around and contest the interfaces of these disciplines in order to sustain a creative climate from which emergent inquiries might develop. We teach and practise narrative inquiry in this way, often generating particular, small, artful, fragmented narratives in order to make visible the gaps and spaces left by other forms of inquiry and in so doing to try to make a difference in the world. We include artfulness in the mix of what makes a good narrative inquiry, not for purposes of embellishment or decoration, but in order to legitimise and generate new forms of knowledge. Jane:

Malcolm:

We share an experience of living and working in inner-London. We both originally worked as schoolteachers who taught in multicultural state schools in areas facing considerable social deprivation. You went on to educate teachers and I moved into counselling and psychotherapy and later counsellor education. In terms of the theoretical and research interests you will find in our hearts and on our bookshelves, however, we are quite distinct.

You draw from post-structuralist/feminist ideas concerned with troubling the edges between psychotherapeutic and research practices, and I work out of a cultural-historical tradition concerned with literacy, learning and classroom interaction. But when it comes to critical theory and narrative/ arts–based inquiry the books on our shelves start to merge. I do think that we are both still touched and troubled by the social and cultural dynamics of our first teaching jobs.

 Malcolm Reed & Jane Speedy

Many of the writers of other chapters in this volume (and indeed the narrative scholars they cite inform the body of work we are engaging with, for instance: Clandinin, op cit; Andrews, Squire & Tamboukou 2008; Riessman 2008; Phillion 2006; Trahar 2006). Like Trahar (Chapter 9, this volume), we also draw on the work of narrative therapy practitioners to explore and develop collaborative opportunities for witnessing and working with other people’s narratives. In generating ways of inquiring with people into their lives we hope to ‘exoticise’ and freshen the familiar and engage them as co-researchers (cf. Speedy 2008; White 2004). Of particular interest to us, however, is the way in which narrative inquiry, originally informed by the practices of the creative arts and literary theory, has become disconnected from these arts-based roots on its journey towards inclusion in the canon of social science research. For example, a commonplace way of legitimating the transcription of narratives gleaned from conversation as a deliberately poetic written form is to cite a sociolinguistic antecedent such as Gee (1986, 1991) or a sociological antecedent such as Riessman (1993) or Richardson (1992, 1993). Jane:

Malcolm:

Although we did not discover our shared histories or differences until we began to work together, it is not surprising that the tenor of who we are should draw together the poetic, the critically pedagogic and the dialogic.

We both completed Ph.D.s long after having published research, whilst working full-time and helping bring up children. We both lost much-loved brothers as adults in the 1980s; we both write of them and to them, still.

Much rarer is an attention to the construction of Shakespearean blank verse or more contemporary poetic forms, such as Oswald’s (2002) poetry ‘found’ in conversation along the River Dart. It is at this intersection between social inquiry and creative arts practice that our own contribution to narrative inquiry is situated, straddling the aesthetic demands of well–crafted poetry (cf. Prendergast, Leggo & Sameshima 2009), the methodological challenges of qualitative inquiry and the political, policy-shifting aspirations of social research. Malcolm:

Jane:

One of the consequences of being asked to write about what we do is that we then have to think about and portray this in a way that we don’t normally. This is not to say that we aren’t reflective teachers or reflexive researchers but rather that we are continuously and cyclically so, working within a community of scholars learning daily from

This boxed text is set out like a conversation, but that is just a literary device. One of us wrote most of these words as straight prose and then the other one amended and rearranged them as parallel texts, as if in dialogue. When it comes to finding our ‘voices’ within narrative inquiry, we try to avoid the familiar tropes/traps of authenticity and



Chapter 7.╇ Scrapbooks and messy texts 

each others’ ideas and practices. We meet our university’s criteria of course, but there is also an element of ‘getting lost’ in this work. Indeed, ‘getting lost’ (Lather 2007) may be a central tenet. You have to take our word that this is what we think we do when we think about it. We are of course making this up as we go along. Just like a storyteller, an artist, a poet, or a filmmaker does, come to think of it. Whatever the script, the performance will be different every time.

sincerity by making a move towards a “poetics of insufficiency” (MacLure 2009:â•›98). This is not to say we are deliberately making things up (telling lies), but critically inquiring into what it is that we are producing, as here for instance in this dialogue. What are the conventions? Is anything unexpected emerging or do we remain in the realm of the familiar? Where are the silences (Mazzei 2007; Jackson & Mazzei, 2009)? What is left unsaid and what is unsayable (Rogers et al. 1999)?

There is a good deal of reading, writing, filming, photographing and crafting to be done on this programme. The process of producing artful knowledge is also a form of knowledge itself (Barrett & Bolt 2007) and needs to sit alongside mindful attention to the narratives we are co-constructing with participants over time and to our own cycles of reflexive, mindful and artful practice as inquirers – this requires us to accumulate and ‘swallow’ quite a lot of world. In each of our taught units (which tend to be clustered around modalities such as writing as inquiry, visual inquiry) and later as people engage in developing their own dissertation projects, we spend time – listening to presentations, in workshops together, in conversation and writing separately or together and witnessing each other in performance. Overall, we spend most time engaged in close, critical viewing, reading and discussion of texts we produce and texts from current scholars in our particular field of interest. In this way, by treating these various texts as ‘work in progress’, we gradually discover the criteria, ethical know-how, artfulness and mindfulness that we might need to develop to begin to evaluate and generate the work of narrative inquiry. We like to scrutinise a variety of very differently positioned narrative inquiries, whilst at the same time experimenting with conducting our own. For example, we might bring together Dónal O Donoghue’s (2007) black and white photographs of safe/unsafe spaces in boys’ primary schools in Ireland, Jean Clandinin and team’s (2006c) collaboratively-produced narrative ethnographies of diverse student/parent/teacher identities in Canadian primary schools, Nick Cottingham’s (Insightshare) digital video exploring his personal, spiritual learning journey, and Susanne Gannon’s (2001) poetic biography of the ‘collective girl’. To this mix we might add some of the work produced or under construction in our centre, such as Bainton’s (in press) ‘Dzo dancing’, a poetic/photographic snapshot from an inquiry into indigenous methodologies in Ladakh, or Reece’s (2009) imagined narrative interview with Sylvia Plath.

 Malcolm Reed & Jane Speedy

Malcolm:

Jane:

The term usually chosen to express this engagement of our feeling for the narratives of events is ‘evocative’. To evoke is to ‘call forth’. In Shakespeare’s time this calling (this voicing) took a magical sense of summoning spirits; by the time of the Enlightenment what are called into being are feelings or memories. I would argue that evocative texts call both the spirits of people and our feelings for them, and that there is other voice-work that draws substance of significance through our memories – that artful texts invoke, provoke, revoke, convoke – that their value as inquiry lies with the consequence of their power to call.

In constructing narratives in conversation we are both listening and speaking. As if at a poetry recital (Speedy 2005), it is within this listening for the “talk that sings” (Bird 2000, 2004) and for expression that takes us by surprise by voicing our lives and those of other people, that I attempt to bring narrative therapy into the practice of narrative research interviewing. What I am implying here is an artfulness and mindfulness to listening on the part of narrative inquirers. This attentive listening precedes anything that might subsequently be produced as an art form, such as a film or written text.

By providing the opportunity to apply a series of discursive questions, we begin at first to evaluate these (often multimodal) narrative inquiries in relation to ‘given’ criteria, such as those concerning transparency, trustworthiness, aesthetic merit, reflexivity, accountability, transformativity and substance (cf. Speedy 2008, p. 56). We may then add or take away certain criteria, or even abandon criteriology altogether, as we explore our own qualities of connoisseurship (Sparkes 2009) and ethical know-how. Like Varela, we can find no substitute for the cumulative ethical know-how that is generated though the “sustained, disciplined practice” (1999, p.74) of artful narrative inquiry. What we are looking for in these endeavours, whether in moments constructed in conversations or in tales told and images found through our own lives and imaginations, is at once small, exotic and elusive. We are listening for what Foucault expressed as “increasing the circumference of the visible” (cited in Sparkes 2009, p. 315). Comparable texts around which to practise this listening, for example, might be Speedy’s (2006) attempts to critique qualitative researcher ‘schoolism’ through harnessing the critical voices of the gargoyles residing in conference hall roofs, Pat Sikes and Heather Piper’s (2009) fictionalised accounts of the lives of teachers accused of sexual misconduct in British schools, and Reed’s (2009) semifictionalised story of police harassment of secondary school pupils. The justification for the ‘make believe’ treatments offered in each of these texts rests on the authors’ recognition of the need for Geertz’s (1988) criterion of conveying powerfully the sense of being there, yet at the same time being able to find no ethical and



Chapter 7.╇ Scrapbooks and messy texts 

non-maleficent way of constructing such narratives except through fictionalised and/or symbolic equivalents in the manner of Yalom (1991, 2006). When invited into these texts as mindful listeners and artful inquirers, what is it (we might discuss) that makes much of Speedy’s innovative approach so hard to read? And what is it that makes Sikes and Piper’s work so compelling or Reed’s story upsetting? What is it about the pace, positioning, voice and verisimilitude of their work that holds our engagement?

Malcolm:

Jane:

Writing, thinking, imagining, dreaming – all those inner-voices (Vygotsky 1987) – inner-modalities which draw on speech but are not spoken, in which we converse with the worlds inside and out through the percepts we learn and adapt from conversation. Bakhtin’s (1981) ventriloquy – the activity of discourse by which the social speaks through the personal – is always engaged through positioning. The trick for the narrative inquirer is to compose a text with the quality of making us care. Learning to position the reader as someone who has agency is what makes inquiry meaningful at all and is a deliberately dialogic and difficult art of engagement.

I’m following a different yet parallel plotline, drawing from Kristeva (1984) the revolutionary power of poetic language and from Cixous’ (1993) embodied and emancipatory experiments in writing – not to forget Audre Lorde’s (1984) challenge that it is inadequate to use the master’s tools (e.g. language) to dismantle the master’s house. Readers sometimes have to struggle hard in order to work out how on earth to read certain texts at all. Which voice? When and how? As Eisner (2001) says, innovation per se is not sufficient – artful inquiry has also to be meaningful and even compelling, as in Cixous’ (1997 p. 67) complex, boxed fragments: this is how I write as if the secret that is in me were before me…

For many contemporary scholars the art of narrative inquiry appears to be restricted to inquiring into the lives of others, indeed three recent overviews of the field have made little or no reference to personal narratives and/or autoethnographic texts (cf. Clandinin 2006a; Riessman 2008; Andrews et al. 2008). We, however, are equally interested in inquiries that place our ‘selves’ under the microscope. Indeed, far from the critique of self-indulgence that is often levelled at autoethnographic studies (Delamont 2009), our experience of teaching units concerned with writing as inquiry, auto-ethnography and collective biography suggests that the art and experience of writing evocatively and from the personal in relation to the political and the social finely tunes an ability to discriminate between reflexivity, personal narrative and auto-ethnography in compelling and convincing ways.

 Malcolm Reed & Jane Speedy

Jane:

Malcolm:

I love Christine’s (Bell 2008) piece advocating self-indulgence as a legitimate methodological stance which turns critique into voluptuous virtue before our eyes! And I stand alongside Tami Spry and her argument for critical, performative auto-ethnography as part of the qualitative canon, given that: “human experience is chaotic and messy, requiring a pluralism of discursive and interpretive methods that critically turn texts back upon themselves in the constant emancipation of meanings.”  (2001, p. 23)

Every unit finishes with a performance: often the highlight of our time together. So-and-so is remembered for saying nothing, but playing a cd of music and dancing; someone else poems a story of being bodysearched too intimately at an airport checkpoint. The choice of modality is interesting, but it is the performativity that lingers. As Walter Benjamin wrote of Brecht: “He goes back, in a new way, to the theatre’s greatest and most ancient opportunity: the opportunity to expose the present.”  (1977, p. 100)

Affording ourselves plenty of opportunities to develop different writing styles and practices of representation and performativity as well as to unpack critically issues of voice, diversity, positionality, subjectivity, verisimilitude and ‘othering’ enables us to learn our art through experience, which grows the confidence to enter and perform inquiry in both familiar and more ‘edgy’ arenas. It is this cumulative experience of performance over time that offers the most explicit embrace of performativity – that is to say, it develops the kinds of ethical mindedness that support an awareness and critique of the power relations that occur in the act of performing personal stories and performing stories to other people (Peterson & Langellier 2006). 2.â•… Time for inquiry Narrative inquirers do not conduct explorations into lives as if lived moment by moment. Even if such study were possible, we would suggest other investigative means to be more appropriate. Our excavations produce lives told, performed and represented in context and relation over time – so once again we are back amongst Clandinin’s jostling ‘three dimensions’. We are interested in the meanings that narrator and audience (and the powerful moment-by-moment shifts between these positions) attribute to lives and mindful of the identity claims being made. As ‘artful’ inquirers we are particularly drawn to the liminal space between perceptions of life “as lived in the moment” and life “as told, in retrospect, from the vantage point of the present” (Freeman 2010, p. 1). We return here to the epigraph to this chapter: “There are times in my life to which I/return like a cat scratching, licking,/worrying at an old sore”



Chapter 7.╇ Scrapbooks and messy texts 

(Piercy 1983, p. 30) only to discover that even as we give our attention to this particular expression of time we are confronted with its multi-dimensional, fractured nature. Time is slippery, a trickster and a guizer, and as narrative inquirers we have far more than just passing through different international date lines to contend with (although, conceptually, arriving in Los Angeles temporally before we have left Auckland yet bodily and experientially after a twelve hour flight always does Jane’s head in). There are different cultural conventions understandings available (or not) to express time in language and art. Tuhiwai–Smith argues that “collective memory of imperialism has been perpetuated through the ways in which Knowledge about indigenous peoples was collected, represented and then fed back in various ways to the West” (1999, p. 1). Thus, in these supposedly “post-imperial times”, the conjunction of time, memory and narrative in different formalisations of history still afford the colonisers, the colonised, and all those who inherit such representations a sense of time being used and abused. Furthermore, time may become scattered, along with belongings and family members, as we migrate through choice or force around the globe (cf. Ifegwenigwe 1999). Some of us may be in tune and in time with the dominant discourses of narrative inquiry; others may find ourselves with no time or space available, placed beyond the margins of a concept like auto-ethnography, for instance, which arguably can only emerge in times and places where it is possible/imaginable/conceivable that ‘I’ and ‘culture/ race/geography/context’ could even be separated as different morphemes of a word. Indeed, one of our course participants began her auto-ethnography assignment by writing herself all round the margins of the pages, leaving the middles blank and pointedly ‘white’. Later, visiting a different time and country, she wrote herself around the margins of an exploration of black women’s marginalisation in academia (Bradshaw 2005). When we teach the artful exploration of time, we learn through the inscription of different timescapes we inhabit also to seek out reflexively the inscription time places on us. Alongside conceptualisations of the ‘possible’ timescapes developed by human science researchers, we include expansions of Freeman’s (1998) mythical timescapes as sojourns in ‘impossible’, fictional and magical worlds. So we learn to dig up from ourselves and dwell in dream-time and reverie, storied and poetic time, surreal, magical realist and ‘fabulous’ time. We learn to allow ourselves to experience living in worlds figured by myth and poetry and drama, because from time immemorial these have been ways in which we have mediated how our worlds work on us (Reed 2010). We take expressions of life used in therapeutic conversations, such as “My mother-in-law swallowed me whole” (Speedy 2008, p. 174), not as metaphorical

 Malcolm Reed & Jane Speedy

or ‘as if ’ accounts, but as potentially transgressive moves into different realities in order to find meaning where no sense could be made of actual situations. Social science research has ‘cherry picked’ the narrative arts and has taken arbitrarily testimonial, memoir, autobiography and fictionalised, dramatised and poeticised accounts, but left magical realism, surrealism, science fiction, fairy and folk tales hanging on the literary tree, lest perhaps narrative inquiry might not be taken seriously enough. If, however, narrative inquiries are about the meanings people make of their lives within relational-temporal-contextual spaces that figure real and present utterances of experience and – with sometimes an almost exclusive need – the beyond-real and not-yet-sayable experience (i.e. metaphysical, magical and impossible), then the art of inquiry must surely include the imaginary, the futuristic, the make-believe and the otherworldly. Of course we inform our work by reading other social researchers and theorists, but we have learned as well to sustain our craft by engaging closely with storytellers, fabulists, dramatists and poets who offer us other ways of seeing and writing the scenes our lives. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), a baby that dies before the book begins remains the most central and active character in the story – here, portrayals of past lives infiltrate present events. Margaret Attwood creates dystopic futures in novels such as Oryx and Crake (2004) and The Year of the Flood (2010) that help us to imagine the worlds towards which our present actions might lead. Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1982) refigures the English that might be spoken in a culture long after humankind has reversed technological evolution. The Hungarian poet, János Pilinszky, survives the Nazi death camps and states: “I would like to write as if I had remained silent” (1976, p. 10). Twenty-first century lives are also lived alongside and within cinematic and digital timescapes. In Eisenstein’s famous scene from Battleship Potemkin (1926), a baby carriage rolls in almost real time down the Odessa Steps amidst a massacre carried out by Tsarist soldiers – the scene is a formidable refiguration of human imagination as a simultaneity of time/space/relational dimensions – we witness an event from the perspective of being there even though historically it never actually happened. Showing this three-minute sequence of carefully crafted and edited film in our narrative inquiry classes now, draws our attention to the cinematic cultures that we live in that also ‘create’ us. We have become used to the extended stretch of time taken up by the process of creating perspectives, exploring positions and developing ways of depicting the field of any given inquiry. Whilst we craft our field texts and our reflections on the inquiry process into narrative inquiries we also take time to show mindfulness of the ethical and relational practices in which we are engaged. Similar to the art of film directors and editors, we take considerable production time to



Chapter 7.╇ Scrapbooks and messy texts 

give our inquiries their finish. However, this delay between event, inquiry and reproduction is being severely reduced by more current ways of seeing, shaping (and thus being shaped by) events, particularly instanced by digital narrative episodes that move so swiftly around the world via mobile phone and video-sharing websites like YouTube. The speed and breadth of cheaply available digital means of distribution through computers and mobile phones means that participants and co-researchers may be openly producing, performing, exchanging and responding to texts of the field in very public arenas and before ‘properly’ pausing to reflect. In this sense, time may overtake and even run away with us in terms of processing what we are doing. More instantaneous, immediate and thus sometimes more messy, bumpy and uncomfortable narrative inquiry spaces are emerging, perhaps with less reflexive security. The interplay between the commonalities of time, space and people nonetheless remains. In our classroom exchanges about timescapes what has emerged is a different lexicon for the activity of ‘doing time’. We talk of and in terms such as: stucks and fixes and fixeds and places and shifts and slippages and stayings and puttings and emergences, happenings, endings, showings, forgets and regrets. The class breaks into small groups (three or four people) in order to conduct a first narrative inquiry. Each group looks out of one of the large fourth floor windows of the Graduate School of Education at a tract of the city below us. Flipchart paper and felt-pens are provided with which to make initial ‘field notes’, which some choose to read as ‘feeled notes’. When we reconvene over two hours later we discover that each group has gone about this inquiry process quite differently. It turns out that the major tools that drive the inquiry are not pens, paper and objectifications of the field but play with our selves and between each other. For some the experience has been emotionally charged – “I was born here,” maintains Jo. “I had to respond to your vehemence, Jo,” returns Heather. For others, the engagement was not immediate: “I was not particularly attached to anything I saw. I focussed on a balcony in the flats opposite,” comments Catherine. Others connected again with memories of different cities: “This is not my country or my city. I was not attached to it. I am attached to my city, but here I was on the fence,” states Sika. As people discuss and reflect and consider their processes in comparison with the reports of others, they describe how some began looking silently and individually and then later commenced to merge their different perspectives whilst others discussed together from the outset and ‘bumped off ’ each other continually. The process being described is deeply relational – a reflection of the experience of collective inquiry in which methods and texts of the field emerge dynamically and through respect for diversity instead of in a prefigured and linear sequence towards a given end. These various acts and expressions of consciousnesses at work on voyages of inquiry sometimes merge

 Malcolm Reed & Jane Speedy

and play and say their piece of mind and sometimes submerge and swim alone or in silence or out of mind. We all gather up temporal, contextual and relational threads of what it may mean to be doing narrative inquiry. It is all quite confusing but we have begun. Jane:

Malcolm:

This nomadic reflexive inquiry process of always travelling and never arriving is hard to sustain. It requires not only tentativeness, but also tenacity and resilience. The temptations to pitch camp and settle are many. Over the years I have accumulated some wisdoms as a narrative inquirer: the cumulative development of a nose for liminal spaces – the points of entry to the stories not yet told, but possible to tell; some sense of that which remains at times unsaid and why; and slightly less sense of what remains unsayable. I remain at the threshold of much that I do not know.

What of the moment before dawn into which one wakes but is not yet so? What of that looking for where to look? What of the haze before an object is determined by one’s gaze? Coming to inhabit a liminal space in artful inquiry is to rest on the threshold of a world of pre-sense. It is a profoundly nomadic and proudly unsettled activity. It is, to use Richardson’s wonderful phrase, to walk “the shaggy boundaries” (2000, p. 253), of the tidal shoreline of research. And, like swimming, you can’t do it without getting wet.

We could go on, but now time eludes our grasp. We hope to have given enough of a sense of the messy yet rigorous and cumulative process we are engaged in doing narrative inquiry in an artful manner at the University of Bristol. As Jeanette Winterson writes: The stories I want to tell you will light up part of my life and leave the rest in darkness. You don’t need to know everything. There is no everything. The stories themselves make the meaning. The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit up moments and the rest is dark.  (2004, p. 134)

References Andrews, M., Squire, C., & Tamboukou, M. (2008). Doing narrative research. London: Sage. Attwood, M. (2004). Oryx and Crake. London: Virago. Attwood, M. (2010). The Year of the Flood. London: Virago. Bainton, D. (in press). Dzo dancing. In J. Speedy (Ed.), Creative practitioner inquiry. Houndmills: Palgrave. Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The dialogical imagination: Four essays by M.M. Bakhtin, M. Holquist (Ed.), C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Trans.). Austin TX: University of Texas Press. Bamberg, M. (2004). Considering counter narratives. In M. Bamberg & M. Andrews (Eds.), Considering counter narratives: Narrating, resisting, making sense (pp. 351–371). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.



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Barrett, E., & Bolt, B. (2007). Practice as research: Approaches to creative arts inquiry. New York, NY: I.B. Tauris. Barton, D. (2007, 2nd edition). Literacy: An introduction to the ecology of written language. Oxford: Blackwell. Bell, C. (2008). Messy texts and visible fragments. Unpublished EdD assignment, University of Bristol. Benjamin, W. (1977). Understanding Brecht. Trans. A. Bostock, Intro. S. Mitchell. London: NLB. Bird, J. (2000). The heart’s narrative: Therapy and navigating life’s contradictions. Auckland: Edge Press. Bird, J. (2004). Talk that sings: Therapy in a new linguistic key. Auckland: Edge Press. Bradshaw, F. (2005). Unpublished auto-ethnography assignment. University of Bristol. Cixous, H. (1993). Three steps on the ladder of writing. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Cixous, H. & Calle-Gruber, M. (1997). Rootprints: Memory and life writing. London: Routledge. Clandinin, D.J. (2006a) (Ed.). Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, F.M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco CA: Jossey Bass. Clandinin, D.J., Pushor, D., & Murray Orr, A. (2007). Navigating sites for narrative inquiry. Journal of Teacher Education, 58, 21–35. Clandinin, D.J. & Rosiek, J. (2006b). Mapping a landscape of narrative inquiry: Borderland spaces and tensions. In D.J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology (pp. 35–75). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Clandinin, D.J., Huber, J., Huber, M., Murphy, M.S., Murray Orr, A., & Pearce, M. (2006c). Composing diverse identities: Narrative inquiries into the interwoven lives of children and teachers. London: Routledge. Cottingham, N. (Insightshare). Woodland Peace, a short film by a highly creative person living with schizophrenia in Oxford. Available from: http://insightshare.org/watch/video/ woodland-peace Delamont, S. (2009). The only honest thing: Auto-ethnography, reflexivity and small crises in fieldwork. Ethnography and Education, 4(1), 51–63. Denzin, N.K., & Lincoln, Y.S. (Eds.) (2005). Sage handbook of qualitative research. (3rd Ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Eisenstein, S. (1926). (Director) Battleship Potemkin. New York, NY: Kino Video. Eisner, E. (2001). Concerns and aspirations for qualitative research in the new millennium: Approach to a methodological dilemma. Qualitative Inquiry, 7 (6) 787–800. Freeman, M. (1998). Mythical time, historical time, and the narrative fabric of the self. Narrative Inquiry, 8, 27–50. Freeman, M. (2010). Hindsight: The promise and peril of looking backward. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gale, K., &Wyatt, J. (2008). Between the two: A nomadic inquiry into collaborative writing. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. (Based on their conjoint EdD thesis, 2008, University of Bristol.) Gannon, S. (2001). Re-presenting the collective girl. Qualitative Inquiry, 7 (6), 787–800. Gee, J. (1986). Units in the production of narrative discourse. Discourse Processes, 9 (4), 391–422. Gee, J. (1991). A linguistic approach to narrative. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 1(1), 15–39.

 Malcolm Reed & Jane Speedy Geertz, C. (1988). Works and lives: The anthropologist as author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Halliday, M.A.K. (1985). Spoken and written language. Victoria: Deakin University. Hoban, R. (1982). Riddley Walker. London: Picador. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress. New York, NY: Routledge. Ifekwunigwe, J. (1999). Scattered belongings: Cultural paradoxes of race, nation and gender. London: Routledge. Jackson, A. & Mazzei, L. (2009). Voice in qualitative inquiry: Challenging conventional, interpretive, and critical conceptions in qualitative research. New York, NY: Routledge. Jackson, D. (2010). Seven days down south: A war story. Unpublished EdD dissertation, University of Bristol. Kristeva, J. (1984). Revolution in poetic language. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lather, P. (1997). Troubling the angels: Women living with HIV/AIDS. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Lather, P. (2007). Getting lost: Feminist efforts toward a double (d) science. New York, NY: State University of New York Press. Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. New York, NY: Crossing Press. MacLure, M. (2009). Broken voices, dirty words: on the productive insufficiency of voice. In A. Jackson & L. Mazzei (Eds.), Voice in qualitative inquiry: Challenging conventional, interpretive, and critical conceptions in qualitative research (pp. 97–114). New York, NY: Routledge. Massey, D. (2005). For space. London: Sage. Mazzei, L. (2007). Inhabited silence in qualitative research: Putting poststructuralist theory to work. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. New York, NY: Knopf. O Donoghue, D. (2007). ‘James always hangs out here’: Making space for place in studying masculinities at school. Visual Studies, 22 (1), 62–73. Oswald, A. (2002). Dart. London: Faber and Faber. Percy, M. (in press). Seeing learning disability: A re/claimed book. In J. Speedy (Ed.), Creative practitioner inquiry. Houndmills: Palgrave. Peterson, E., & Langellier, K. (2006). The performance turn in narrative studies. Narrative Inquiry, 16 (1), 173–180. Phillion, J. (2006). Narrative inquiry in a multicultural landscape: Multicultural teaching and learning. Greenwich, CT: Information Age. Piercy, M. (1983). Eating my tail. In Stone, paper, knife: Poems. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Pilinszky, J. (1976). Selected poems (T. Hughes & J. Csokits, Trans.). Manchester: Carcanet. Prendergast, M., Leggo, C., & Sameshima, P. (Eds.) (2009). Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social science. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Reece, J. (2009). Conversation with Sylvia in colour. International Review of Qualitative Research, 1(4), 569–582. Reed, M. (2009). Waiting for rain. Changing English, 16(2), 137–147. Reed, M. (2011). Somewhere between what is and what if: Fictionalisation and ethnographic inquiry. Changing English, 18(1), 31–43. Richardson, L. (1992). The consequences of poetic representation: Writing the other, rewriting the self. In C. Ellis & M.G. Flaherty (Eds.), Investigating subjectivity: Research on lived experience (pp.125–140). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Richardson, L. (1993). Poetics, dramatics, and transgressive validity: The case of the skipped line. The Sociological Quarterly, 34(4), 695–710.



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Richardson, L. (2000). Evaluating ethnography. Qualitative Inquiry, 6(2), 253–255. Riessman, C.K. (1993). Narrative analysis. London: Sage. Riessman, C.K. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rogers, A., Ekert, J., Sheinberg, N., Casey, M., Holland, J., & Nakkula, V. (1999). An interpretive poetics of languages of the unsayable. In R. Josselson & A. Lieblich (Eds.), Making meaning of narratives (pp. 77–107). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rushdie, S. (1981). Midnight’s children. London: Jonathan Cape. Sikes, P. & Piper, H. (2009). Researching sex and lies in the classroom: Allegations of sexual misconduct in schools. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Sparkes, A. (2009). Novel ethnographic representations and the dilemmas of judgement, Ethnography and Education. 4 (3), 301–319. Speedy, J. (2005). Using poetic documents: An exploration of poststructuralist ideas and poetic practices in narrative therapy. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 33(3), 283–298. Speedy, J. (2006). The Gulbarrian College gargoyles and the narrative gaze: Landscapes of the future, imaginative learning and researcher identity. In S. Trahar (Ed.), Narrative research on learning: Comparative and international perspectives (pp. 253–271). Oxford: Symposium Books. Speedy, J. (2008). Narrative inquiry and psychotherapy. Houndmills: Palgrave. Spry, T. (2001). Performing auto-ethnography: An embodied methodological praxis. Qualitative Inquiry, 7, 706–732. St. Pierre, E. (1997). Nomadic inquiry in the smooth spaces of the field: A preface. Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(3), 365–383. Trahar, S. (2006). Narrative research on learning: Comparative and international perspectives. Oxford: Symposium Books. Tuhiwai-Smith, L. (1999). Decolonising methodologies. Auckland: Zed Books. Valsiner, J. (2008). Ornamented worlds and textures of feeling: the power of abundance. Critical Social Studies, 1, 67–78. Varela, F.J. (1999). Ethical know-how: Action, wisdom, and cognition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In R.W. Rieber & A.S. Carton (Eds), N. Minick (Trans. & Intro.), The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky. Volume 1. Problems of general psychology (pp. 37–285). London: Plenum Press. White, M. (2004). Narrative practice and exotic lives: Resurrecting diversity in everyday life. Adelaide: Dulwich Centre Publications. Winterson, J. (2004). Lighthouse keeping. London: Fourth Estate. Yalom, I. (1991). Love’s executioner and other tales of psychotherapy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Yalom, I. (2006). Momma and the meaning of life: Tales of psychotherapy. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

chapter 8

Many more than two of us Denaturalizing the positions of speech and writing in a narrative constructionist research workshop Veronica Larrain

University of Barcelona This chapter deals with the way that students in a workshop to introduce narrative constructionist research questioned the ways in which a series of stories of their own creation were produced. Four main issues made up the deconstruction of the prevailing discourses present in the positions of speech and writing: writing as a threat to the authenticity of speech; narrative coherence as an element which legitimates various forms of being; tensions in the reconstruction of the real-life experiences with the “appropriate” meaning; and a textual politics which promotes an unbroken reading of the experience of the Other. From the deconstructive process emerged a model of the narrative inquirer as a person who tells a story from a non-institutionalized point of view which allows other to tell their own.

1.â•… I ntroduction to the Masters and context of workshop on narrative constructionist research I work as a teacher in the Faculty of Fine Arts in the University of Barcelona where I have tried to link the arts with education and qualitative research in order to approach processes of production (both of knowledge and of artistic artefacts) linked to different forms of experience. A methodological perspective which has enabled me to establish connections between these aspects has been Narrative Constructionist Research (NCR). Despite (NCR) is being considered as an umbrella term (Sparkes & Smith 2008, p. 296), the main emphasis of this perspective is on “narratives as a vehicle through which our world, lives and selves are articulated and the way in which such narratives function within social relationships” (Sparkes & Smith 2008, p. 298). There are two complex issues which concern it directly, which are present in research in the field of education and visual arts, and which have been of particular

 Veronica Larrain

interest to me: the implications in the recreation of the experience of the Other based on stories which reveal his or her constructed character (and which situates the narrative paradigm which I suggest in relation to deconstructionism) and the effects of power relations, authorship/authority and negotiation in the pursuit of meaning which articulate the construction of these stories. The workshop introducing NCR, which lasts approximately three hours, is part of a series on research methodology and types of analysis and interpretation which is part of the second year of the Masters in Studies and Projects in Visual Culture (2008–2010). Semiotics, discourse analysis, psychoanalysis, practices of reception and consumption, performance research and visual ethnography are other research perspectives included in this module. As a teacher invited to plan this workshop I have tried to relate the two abovementioned issues to the Master’s proposal to explore, from alternative viewpoints, ways of representing experience and research relationships which demonstrate their complexity. This is basically because this complexity is usually concealed by other ways of accounting for evidence and analysis in narrative research, as for instance, the use of sociolinguistic analytic tools to analyze qualitative data, or the use of literary terms to get a general sense of an experience (see Pinnegar & Daynes 2007). For this reason this block on methodologies includes content and skills coming from various fields which reflect upon different ways of understanding with respect to how research is carried out, how we come to know, and how we communicate this process. These different ways of understanding are particularly interesting if one takes into account that the majority of the students of the Master’s come from different Latin American countries with a long academic tradition, such as Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Mexico. The baggage each of these professionals of communication and visual arts brings with them presents an important chance to tackle the multiplicity of viewpoints of theory and practice which contradict the validity of those forms of thinking which see themselves as monolithic and universal. This opportunity takes on particular relevance in the Master’s if one takes into account that it arose specifically out of the need on the part of the students to acquire basic concepts from a number of disciplines which would enable them to question and at the same time to develop their professional practice. 2.â•… E  pistemological, ontological and methodological focus of the workshop The practice of NCR which I fostered in the workshop presumes that reality is socially constructed so multiple truths or realities are derived from relationships.



Chapter 8.╇ Many more than two of us 

Further, meaning is constructed through symbolic (language) interaction (Berger & Luckmann 1967) within communities and knowledge is the product of the individual’s relationship in relation to others in the world. From this standpoint, narratives in NCR can be characterised as follows. a. “On-going, social practices that people perform and do in relation to others as opposed to something they have” (Phoenix & Sparkes 2008, p. 213). b. Culturally situated and structured according to shared social conventions of language and the possibilities of tellability which may be subverted and rewritten. c. Appropriated by individuals to be used in different contexts. For this reason a. They “must be analyzed in the context of relational and cultural matrices because they do not “exist” out of these complexities” (Sommers 1994).1 b. Narrative inquirers need to identify in narratives the discursive accounts which constitute us and within which are embedded ways of thinking and acting (Larrain 2010). This approach to NCR makes more complex the relationship between researcher and research subject as well as from an interest in prediction and control. This has important implications for the construction of the relationship between the narrative inquirer and the research subject (the collaborator), placing the relationship at the centre of the tensions and contradictions already dealt with in different disciplines and from different approaches. That is to say, in language, in relations of power and authorship/authority, in questions related to reflectivity, in the ethical and political responsibility of the research, and in the reproduction of the ‘colonial eye’ or the ‘divine eye’ which sees all. 3.â•… What is worthwhile talking about in such a short workshop? Carrying out such a short workshop presents the difficult challenge of having to make a synthesis of NCR highlighting the most important aspects but without falling into the trap of superficiality or mere description. In one of the workshops carried out in the context of a conference on methodologies for doctoral students, a group of students suggested that learning about

.╅ Cited by C. Phoenix and Andrew Sparkes (Phoenix & Sparkes 2008, p. 213)

 Veronica Larrain

narrative research didn’t have to be something ‘outside’ the experience of those who were studying it. It was necessary to experience it ‘in the flesh’ rather than learning a ‘lesson’ about NCR to be able to understand its meaning and the value of recreating an experience based on a story constructed from the relationship with the Other. Although a more embodied experience in learning didn’t alter substantially the subordinate position in which education, even at University level, tends to place students, I began to consider the possibility of carrying out a University workshop based on the participants’ learning process and not in dictated notes or lectures. A workshop not based on my explanations about narrative inquiry but rather on the interchange of stories and experiences of the participants which might serve as sources to approach this research perspective and some of the epistemological, methodological and ethical issues which it tackles. In the workshop for the 2008–2010 Masters I decided to organize the introduction to NCR around small stories constructed by the students themselves. Small stories are a kind of “breaking news” usually shared with friends, which captures the dynamic and ongoing nature of life (Georgakopoulou 2006, p. 126). These, as talk-in-interaction and social practices (Georgakopoulou 2006, p. 126) are those “we tell in passing, in our everyday encounters with each others” (Bamberg 2004, p. 367). As small stories are characterized by giving an account of recent events, they allow us to place emphasis on the situated and contextual nature of narrating. In addition, small stories permit us to render an account of the process of identity construction, in particular with reference to the way in which identities are remembered, communicated and categorized in the relational context out of which they emerge. Another aspect highlighting the orientation I have given to the workshop is the attempt to tackle the hows, taking into account more post-modern approaches to narrative research. That is to say, “concentrating representational practices to the extent that they abandon most conventionally empirical concerns and direct their attention to researcher’s textual practices in the construction of reality” (Gubrium & Holstein 2008, p. 6). This focus does not exclude the spoken word and its practices of recreating certain identity-forming experiences. In relation to the hows, the workshop to introduce NCR was structured around two axes: On the one hand, offering an approach to the role of the narrative inquirer as a storyteller, understood as someone who sustains stories and doesn’t only collect them. This has to do with the idea that the narrative inquirer as storyteller places himself or herself in a different place to that which is accepted in traditional research. Following Patty Lather (1991) instead of the invisibility under which the research normally works, a narrative inquirer as a storyteller accepts him or herself as a social subject in relation to others. He or she is a



Chapter 8.╇ Many more than two of us 

storyteller who doesn’t seek to capture reality but rather to produce stories which generate other stories.2 On the other hand the workshop also has the intention of tackling the role of informant/collaborator, the person who is telling – in this case, orally, – an experience from their life which they consider significant in terms of their identity. In doing so the intention is for the identity to be accomplished and performed narratively (Phoenix & Sparkes 2009). This is in consonance with the idea that the “interactional and performative element of identity construction through the use of narrative (…) is intricately connected to social contexts within which it occurs” (Phoenix & Sparkes 2009, p. 220). The approach to identity made by Paul Ricoeur (1992) is interesting in understanding the role which the informant/collaborator may carry out when speaking about his or her life. When recreating an identity-forming experience one tries to respond to this who? which Paul Ricoeur speaks of. In the act itself of responding to this question we define ourselves and we explain who we are, we evaluate and we re-elaborate the meanings about ourselves, combining the personal, social, individual and contextual. Taking into account those two aspects I tried to shift from an approach to narrative inquiry reduced to the process of telling and analyzing stories to situate it within the relationship between the narrative inquirer and the collaborator. A workshop concentrating on the hows and tackling the roles adopted by the narrative inquirer and the collaborator links up with a model of NCR which pays attention to the relationship which is established between the two, and situates the relationship as the locus in which experiences are related again and again via oral, written and/or visual accounts. 4.â•… Description of the activity After explaining to the students the broad lines around which I intended to develop the workshop I invited them to form pairs and to tell each other about some experience in the formation of their identities bearing in mind aspects such as gender, ethnicity, sexual options or social class, and which might be related to their daily life (joining the Master’s, living in a foreign country, their professional work etc).

.â•… This affirmation comes from the reflexive process carried out by the consolidated research group named ESBRINA, Subjectivities, and Contemporary Educational Contexts, around the narrative research perspective and which was recorded in the minutes of the sessions in the 2003–2004 academic year.

 Veronica Larrain

Then, I asked them to write down the story told by his/her partner as a small story, so each one of the students could assume both the role of the narrative inquirer as storyteller and the role of the informant narrator (the collaborator). The formulation of a story – a small story – about a daily experience related to the formation of identities had to do with two aspects which I was interested in recuperating. First, linking this story about an identity-forming experience with a concept of identity understood as something which is neither given nor chosen but rather the result of a crossover of narrative practice which emerges from the relationship with others and which responds to the questions: Who am I? How did I become to be like this?, and Where am I going? Questions usually explored in what Michel Bamberg defines as big stories, i.e. life stories or autobiographies, but which I also consider appear in the small stories “about very mundane things and everyday occurrences” (Bamberg 2006, p. 2) My intention was that the small stories could allow one to explore the hows of the activity of narrating in order to understand the different ways in which the questions can become key elements (performative and strategic) in order to achieve something (Phoenix & Sparkes 2009:â•›p. 222). In this case, responding to who (I am, I want to be and I was). But concentrating on the hows not only has to do with what these accounts can bring us with respect to how we construct our identities but rather how we perform our identities and construct those of the Other through narrative genres in various social and interactive contexts. Finally I invited the pairs to share some of the their reflections bearing in mind four questions: As informant narrator: a. What purpose was served by telling the partner the experience selected? b. What aspects did I take into account in my reconstruction? As storyteller: a. From what position do we approach and represent Otherness? b. What difficulties do we find when recreating the story of our partner and sharing it with him or her? 5.â•… Deconstructing the authentic story As storytellers, some of the worries raised by students had to do with the impossibility of representing the Other through written words, the location of voices and the sense (or non-sense) of coherence of the written text. As informant narrator the concern was in the transparency/slipperiness of one’s own oral story. These worries



Chapter 8.╇ Many more than two of us 

are not only signs which raise a series of important epistemological, methodological and ethical questions but also exert an influence on the tension in which the type of NCR described in the workshop is carried out. That is to say, on the tension produced by constructing and performing identities through stories which come out of a research relationship embedded in power dynamics. So in the process of narrating an identity-forming experience and recreating it in a written/visual account (some resorted to the use of comic strips) there were various moments of doubt and hesitation. Some of the comments were as follows: a. when narrating their own experience: “It is very difficult to tell one’s own story, to talk about oneself. It is an uncomfortable situation and it is not exactly because I feel embarrassed about it but because I was not certain that what I said was exactly what I wanted to say” “We have an idea of ourselves and of how people see us and when that is broken by a written story which is read in front of everybody, it is very hard. It is a delicate area (the space in which the stories are shared)” Or else “The story is similar to what I said. I feel listened to. It seems to be valuable that the central idea is not lost. It is a reliable account.” “A story is no longer only mine when it comes through another person who has told my story” b. As storyteller: “I don’t know if it was what he/she wanted to say. I don’t have enough information to make the story more complete” “I think that the written word is not the most appropriate means of reproducing experience narrated orally as it doesn’t include everything.” From comments such as these arose three issues which were tackled in the workshop and which I explain below. 1. The failure of attempts to represent what is told (and as an extension, to represent the other). The problem of not knowing how to represent adequately, and not feeling well portrayed in the narrated story emerged as the first obstacle producing unease in the relationship. This had to do with the narrative being understood initially as a transparent and reliable story of experience and not as a product of our insertion in private practices and discourses which are available at certain moments and in certain places. However this very unease allows us to explore how in reality the

 Veronica Larrain

impossibility of portraying the spoken word via the written word is connected to the assumption that writing is seen as a threat to the authenticity of the spoken story (speech), as an external moment which corrupts the innocence of the authentic voice. It was suggested that there was a need to deconstruct Western tradition which has considered orality as the ‘authentic’ language, pronounced by a rational subject and which is above the written word, which is seen as a sign representing the original (spoken) sign. Thus there is a prevailing logocentrism: a type of basic faith in an order of meaning which exists independently of the structures of language. In this respect one of the students commented: “Western culture has tended to assume that speech is a clear and direct means of communication.” Drawing on the thinking of Jacques Derrida was a useful way of being able to explain the false assumptions about the nature of speech and writing and the unavoidable tensions between ideas of clarity and coherence, as a sign of the presence of an authentic voice and for that reason the presence of an absolute, articulate and complete identity. Derrida explains that the disdain for writing is associated with an ethnocentric vision of writing. He points out that: The paradox is only apparent, one of those contradictions where a perfectly coherent desire is uttered and accomplished. By one and the same gesture (alphabetic) writing, servile instrument of a speech dreaming of its plenitude and its self-presence, is scorned and the dignity of writing is refused to nonalphabetic signs (Derrida 1997, p. 110)

On the other hand and as Maggie MacLure points out (2009) neither speech nor writing can close the divide which exists between the self and the Other. “Speech is no less fissured than writing by the fabrications of signs and the necessary spacing or différance that divides the self from itself ” (MacLure 2009, p. 100). 2. Desiring plenitude. The construction of coherence in order to make one’s identity clear to a specific group. One of the worries which emerged from the workshop with some force was related to the conditions under which the stories related to identity-formation were produced. That is to say: What happens when it is impossible to elaborate an articulated story which has implications to morality or normalcy? Several of the small stories elaborated by the students (both oral and written) appeared to be fractured, open, and without resolution, showing their contradictions. To initiate the debate I raised the following question “Can narrative coherence be a harmful phenomenon, how and in which context?” (Hyvärinen et al. 2010, p. 7). In this respect the students spoke of the difficulty of telling stories and



Chapter 8.╇ Many more than two of us 

telling their own stories taking into account how the need for coherence legitimizes certain ways of positioning themselves correctly as foreign students in a Europeanising academic context. In this respect the point was discussed that in truth the oral/written stories are not a natural product but one authorized by the group which we are surrounded by, in this case, by the informant, the teacher and by the group in a politically loaded academic context. Moreover reference was made to the unease of feeling identified as a particular model of reflective student who knows oneself, who is concerned about what it is that one knows, how one knows it, and how one gives an account of what one knows. This model of student depends on the idea of a fuller and rounder subject capable of being known, and what it does is it tends to produce lineal stories which support this model. Because as Michael Bamberg maintains the “equivocations and inconsistencies (…) are signs of disarrays” (Bamberg 2004, p. 368). The chief fear expressed by the students had to do with how what is narrated orally and in writing could be a kind of testimony of an incoherent, weak and contradictory identity. This fear is rooted in a pressing need to construct a complete narrative, a story which gives form to the subject who was constructing it, giving them its own experience of coherence in the action of narrating. For the students, assuming that the function of narrative and storytelling is basically to create coherence in regard to experience (and understand it as a virtue) is complex because it entails questions such as can I be a coherent person/have a full personhood without giving my life a storyline? ¿Up to which point is “emplotment” another ethnocentric concept embedded and naturalized in our culture? The comments made by the students show the problematic consequences of assuming as a norm that through narration one “becomes oneself ” (Ricoeur 1992) – a characteristic of human action so fostered in the model of subject-student dominant in current educational contexts. Some of these consequences were discussed among the students. The first thing I wanted to put in place was that Ricoeur is committed to the principle of coherence which can be tracked back to Aristotle. Critics of narrative often tend to question Ricoeur’s ideas of giving coherence to a story through “emplotment” – the rendering of action or experience into a coherent form. Some of these critics argue that he gives an Aristotelian account of human action which is teleologically driven and organized through narrative. For many of them, the main problem is that Ricoeur naturalizes and de-historicizes the idea of textualizing human experience and action, making it a transcendental category, and forgetting that all western conceptions of reason are serviceable in particular regimes (Sartwell 2000; Hyvärinen et al. 2010). According to Sartwell, “the textualizing of human experience and action, and the textualizing of the “human world” are disciplinary artefacts, that one is rendered a textual subject by being subjected to texts” (Sartwell 2000, p. 46). To accept the rendering of action or experience into

 Veronica Larrain

a coherent form is to empower oneself precisely within the regime of signs by which one is subjected by becoming a node of that regime (Ibid). Second, when revising some of the stories produced, we discussed how the experience of coherence achieved in the action of narrating seems to be linked to narrative conventions ideologically grounded in master scripts which prevent from bringing to the surface the complexities of feelings and experiences of belonging/not belonging (politically and economically, ethically, etc) in the university context. Moreover, conceiving one’s life as a narrative (which seems to be a good thing) wrongly distresses those who do not conceive their lives in narrative terms and excludes other human self-understanding (one student remarked that Zen philosophy was strongly anti-representational). In relation to the students’ comments, I raised two questions which have occurred to me several times when doing narrative inquiry. How far is the narrative tendency to look for coherence in one’s life finally “a gross hindrance to self-understanding” (Strawson 2004, p. 447) or “counterproductive” (Spivak 1988, p. 272)?3 Can we re-think coherence in order to be a useful concept in narrative inquiry (for instance as it is being done in avant-garde literature and film)? 3. How can one reveal the porousness, the fragmentary and the contradictory aspects of interpretations, subjectivities and meanings via stories? Another tension produced when telling and recreating an identity-forming experience emerged from the constant alternation between the need for coherence in constructing a complete story and the desire to reveal the incoherences and fractures in the process of recreating an identity-forming experience. This tension led us to discuss the possibilities of understanding identities not as static but rather as changing entities when recreating experiences about them in an oral, written or visual story. In this respect we talked about how they change depending on the experiences that each person maintains with other persons and their own experiences of knowing. Taking into account the fragmented, contradictory condition of identities, in crisis and in permanent change, the students considered that for a story about these identity-forming experiences to be coherent a subject identical to the story would be necessary. This would entail an identity which embraces the subject in totality, which would be impossible. Situating the small stories produced in the workshop as fractured, contradictory, open and without resolution questions the way in which modernity constructs subjects and stories which appear as homogeneous. In reality, the formation of those subjects and

.╅ Quoted by Elizabeth Ellsworth (Ellsworth 1989, p. 322).



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stories can’t be anything but heterogeneous. For this reason any manifestation of unity and coherence implies a silencing and a suppression of the difference. In this respect many of the criticisms which are made of narrative from a constructionist point of view involve the supposed characteristics of unity and coherence which are attributed to it. This leads the narrative inquirers themselves who work on stories to give precedence to those which present consistency in representational terms over those which question this consistency based on the tensions and the fractures which are produced in the very process of reconstructing life with an adequate meaning (Hyvärinen et al. 2010, p. 10–11). We considered the need to situate stories as forms which permit one to examine how the person narrating manages a sense of him or herself in contexts which require interactive accounting. In this way the contradictions and inconsistencies in a story cease to be such and become a chance for the narrative inquirer and the collaborator to analyze how these are used to produce a complex, multi-faceted but nevertheless communicable identity. Having got to this point the inevitable question emerged in the group about how one can make a representation which reveals the porousness, the fragmentary and the contradictory aspects of the interpretations, the subjectivities and the meanings. Trying to avoid falling into formulae which I myself doubt, I put to the students that they should make some suggestions which might solve that problem. For a good number of them an alternative would be to pay attention to non-‘totalitarian’ strategies which might reflect the different sources and referents which make up the story. This led me to show various examples of research which as an alternative and/or as a critique to coherent stories, have taken into account the chance to incorporate other forms of writing. For example, the “bad faith” narratives (Hyvärinen et al. 2010, p. 7), the fiction narratives (Trahar 2006), the disturbance to the univocal ‘happy ending version’ (Larrain 2010) or the “messy text” (Rifà 2009) based on juxtapositions, and types of palimpsest which make lineal readings complex. 6.â•… Opening comments: Convincing people ‘of what’ and ‘for what?’ As a final aspect to be dealt with in this chapter I think it necessary to tackle the position as reader which was adopted by the storyteller in front of their audience. In this respect it happened that on various occasions the storyteller – who at the end read the story based on the oral version to the audience, formulated a clause which preceded it and which acted as a kind of introduction or clarification. Some of the opening clauses were “this story is a fictional story, it isn’t real”. Or else “I have incorporated typical words from my companion’s country of origin

 Veronica Larrain

which may be unknown and cause confusion, but I did it in order to make it sound as if it came from his country”. When the students were asked where this need to clarify what they were going to read came from, the replies of the storytellers were related to the sensation that the story written by them was incomplete and for that reason could be distorted in relation to the intentions they had as author. From these uncertainties came two themes which I considered appropriate to deal with and which are again related to the need to avoid the story being fractured and incoherent, as something which makes people feel awkward. Although this time it applies principally to the interpretative efficiency of the narrative inquirer as storyteller: a. The need to construct a story which is rounded and leaves no room for misinterpretation has to do with the place of researcher as owner and leader of the interpretations. This privileged position leads towards epistemic violence with respect to those who have narrated their experience and with respect to those who are listening to the story. The effect of domination on the part of the researcher gives to the Other a distorted identity which only goes to show the self-interested knowledge of the researcher. That is to say, the researcher doesn’t show any more than he or she wants us as readers/audience to see and has us read with no interruptions and without the possibility of raising any doubts. (Clifford 1986, p. 12) b. This idea that the identity-forming experience of the Other can be read without interruptions in a story produced by the researcher is considered by Maggie MacClure (2009, p 103) as one of the characteristics of the textual politics of good intentions which the humanist/enlightened model or as I have pointed out above the reflective student, underlies: The student knows who he or she is, is conscious of his or her process of knowledge and is certain of what he or she knows and says. This fuller and rounder subject model who can be read without interruptions needs to be challenged in teaching narrative inquiry, especially when the topic of representing the Other is raised by the students. Finally, I asked the students a question which was left in the air: up to which point does the need to construct a story which is rounded reduce the otherness to equality, and represent knowledge as a process which follows the path of the understandable?

7.â•… Denaturalizing the position of the narrative inquirer as storyteller Right at the end of the workshop the need emerged to give a new face to the role of narrative inquirer as storyteller which takes into account the hows. That is to say, to



Chapter 8.╇ Many more than two of us 

bear in mind some of the assessments made with respect to the limits of representation and the need to attend to types of textual production, to spaces of unsayability in the story and its possibilities in recreating the identity-forming experience, and to the context in which such stories are produced. Outlining a new profile for the storyteller also brought about an indirect relocation of the person who carries out the role of informant/collaborator which connects him or her to the significance of accepting the role of storyteller in a piece of narrative research. 1. The reconfiguration of the role which the narrative inquirer carries out as a storyteller From a NCR perspective the students considered it necessary to attend to the implications which the recreation of the Other’s experience entails. For this reason, in this recreation there is an underlying deconstructive question. That is to say, it is pertinent to question a certain appearance of transparency in the textual production in which a solid world, capable of being communicated in a clear style is assumed, and in which there is no linguistic intrusion, even from the narrative inquirer. A narrative inquirer as storyteller seeks to respond to a philosophic debate which comes from the Greek era and which has been taken up again by constructionism: ¿How do we think and how do we represent the world? In distancing oneself from ontological positions in which one accepts an a priori approach according to which it is not necessary to explain the position when attempting to understand the world and the Other, the narrative inquirer as storyteller is led to pay attention to the performativity of language and to the operations which intervene in the processes of textual production: that which is selected, how this is done, what is said, what is discarded, how the narrative inquirer represents him or herself in the text and how he or she represents the Other, as well as continuities, and discontinuities within the text itself. (Bosco & Rifà 2009, p. 5) Deconstruction thereby becomes a useful strategy for revealing the mechanisms of production of “fictions” via narrative research. (Bosco & Rifà 2009) But a group of students raised the question: What is gained by paying so much attention to a certain appearance of transparency in the textual production itself? What purpose is served by attending to the how? A possible response located the storyteller as a narrative inquirer who ceases to concentrate on how he or she can interpret, analyze and systematize in order to offer a better representation of reality. On the other hand there was a concern to narrate what people are telling us in order to talk about current themes from approaches and views which are not associated with discourses and interpretations which are already institutionalized. The unexpected, the experimental or the chaotic are necessary aspects in the narration of a storyteller that tries to capture uncharted aspects of life. It is at this point that

 Veronica Larrain

it makes sense to consider a model of a narrative inquirer as a storyteller who seeks to tell a story which allows others (reader, public) to tell their own. The open door which it leaves in its story permits places of indeterminateness and the avoidance of perfect fiction. In this sense the narrative inquirer as storyteller allows one to situate NCR in relation to a deconstructionist approach. 8.â•… Does it matter? In this workshop I tried to open lines of reflection about some of the arguments which are mobilised and transformed in a NCR perspective, in which the experience of identity is recreated through stories produced in a research relationship. Arguments in which there are underlying ideas such as, the representation of the Other and the desire for totality and coherence. By the end of the workshop, I asked the students if this experience was useful for them and whether it matters in terms of research methodology. Disallowing claims to certainty and totality and paying attention to the textual operations in the production and organization of meanings, was considered by the students as something fundamental in a NCR perspective in which stories are produced within the research relationship. Moreover, situating the research process as a relational type in which the stories told by each person are also modelled by the other, acts as an element of pressure to make this process incorporate reflexivity as a moment which permits one to analyse its influence over oneself and in the relation with others. A reflective practice can be useful when it permits us to review research practice which puts us in subject positions which are institutionally acceptable. How can we review and expose our epistemological positions? asked a student, do you have any recommendations? What have we learnt today that we can convert it into some recommendations for all of us? – I answered. So, as a way of concluding remarks, we opened a space to reconsider the possibility of rewriting the stories produced and review the locations inscribed in them bearing in mind a set of questions: a. Why do we tell the stories which we tell? b. What visions of oneself does a specific story reinforce or challenge? c. Can we displace our view in such a way as to be able to read our own stories of experience not as true stories about ourselves? d. What were the tensions, subtext, and implied agendas in my stories and how do I want to deal with them? (Conle 2005, p. 205). e. What is it that I can learn about my beliefs and suppositions, especially those which structure the disciplines and institutions which shape my ways of understanding?



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A complementary good start is to review the blind spots and absences which appear in the stories produced. It would also demand a reconstruction of our own narratives to rethink ourselves from different parameters. To rethink ourselves from different parameters consists in conceiving our stories of experience as fictions which challenge the practices which form us as storyteller and informant/ collaborator. It allows one to make something which doesn’t exist yet, which subverts the a priori coherent story (about social class, gender, country of origin, etc.). An a priori which defines, captures, understands and explains the subjects who create the stories in a research relationship.

References Bamberg, M. (2004). Talk, small stories, and adolescent identities. Human Development, 47, 366–369. Bamberg, M. (2006). Stories: Big or small why do we care? Narrative Inquiry 16(1), 139–147. Berger, P. & Luckmann, T. (1967). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press. Bosco, A. & Rifà-Valls, M. (2009). Espacios, tiempos y saberes para una subjetividad reflexiva en la escuela primaria Bellaterra [34 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/ Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 10(2), Art. 27. Available from: http://nbnresolving.de/ urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0902273. Conle, C. (2005). The world in my text. A quest of pluralism. In J. Phillion, M. Fang He & F.M. Connelly (Eds.), Narrative & experience in multicultural education (pp. 203–230). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Clifford, J. (1986). Introduction: Partial truth. In J. Clifford, & G.E. Marcus (Eds.), Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography (pp. 1–26). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Derrida, J. (1997). Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Georgakopoulou, A. (2006). Thinking big with small stories in narrative and identity analysis. Narrative Inquiry, 16(1), 122–130. Gubrium, J.F & Holstein, J.A. (2008). The constructionist mosaic. In J. Holstein & J. Gubrium (Eds.), Handbook of constructionist research (pp. 3–10). New York, NY: Guilford. Hyvärinen, M., Christer Hyden, L., Saarenheimo, M., & Tamboukou, M. (2010). Beyond narrative coherence. In M. Hyvärinen, L. Christer Hydén, M. Saarenheimo & M. Tamboukou (Eds.), Beyond narrative coherence (pp. 1–15). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Larrain, V. (2010). El buen nombre. una investigación narrativa en torno a las experiencas de subjetivación en la relación investigadora. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Universidad de Barcelona. Lather, P. (1991). Staying dumb? Student resistance to liberatory curriculum. In Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern (pp. 123–152). New York, NY: Routledge. MacLure, M. (2009). Broken voices, dirty words. On the productive insufficiency of voice. In A.E. Jackson & L.A. Mazzei (Eds.), Voice in qualitative inquiry. Challenging conventional, interpretive, and critical conceptions in qualitative research (pp. 98–113). London: Routledge.

 Veronica Larrain Phoenix, C., & Sparkes, A.C. (2008). Athletic bodies and aging in context: The narrative construction of experienced and anticipated selves in time. Journal of Aging Studies, 22, 211–221. Phoenix, C., & Sparkes, A.C. (2009). Being freed: Big stories, small stories and the accomplishment of a positive ageing identity. Qualitative Research, 9 (2), 219–236. Pinnegar, S., & Daynes, G. (2007). Locating narrative inquiry historically: Thematics in the turn to narrative. In D.J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative research. Mapping a methodology (pp. 3–34). Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage. Ricoeur, P. (1992). Oneself as another. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press. Rifà, M. (2009). Deconstructing immigrant girls’ identities through the production of visual narratives in a Catalan urban primary school. Gender and Education, 21(6), 671–688. Sartwell, C. (2000). End of story: Toward an annihilation of language and history. Albany NY: State University of New York Press. Somers, M. R. (1994). The narrative constitution of identity: A relational and network approach. Theory and Society, 23, 605–649. Sparkes, A.C., & Smith, B. (2008). Narrative constructionist inquiry. In J. Holstein & J. Gubrium (Eds.), Handbook of constructionist research (pp. 295–314). New York, NY: Guilford. Strawson, G. (2004). Against narrativity. Ratio (new series), XVII (4), 428–452. Trahar, S. (2006). Roads less travelled: Stories of learning and teaching in a multicultural higher education environment. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Bristol.

chapter 9

‘Burt’s story reminded me of my grandmother’ Using a reflecting team to facilitate learning about narrative data analysis Sheila Trahar

University of Bristol The common elements that link the approaches to the practice of reflecting teamwork that have been developed in different contexts such as family therapy, anthropology, collaborative research and management education are that they are informed by poststructuralist and non-structuralist understandings of life and identity. Within such understandings, identity is a social and public achievement, negotiated within social institutions and communities and shaped by historical and cultural forces. In the reflecting team forum people have the opportunity to tell some of the significant stories of their lives and to experience how those stories affect, are familiar to, interest or stimulate memories of experiences for others. Dominant knowledges are challenged and local knowledge is valued as new layers of meaning emerge from the process. This chapter offers a critical evaluation of the experimental use of a reflecting team to teach narrative data analysis with a group of doctoral students. Drawing on my reflections and those of Alison and Titina, the two conversants, who stimulated the reflecting team conversations, it proposes that the reflecting team activity revealed much potential for development as a pedagogical practice.

1.â•… Introduction “The reflecting team practice was first introduced into family therapy by Tom Andersen in 1991 and has now become an international feature of that therapeutic practice. The practice has been used in anthropological studies, most notably in the work of Barbara Myerhoff (1980) and is a feature of collaborative research. In 1999, William Griffith pioneered the use of the reflecting team in management education. The common elements that link the approaches to reflecting teamwork that have been developed in these different contexts are that they are informed by poststructuralist and non-structuralist understandings of life and identity. Within such

 Sheila Trahar

understandings, identity is a social and public achievement, negotiated within social institutions and within communities and shaped by historical and cultural forces. In the reflecting team forum people have the opportunity to tell some of the significant stories of their lives and to experience how those stories affect, are familiar to, interest or stimulate memories of experiences for others. The audience – the reflecting team – listens to the stories that are told and then engages in a conversation that is resonated or triggered by the stories/aspects of the stories that they have heard. I would like us to engage in this process to have conversations about the Riessman chapter that I have given to you in preparation for this part of the unit. The purpose is to deepen knowledge, understanding and application of dialogic/performative analysis of narrative data through our dialogue.” I provided this information to a group of about 20 students enrolled on our Master of Philosophy/Doctor of Philosophy (M.Phil./Ph.D.) programme in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Bristol in preparation for a day on analysing narrative and visual data, part of a course on Advanced Qualitative Data Analysis. The aims of this particular session were stated as: –â•fi To demonstrate how narrative representations offer opportunities for a critical exploration of the interplay between ‘selves’, ‘the other’, identities and cultures –â•fi To develop a critically informed appreciation of ways of handling ‘spoken narrative data’ Students were provided with a copy of Chapter 5 Dialogic/Performance Analysis from Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences by Catherine Kohler Riessman (2008) together with the following 3 questions: 1. From your reading of this chapter, what do you infer to be the differences between dialogic/performance analysis and thematic and structural analysis? 2. What do you understand to be the core elements of this method of analysing data? For example, how are researcher and participants positioned? 3. What do you consider to be the strengths and limitations of this method of data analysis? All were asked to read the chapter and to make notes using the questions as a guide. In addition, I provided information about the reflecting team process (Appendix) and asked students to volunteer to me if they were willing to have a conversation about their reading of the text in order to stimulate reflecting team conversations. This chapter is, therefore, an account of a learning and teaching ‘event’; firstly from my perspective followed by the perspectives of Alison and Titina (pseudonyms chosen by them), the two people who volunteered to have the initial conversation about the text. Perspectives from Alison and Titina and additional ones



Chapter 9.╇ ‘Burt’s story reminded me of my grandmother’ 

from me were gathered in a conversation held a week or so after the event in which we ‘reflected’ on resonances for us from the learning and teaching experience. Seeking to retain and to communicate some of the spirit in which the activity emerged, was introduced and occurred, I am using dialogic/performance analysis (Riessmann 2008) to ‘analyse’ the session and our subsequent conversation. I use the poetic device of stanza, different fonts for different voices and purposes and the present tense, “reported or reconstructed speech”, seeking to pull readers into “the narrated moment” (Riessman 2008, p. 112). Riessman (ibid, p. 107), drawing on Bakhtin, writes, “Every text…includes many voices – hidden internal politics, historical discourses and ambiguities – beyond the author’s voice”. I was seeking to use a text to enable the students to surface those ‘hidden’ voices and, in doing so, to meet one of my stated aims for the session, to develop a critically informed appreciation of ways of handling ‘spoken narrative data’. The chapter strives to extend that process by including voices ‘beyond’ mine. 2.â•… Doctoral research training M.Phil./Ph.D. students in the Graduate School of Education are required to undertake a programme of research methodology training including courses on Exploring Qualitative Methods and Advanced Qualitative Data Analysis. Beginning with a course Understanding Educational Research, they are introduced to different paradigmatic positions and challenged to read research critically in order to make judgements about quality and about the extent to which authors articulate paradigmatic perspectives and display congruence with them in their reporting of their research. Working in one of the few Education departments in the UK where narrative inquiry has a very strong presence – we offer the only EdD in Narrative Inquiry (see Chapter 7) – all doctoral students are exposed to this methodological approach, along with others, in their research training programme. In the very practical Exploring Qualitative Methods unit, they are introduced to narrative inquiry via participation in a ‘narrative interview’ as both interviewer and interviewee and invited to contrast this experience with participation in a semistructured interview. Some students prefer the structure of the latter, expressing cynicism about a method of conducting research, a narrative interview, in which the researcher is wholly and transparently involved. Validity and reliability are questioned – perfect opportunities to enable those asking such questions to recognise the paradigmatic perspectives from which they are speaking. For other students, however, the unstructured, more collaborative procedure of the narrative interview in which, as the interviewer they may have shared resonances for them in the narrator’s story, can open up a different kind of questioning – not only

 Sheila Trahar

a different way to question each other – but also one that challenges dominant philosophical paradigms. In addition, some may begin to challenge the rationale for a researcher being a “detached observer” rather than an “active participant” in the interview process (Phillion & He 2008, p. 6). These very different, profound experiences can stimulate lively and robust intellectual debate where students are engaging with concepts that they may, until that point, have found complex and, indeed, resisted. Thus, rather than isolate the ‘interview’ from its epistemological and philosophical perspectives, by sharing their immediate responses to the different styles of interviewing in such ways, students are articulating the stories that they hold, personally and professionally, beginning to recognise how these inform, inevitably, their paradigmatic perspectives. In the second part of the qualitative research training, the focus is mainly on the analysis of qualitative data and I have sought different ways of engaging students in narrative data analysis over the past 4 years. Unlike many of the students described in other chapters in this book (e.g. Chapters 2, 3 and 7) most M.Phil./Ph.D. students are not driven or motivated by wanting to learn about narrative inquiry. They come from several different contexts and academic traditions and many are familiar only with quantitative research. Some students, however, having been introduced to this methodological approach, even if at such a cursory level, are so captivated by it that they make a profound shift, subsequently, in their paradigmatic thinking to use it in their research. 3.â•… The reflecting team I first encountered the ‘reflecting team’ process through my colleague, Jane Speedy (Chapter 7), who trained as a narrative therapist with Michael White and David Epston. Her accounts of narrative therapy and her practical demonstration of the reflecting team stimulated me to learn more about this therapeutic approach. As a trained counsellor I was soon seduced by the principles and practices of narrative therapy, relishing their challenges to the dominant theoretical approaches to counselling. I liked the non-pathological approach; the positioning of the ‘problem’ as the ‘problem’ rather than the person as the problem. Experiences of externalising conversations (see, for example, White & Epston 1990, Morgan 2000) enabled me to experience the value of these ideas. While not claiming to be a narrative therapist, I integrated some of the principles into my work as a counselling practitioner and as a higher education teacher. The reflecting team appeared to fascinate people wherever they came from and, in addition, often seemed to provide the space for more reticent group members to speak. As I became more confident in its value as



Chapter 9.╇ ‘Burt’s story reminded me of my grandmother’ 

a teaching and research practice, so did students, some using it as a collaborative research method in their dissertations e.g. Shih (2004). My own journey towards becoming a narrative inquirer thus began with my encounters with narrative therapy and continues to be informed by many of its principles and practices. In 2009, I facilitated a reflecting team during a Graduate School of Education training day on ethics in research. Two doctoral students, whose work I was supervising, had a conversation about ethical complexities that they were encountering in their research and the reflecting team discussed resonances for them. The ‘team’ was too large – it consisted of more than 20 people – but, in spite of its size, I noticed that once again, people who tended to be more reticent, particularly in such large groups, made contributions. The experience was undoubtedly very powerful for many people and one of the doctoral students, Alison, suggested to me that we use a similar practice in the forthcoming Advanced Qualitative Data Analysis course. Her suggestion sowed a seed for me and I began to muse on how best to implement it. As a committed practitioner of adult learning, I hold steadfastly to the belief that learners should have every opportunity to determine how their learning might take place. I was intrigued by Alison’s idea; although was not entirely clear how such a practice might be employed in the ‘teaching’ of narrative data analysis. I decided, however, to experiment with it. I provided the students with the Riessman chapter together with the 3 guiding questions, signalling the intention to use a reflecting team to enable dialogue about dialogic/performance analysis. I put a short explanation about the reflecting team process (Appendix) on our Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) Blackboard and asked for people to volunteer to have the initial conversation about their reading of the text. Alison and Titina contacted me. The only guidance that I gave to them was to ensure that in their conversation, they mentioned each of the 3 exemplars in Riessman’s chapter. 4.â•… Learning and reflection The principles of the reflecting team share many of the principles that inform much of my pedagogical practice. These principles include: striving to involve students fully in the learning process; building on existing knowledge and creating a learning climate within which students feel supported to disagree with the opinions of others and to express their own, yet not too comfortable that they do not feel challenged intellectually. In addition, the emphasis in the reflecting team is on collaboration and participation. Philosophically, the reflecting team is a practice that is informed by social constructionism and poststructuralism. In this chapter I do not need to explain these philosophical perspectives in any depth but consider

 Sheila Trahar

it useful for me to articulate some of their core elements and how they inform the reflecting team. By doing so, I offer further explanation about why I experimented in using the practice with this group of students. The first one is that knowledge is created through interaction with others and that learning is essentially a social process. For me, this relates to a core guiding principle of the reflecting team – and indeed of narrative inquiry – which is that no story is an individual story; it is mediated by social, historical and cultural influences. Thus in the therapeutic use of the reflecting team, the client – or the one who consults – not only derives insight from the team’s conversation but may also derive great consolation from hearing how her/his story resonated with others; a feeling of ‘I am not alone’. Another principle is that dominant knowledges are challenged and local knowledge is valued. In an educational setting such as the one in which I work which is very diverse, culturally, it is particularly important to recognise and acknowledge what mediates our understandings of learning and teaching (Trahar, 2011). By using a practice informed by philosophies that celebrate diversity and that challenge single, dominant truths, I seek to model inclusive and culturally synergistic pedagogy. A reflecting team invites the introduction of new perspectives rather than the consolidation of existing ones because it does not follow ‘normal’ conversational rules. Participants speak about what resonates for them, what they were curious about in the conversation rather than discussing – even interrogating – what they have heard the conversants say. A legitimate question to ask may be, ‘How does a reflecting team differ from any other form of groupwork in which participants are invited to discuss a topic and express their views, perhaps with the purpose of gaining new perspectives’? It is common in this more usual type of group discussion that the participants discuss and one person presents feedback – or a summary – of the discussion. What the larger group hears may then be a series of discussions that have been filtered/filleted/evaluated – by the spokesperson. Even with skilful facilitation, for example, inviting other group members to add to or dispute the speaker, the conversations can be limiting because they take place, usually, between 4–6 people. In a reflecting team, the conversation occurs between all members of the team, creating different spaces to offer or construct radical perspectives through the sharing of resonances. In the ‘experiment’ that I write about here, all of the discussants were students. I therefore invited disruption of the more familiar power structure where the lecturer is directing – even if she claims to be facilitating – the process and her perspectives may be the ones that are being discussed. Had I, for example, decided that I would have a conversation with a student about the chapter, the potential for robust exchange may have been different for some participants, limiting some in articulating their radical reading of the text.



Chapter 9.╇ ‘Burt’s story reminded me of my grandmother’ 

Frake & Dogra (2006, p. 148) claim that: The use of reflection is less likely to be influenced by factors such as gender and culture as it places the patient or learner at the centre of the dialogue, although patterns of social behaviour related to gender and culture may already have influenced the patients and learners to specific kinds of behaviours. There is no attempt to categorize certain perspectives as being right or wrong. The process builds on what is presented as relevant to patient and learner.

In common with much of the literature on the reflecting team/outsider witness ceremony (e.g. Friedman 1995; White & Epston 1990), the use of the word ‘patient’ provides a clue to the type of reflecting team that the writers refer to here – the more common therapeutic type – but phrases relevant within this context are that ‘there is no attempt to categorise certain perspectives as right or wrong’ and ‘the process builds on what is presented as relevant’. So, in inviting the students to be reflecting teams that ‘witnessed’ Alison and Titina’s conversation about their readings of the Riessman chapter and what resonated or had relevance for them, I was striving to communicate my belief that all of our knowledge is partial; ‘not knowing’ is thus acceptable and to be encouraged, mirroring what, for me, are other key elements of narrative inquiry.

5.â•… Back to teaching narrative data analysis I have experimented with various options for this element of the teaching. My preferred strategy would be to have students ‘analyse’ some qualitative data that they have generated using a form of narrative data analysis such as structural, thematic or dialogic/performance (Riessman 2008). Some students, however, may not have any qualitative data or may be a little reticent to work with their own data in such ways. A second option is to use narrative data that I have analysed and offer them to students to analyse, so that, inevitably, they bring their own meanings to the analytic process. Having used my data many times in teaching, I have learned that, although the meanings that others bring are always valuable to be considered alongside those that I and research participants – ‘narrators’ – have constructed, some students can be hesitant to share their own meanings or prefer to focus on critiquing me as an interviewer, not the aim of the activity. The first year that I taught this part of the Advanced Qualitative Data Analysis course, I used Peter Clough’s (2002) Narratives and Fictions in Educational Research selecting an extract from one of the chapters, inviting the students to ‘read’ it as if they were the different characters in Clough’s fictionalised narrative. Feedback from the group indicated that this was an interesting and enjoyable activity; indeed,

 Sheila Trahar

somewhat to my surprise, those more cynical about narrative inquiry informed me that it was a powerful experience for them. Reflecting on the process after the class, however, I felt that it did not really enable deep understanding of different ways of analysing narrative data. In 2008, when Narrative Methods in the Human Sciences was published, I decided to use the chapter on Dialogic/Performance Analysis in Riessman’s book as a basis for teaching this topic. 5.1â•… Choosing the text Locating texts that describe how to work with and analyse narrative data is not easy. Many narrative inquirers are resistant to producing ‘how to’ texts – indeed, as I wrote in Chapter 1, that is emphatically not what this book seeks to do – yet in order for more people to understand and engage with this/these way (s) of doing research, some guidance is useful and important. I do not seek to ‘convert’ people to narrative inquiry but do believe that the process of doing a doctorate should open and stretch minds to myriad possibilities, to challenge held beliefs and to question – in particular the Eurocentric values and beliefs – that inform the more dominant philosophies of social science and thus many methodological approaches – including to some extent – narrative inquiry. I decided to use this particular text because Riessman was a visiting professor at the University of Bristol in 2005. I had met her and worked with her and when I read the book realised that I had heard many of the stories in the seminars that she had offered and during a course on Narrative Analysis that she taught and I was fortunate to attend. In addition, it was one of the few texts that I had encountered that explained through various exemplars of her own and others’ ‘data’ what to do with ‘data’ that had been gathered using narrative methods. The exemplars are mainly from North America, however, certainly in the Dialogic/ Performance chapter. Given Riessman’s emphasis on the importance of clarifying context within which narratives are gathered, I was curious about whether students would be able to relate to the ‘contexts’ that were displayed without more detailed contextual information. 5.2â•… Teaching narrative data analysis: The day dawns … We begin the day with ‘A quick quiz on narrative inquiry’ – an interactive activity designed to remind students about the core concepts of narrative inquiry that we had discussed 6 months previously in Exploring Qualitative Methods. I am impressed with what they have ‘remembered’; I feel positive about the forthcoming activity. I invite Alison and Titina to take their seats and explain that I have allocated the 19 other people in the group to 2 teams. I am transparent about my reasons for doing so; I have choreographed the teams so that in each team there is



Chapter 9.╇ ‘Burt’s story reminded me of my grandmother’ 

a mix of men and women, of cultural backgrounds and of those who speak English as their first and those who speak it as a second or third language. By now they are used to my structuring groups in such ways; they have become aware that I believe such group diversity is important for people to experience the “felt modalities” of difference (Gannon 2009, p. 71). 5.3â•… The first conversation Every paper I read Changes me in a way Burt’s story Reminded me of my grandmother One can’t Be a self By oneself I was thinking About My interviews I put words into My interviewees’ mouths Returning many times To the data Analysis changes From day To day Appropriation and ventriloquation Fascinating I Wanted to know more About how Riessman Interacted with Burt It made me think About how I am going to do Interviews

This extract from their 20 minute conversation resonates powerfully with me as a listener. Titina relates her reading about Burt to her own family – she talks about how Burt’s behaviours remind her of her grandmother; Alison’s contributions are at a more intellectual level. I am curious about the words ‘I wanted to know more about how Riessman interacted with Burt ‘and by their many references to ‘wanting more’ of Riessman. Do they feel that Riesman is in some way absent from her

 Sheila Trahar

writing? I have asked them to ensure that they discuss their perspectives on all three exemplars but it is the Burt story and the third exemplar, where Riessman draws on the work of Karen Gallas, that catches their attention. 5.4â•… The reflecting teams: My perspective Following Alison and Titina’s conversation, their colleagues move to their respective reflecting teams. The first words I hear are ‘We make assumptions and assume that they are common’ followed by scepticism about the word ‘performing’. Do we have power and freedom to perform? That was an unwise decision to interject in the first team that I sat with. My sense was that the participants were focusing on critiquing the conversation between Alison and Titina rather than sharing what had been resonated for them by the conversation in response to their reading of the article. My clumsy attempt to rectify – or what I thought was to rectify – the situation was challenged immediately by one or two of the participants critical of my action. This team in particular appeared to be fixated on the reflecting team practice emanating from family therapy; they thought that I had rendered Alison and Titina vulnerable. This comment reminded me of when I was very involved in training counsellors and a trainee, feeling uncomfortable by hearing another trainee’s story, would hold me responsible for her/his discomfort, feeling that I should have intervened and ‘rescued’ the person. Was that what was happening here? Did this team feel that I should have stopped Alison and Titina’s conversation? I move to the other reflecting team; I am amazed by how people are finding their voice. Students who have been much more reticent in other teaching sessions are voicing opinions, challenging each other on their expressed perspectives. They have really engaged with the chapter and been stimulated by hearing Alison and Titina’s conversation about it to express their own, radical readings of it. I note my surprise at two women who, up until now have been much more silent members of the doctoral students’ group. They are having a very robust exchange prompted by their reading of Riessman’s words “Burt bled stories from beginning to end” (p. 108). Following the team reflections, Alison and Titina have a final conversation about what they heard in the teams; whether they had gained any new insights, what surprised them about people’s responses. For Alison in particular, this seems an important moment when she speaks about how, in interviews conducted in previous research, she has never revealed anything of herself. As she is planning an ethnographic study, where she will be spending some considerable time with her participants, she now feels that it would be inappropriate of her not to be willing to share aspects of her own life.



Chapter 9.╇ ‘Burt’s story reminded me of my grandmother’ 

I ask for some immediate feedback on the process. This is mixed and comes from the more vocal students. Overall it is positive apart from the criticism that I discussed earlier. One participant comments that he thought the process was ‘controlled’; I take this word to heart and discuss it with Alison and Titina in our subsequent conversation. Following a break, I then talk about other ways of analysing narrative data, such as structural and thematic, to complement the focus on dialogic/performance analysis.

6.â•… A conversation about conversations A week or so after the reflecting team activity, Alison, Titina and I had a conversation about our experiences and perceptions. I felt that, overall, it had gone well but I wanted to hear about how they had experienced it and also whether they had had conversations with other students about it. As a teacher, as I indicated earlier, I am always reflecting on my practice, seeking to identify what is valuable and what I might develop. I re-present our conversation using dialogic/ performance analysis and poetic stanza. My unspoken thoughts are presented in italic script. I feel that I have to begin. I ask them how they felt after having volunteered to be the conversers. The conversation winds in and out from our reflections on the process to more general discussions about teaching in higher education, and back again to the process and how it might be improved. Both Alison and Titina draw on conversations they have had with their colleagues or on hearsay. At the end of our conversation, Titina says, “Everybody enjoyed it because it was so different, everybody was so happy. It’s a nice break, you’re relaxed”. Such words, for me, bear a marked contrast to the middle part of the conversation where they report what I hear as much more critical feedback from their peers, such as the session was ‘overly controlled’. Alison: You wanted us to talk about the reading – it was a question of how I interpreted that. The task was quite different, quite an academic activity, talking about a text, talking about the theories, cases, analysing them. I didn’t expect to talk about personal things, whereas Titina brought those up and discussed them. It didn’t occur to me to do that in public. I didn’t feel entirely comfortable; it was such a short period of time; I needed to cover as much of the academic side as possible. I felt I wanted to cover as much of the theory as well as discussing each case.

 Sheila Trahar

Titina: The point was to trigger conversation. It was a conscious choice to include personal feelings. I’m trying to think differently. Alison was closer to the text. We had two different, quite different opinions. Some of our colleagues they usually don’t speak but they were sharing their personal stories. Titina’s words affirm my own impression – that more reticent people had been encouraged to speak out. I share with them that I had been impressed with the way that at the end of their first conversation, they had both said that they had been ‘performing identities’… Titina: Performed identities – even ethics wasn’t too personal. These conversations made people want to talk about identities Alison: It’s necessary that people relate on a personal level, they need to relate theory to their own life. Reading about performance and identity it’s necessary to reflect that in your own life. Each person is probably going to be doing that. I don’t think that people interpreted that they had to talk about personal things. There are different ways of talking about a text and we can make choices… There was a huge difference of opinion – about Burt – expressed very robustly. That’s because people did relate to it personally; you can’t just relate to those cases intellectually. Titina: The point of narrative is to encourage people to think differently. So, they are remembering the ‘ethics day’ and making comparisons between the two experiences. This is great! I feel pleased here, pleased because they are talking about relating emotionally as well as intellectually to the text. But, did it ‘achieve’ its purpose? Titina: We had limited time – we talked about it but then how are you going to use it? Alison: It would be useful to go through all 3 i.e. thematic as well as structural and have a piece of narrative data to work with…. It would be good to have a ‘whole day with narrative’. I am delighted to hear this even though a whole day on narrative will be unlikely within our current curriculum for that course. In addition, for some students, a whole day on narrative would be anathema. We then talk about ways in which the activity could be developed: Titina: Our conversation could be analysed. Sheila: We could have a reflecting team, same chapter, I could give you some data; that might be a way forward. Titina: We could have another reflecting team at the end.



Chapter 9.╇ ‘Burt’s story reminded me of my grandmother’ 

Then write Collaboratively Everybody Could write something That was a response I am still concerned by the word ‘controlled’ that one of the participants had used in the immediate feedback. I do not want to be seen as a ‘controlling teacher’; on the other hand, the reflecting team practice has to be ‘managed’ if it is to be useful. Alison: I didn’t feel that the process was ‘overly controlled’ but some people did. I am attributing a negative meaning to these words: I want to explore this with them. Titina: If we had kept talking, it would be us and not them. We could have longer for the teams Alison: A lot of people want to talk a lot This is fascinating! So, they share my own perceptions of more dominant voices, as in any group. I share with them a previous reflecting team experience where the focus was experiences of informal learning. A colleague and I were the conversants and our conversation was intended to encourage people to share their own informal learning experiences. Some colleagues needed a lot of persuading to experiment with a reflecting team, and I recall asking someone who was familiar with the process to begin the team’s conversation. I use this story as a way to illustrate, firmly, that, for the process to be successful, it has to be ‘managed’. They respond – in this stanza I have merged their words together: Perhaps next time Make it clear Why you’re controlling some aspects People are not familiar They don’t know how to react More explanation Examples of how they might respond Need people to guide Sharing what happened in the different groups More explanation Some examples of a response Alison: It was good that you said ‘everybody needs to speak’ making it a responsibility for everybody. It is difficult though to answer the question ‘What resonates for you?’ One group was evaluating our

 Sheila Trahar

contribution; they went off at a tangent but you brought them back. People need to take a risk. That’s interesting that Alison’s perception is that one group ‘went off at a tangent’ and that I ‘brought them back’. That was what I felt, but group members were critical of my intervention. I agree with her that ‘people need to take a risk’ but the ‘counsellor’ in me stresses the importance of establishing and maintaining a balance of risk and safety. Alison: People do know each other. I think it’s necessary to push people. I felt that way and I reflected on it. It really struck me how uncomfortable I felt. I’m doing an ethnographic study – I’m going to be in that situation a lot. Then I remember the comment that I had made Alison and Titina ‘vulnerable’. I share this with them, eager to get their views. Alison: You made it clear That it was based on this technique The vulnerability is there Whether it’s therapy or not I was initially very sceptical Stereotypes Something that narrative people have to deal with Touchy-feely Self-indulgent Connection with counselling The final words go to Titina: I think It’s great More innovation In teaching methods 7.â•… Conclusion – innovation in teaching methods? Using a reflecting team in a higher education context to ‘teach’ narrative data analysis seems to be rare. In fact I can find no reported occurrences of its use outside of therapeutic environments other than Griffith’s (1999) application of it in business education, and in some of the activities described by Malcolm Reed and Jane Speedy in Chapter 7. From the experience – and the subsequent conversation



Chapter 9.╇ ‘Burt’s story reminded me of my grandmother’ 

with Alison and Titina – I conclude that using a reflecting team to enable such learning is worthwhile but that more preparation is needed in order to explain the purpose and rationale for doing so. It is especially important to provide an example of resonance before the teams begin their reflections so that I do not need to intervene. The final point I took from the conversation with Alison and Titina after the event was to reconsider the second conversation between the two discussants. Rather than devote time to this conversation, it may be more productive to take feedback from the teams about their conversations so that, together, we can extrapolate key points. A crucial question for me as an educator is ‘What was learned about analysing narrative data’? – one of the stated aims of the session. Verbal and written feedback from the students – including that from the conversation with Titina and Alison – was that the reflecting team activity afforded them an opportunity to experience a narrative inquiry practice to engage with performance/dialogic ways of data analysis. In addition, those students who chose to use dialogic/performance analysis to analyse data for the purposes of their subsequent assignment, demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the process. In this chapter I make no attempt to ‘generalise’ the applicability of the reflecting team to other contexts/disciplines but I continue to use it in my teaching and in my research, refining it continuously. Based on the event recounted in this chapter, the next time we taught that course, my colleague Federica and I decided to film a narrative conversation between us and then invite reflecting teams to ‘analyse’ it using thematic, structural or performance/dialogic analysis. But that’s a story for another day…

References Andersen, T. (Ed.) (1991). The reflecting team: Dialogues and dialogues about the dialogues. New York, NY: W.W. Norton. Frake, & Dogra. (2006). The use of reflecting teams in educational contexts. Reflective Practice, 7(2), 143–149. Friedman, S. (Ed.). (1995). The reflecting team in action: Collaborative practice in family therapy. New York, NY: The Guildford Press. Gannon, S. (2009). Difference as ethical encounter. In B. Davies & S. Gannon (Eds.), Pedagogical encounters (pp. 69–88). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Griffith, W. (1999). The reflecting team as an alternative case teaching model: A narrative conversational approach. Management Learning, 30(3), 343–362. Morgan, A. (2000). What is narrative therapy? An easy-to-read introduction. Adelaide: Dulwich Centre. Myerhoff, B. (1980). Number our days: Culture and community among elderly Jews in an American ghetto. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

 Sheila Trahar Phillion, J., & He, M.F. (2008). Multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry in educational research. Thresholds in Education, XXXIV(1 & 2), 2–1 Riessman, C.K. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Shih, Y-J. (2004). Reflecting on experiences of student centred learning and teaching: A narrative journey. Unpublished Master of Education dissertation, University of Bristol. Trahar, S. (2011). Developing cultural capability in international higher education: A narrative inquiry. London: Routledge. White, M. & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. New York, NY: Norton.

Appendix The reflecting team process 1.

Two volunteers talk about their responses to the Riessman chapter, using the questions that I gave to you as a guiding focus for their conversation. As you listen to their conversation you might consider the following questions:

In what ways do their ‘readings’ of the chapter resonate with your own?

What experiences/memories of your own are triggered by their conversation?

Is there anything in what they say that touches you personally?

Are there any experiences in your life that may have led you to these thoughts and would you be willing to talk about them?

Was there anything that aroused your curiosity in their conversation?

2.

3.

When the two volunteers have concluded their conversation, you as the audience become the reflecting team (s) and have your own conversation stimulated by what you have heard and using the questions above as a guide. This is a conversation between you – not with the two volunteers – although they will listen. After about 20 minutes, the two volunteers then have another, brief conversation about what they have heard and the extent to which it has added to, ‘thickened’ the meanings and understandings that they have attributed to the themes of Riessman’s chapter.’

chapter 10

Negotiating intercultural academic careers A narrative analysis of two senior university lecturers Meeri Hellstén & Katrin Goldstein-Kyaga Södertörn University

Research into the influences on academic work of professional life stories and contextual adaptability is gaining ground. There is an increase in the use of ‘self-study’ as a method for explaining the diverse work demands in the academic profession. This chapter reports on two such stories narrated by university lecturers. The aim is to illuminate and discuss academic and professional pathways to current professional situations by way of two senior university lecturers’ conversations. The academics grew up and pursued their educational and professional careers in different social, cultural, linguistic, economic and political contexts, but are currently working at the same university. In their stories we explore how and in what ways their different contexts have influenced them as professional university teachers and researchers. By so doing, we use these stories to interpret the world or worlds in and through which the two have interacted on their way to academia and thus view their stories as social products constructed in the context of specific social, historical and cultural locations. Stories are here viewed as sources of ‘coming to know’ through which the two represent themselves and their worlds as well as construct personal identities as professionals. In the stories we link the past to the present as the two give meaning to their lives as these have been negotiated academically and professionally. Though stories speak for themselves they require interpretation when used as data in social research. Our model of narrative analysis is more of thematic analysis that places emphasis on the content of the story as a text. With identity construction as professionals we do also have a performative view dealing with how narrators want to be known, and precisely how they involve the audience in “doing” their identities. Through the two narratives presented in the chapter, we make links to how they can be utilized pedagogically to enable the accomplishment of new learning in the intercultural higher education context.

1.â•… Introduction The self-study method of analysis is increasingly becoming a preferred way of working interculturally in academic higher education settings. For the past

 Meeri Hellstén & Katrin Goldstein-Kyaga

20 years the global changes affecting academic life have made an impact on the ways in which scholars think about and manage their professional encounters which in turn has greatly influenced the reshaping of the academic teaching and learning environment (for an overview, see e.g. Hellstén & Reid, 2008). In this chapter we explore the use of narratives as a way of investigating intercultural pedagogical reflections though lived experiences of two senior academics. Our aim is to highlight the meaning of shared intercultural experiences for enriching the educational value in scholarly work, particularly in intercultural settings. We do this by presenting narratives that accomplish a two-pronged approach. On the one hand the narratives act as reflective professional tools in reaffirming objectives for teaching and learning, and on the other hand the narratives in all their epitomized intricacies, are offered as a useful tool for teaching pedagogical content by narrative inquiry in higher education.

2.â•… Self-study for reflecting on academic professionalization Schön’s groundbreaking analysis of reflection-in-action has since its publication in 1983 become a central component for enhancing development in the workplace worldwide. Schön’s claim that the quality of professional conduct is greatly enhanced by the ability to and routinely implement reflection upon our working tasks, and the relationships within which they occur, have since publication been accepted by the professional communities as gospel. Our view on working with professional narratives incorporates Schön’s notion of reflection in that in order to make sense of our life histories, we are concurrently engaged in the task of reflection, and that this involves certain aspects of evaluative quality assessment and self-scrutiny. Schön famously claimed that indeed without the practice of reflection professionals fail to reach higher levels of work quality, and personal work satisfaction. Indeed, the lack of reflective components in our professional development has in public discourse been blamed for causing the lack of ‘quality’ in workplace production. During this century in the upshot of ever increasing economic challenges, escalating workloads and working conditions, human skills and resources have become a valuable cultural capital. In order to sustain continued global development we are increasingly called upon to work together. Lundegård and Wickman (2009) aptly point out that society requires us to collaborate in developing into the future. They provide empirical evidence to the claim that social development hinges on individuals’ reciprocal ability to negotiate amongst themselves. We believe that this is increasingly the case in the face of dissonance and diversity. Further, Lundegård and Wickman state that the human social fabric habitually



Chapter 10.╇ Negotiating intercultural academic careers 

demands our involvement and responsibility in any interactive event, and that we bring to these meeting spaces, the histories of our identities which together transform and construct new social (and professional) identities. In the knowledge society such culmination of new social identities are collectively characterized by ‘innovation’ and ‘new thinking’. However, the ever increasing institutional bids on quality assurance in higher education, provides evidence to an existing unease about the reaching of high ground in terms of quality and sustainability measures. In the academic community there is voiced concern about limited opportunities for growth and professional development and work-life balance (see. e.g. Ninnes & Hellstén, 2005). Some of the rhetoric around the new hype in chasing publication citation indices, external research funding create for many academics a professionally untenable situation in which we risk losing our touch at the inter-personal levels, in the areas of communication, reflective practice and collaborative initiatives. Our chapter is thus an attempt at bringing focus back on our professional activities, and the ways in which these may be utilized to transform some professional challenges into a winning discourse using narrative methods (see also Trahar 2008). Such newly formed narratives are powerful in constructing inclusive and additive ways of looking at for example, multicultural identities of migrants (Goldstein-Kyaga & Borgström 2009). A further aim is to allow for the professional narratives of academics to suggest new forms of good practice for implementation of teaching and learning. For the purposes of clarification then, we define narrative according to a model presented by Somers and Gibson (1994), which will be explained below. To this we add a reflective component and draw from Lundegård and Wickman’s (2009) use of disjunctive spaces to define intercultural narratives, within which we place the two presented case accounts. 2.1â•… Analytic method Somers and Gibson’s (1994) social model of narrative analyses applies most aptly to our analytic objectives. The authors’ convincing claim that narrative sociologies are ontological rather than (merely) representational shifted the paradigm in the accounting of disciplinary knowledge. The ontological nature of narratives in accomplishing the social sciences, is predicated upon their claim that social life is ‘storied’, and as such is analytically never temporal or spatial, but interrelational. They maintain that social experiences are constructed in and by narratives which in turn guide all human action. Working within the narrative field, we acknowledge a distinction between what can be taken as accountable research from work on inquiry. We do not assert research rigour in any kind of positivist claim upon the analytic approach we apply

 Meeri Hellstén & Katrin Goldstein-Kyaga

in this chapter, but rather refer to the field of social science that holds regard for the qualitative analytic value in the generativity of social experiences provided by public and personal narratives. For our analytic purposes we adopt four dimensions of narrativity as presented by Somers and Gibson (1994, p. 60–63), which help us explain the factors central to our narratives in focus. 1. Ontological narratives denote those stories actors employ to make sense of the ‘bigger picture’ of our lives, these can be taken to be theoretical but need not necessarily be so. 2. Public narratives are those generally attached to larger systems outside our personal selves, e.g. social institutions, cultural enclaves and organisations. Our construction of public narratives is affiliated with the conventions endorsed by these institutions and their conventional boundaries. 3. Conceptual narratives are according to Somers and Gibson the most important of the four dimensions, as these are made up of the social forces, market patterns, institutional practices and constraints that explain our actions. These narratives are generative of the vocabulary needed in order to reconstruct historical and ontological social forces. 4. Meta-narratives can also be called ‘master-narratives’ as these are constitutive of the abstract schemes which embed our lives and which we encode into existence. Examples of these may be social theories (e.g. Marxism/Liberalism), or epic dramas (Capitalism/Communism) or other epistemological social regulations. As our analysis is concerned with intercultural narratives that construct the professional experiences of senior academics, we add a fifth dimension to the above four, which we have adopted from what Lundegård and Wickman (2009) refer to as Biesta’s ‘disjunctive spaces’. According to those authors disjunctive spaces are where existence becomes meaningful only when related to the other. We call this an inter-relational narrative accomplished between two or more social actors in “… a mutual interaction and an individual’s existence traces its contours from a relationship to its background – a space” (Lundegård & Wickman, p. 464). Thus, each narrative cannot be separated from its biographical personal past. Our analysis adds an intercultural dimension as follows 5. Intercultural narratives are generated in ‘disjunctive spaces’ which through diversification make salient new conceptualisations and transformations of significant activities, events and social and cultural (including language related) practices.



Chapter 10.╇ Negotiating intercultural academic careers 

In our working with self-study narratives we were guided by a number of base questions. These acted as a scaffold in our narratives but did in no way restrict or fix the parameters within which we allowed the telling to take shape. The questions were roughly arranged around the following issues: –â•fi Development of professional career –â•fi Anecdotal evidence (public/private) that shows development of sense of self professionally –â•fi Any relationships of the above on development of academic identity –â•fi Impact of language and the role of any mentors on/in the above After careful deliberation we decided that we would document the told stories through a method of third person recount. This method allowed us to gain deeper insight into the tellings by creating distance between the content and meeting our analytic objectives. Throughout the documentation, care has been taken to maintain the personal expressions and genre of the narratives by adhering to the speakers’ original choice of words as closely as possible. 3.â•… Recounting the first narrative The first story is told by a female senior lecturer who has worked in academia since the beginning of the 1990’s in Europe and Australia. She has a multi-cultural/ethnic and multilingual upbringing and has received her education in three countries and languages. She begins by reflecting on her professional career summarising that it developed through a series of learning opportunities, determination, and strategic application of ideas, meetings with key people, and traces of ‘luck’. The latter can be described as ‘being in the right situations at opportune moments’. A large part of this has been the result of networking, dialogues, and interactions within academic communities of likeminded professionals. She has also sought the interaction with key professionals, from whom she has taken counsel, and who collectively have shaped the contours of her professional and scholarly boundaries. The main influences of her professional and personal development have been her intercultural and international life experiences. She recalls being comfortable in ‘border regions’, being born into a Finnish family which shared vastly different cultural roots in the indigenous north and the southern regions of the country. Within the incongruent worlds of indigenous and majority cultures, she was brought up with a strong sense of integrity and a virtue of determination through effort. Her formative years were spent in Finland and Sweden and she has lived

 Meeri Hellstén & Katrin Goldstein-Kyaga

the most part of her life in Australia. The indigenous culture was partly but not entirely her point of reference as she learnt to make sense of social boundaries in her formative years living in mainstream society. Recently, she has returned to Sweden to take up a position as senior lecturer. Her comparative life experiences have made her aware of the intercultural nature of human interactions. She has identified with the concept of transition, initially between cultures, then more intimately between social borders and boundaries, and in academic life, between conceptual boundaries and epistemologies. Having lived in three countries (Finland, Sweden and Australia) she has learnt to accomplish adaptation. She has developed a curiosity of people dynamics and fascination of social conventions and how these conventions shape new social systems that we again respond to. She tells about her intercultural experiences as assets in her research regarding international pedagogies and these life experiences have also to some extent informed her choice of academic field in education. Having grown up in a crosscultural environment, she has developed a sense of diversity through learning by evaluating things from more than one perspective. This has drawn her to professional duties that involve intercultural encounters as predicated upon exhibiting such skills. Living in a ‘between borders’ mind set, it is commonsensical to see more than one dimension as an asset to for example, problem solving. She points out that the bilingual research field has ample documentation of such cases. She agrees with the Vygotskian cognitive view and the Wittgensteinian viewpoint of the centrality of language for thoughts. This reaches back to her childhood when as a Finnish migrant primary school pupil in Sweden she was sometimes asked ‘what this or that was called in Finnish’. A problem arose when encountering the Finnish prepositions (such as ‘on’, ‘in’, and ‘at’). What she at that age could not define in Finnish grammatical terms, was what she knew intuitively, namely that the Finnish language in all its complexity, has 15 noun cases and that prepositions are suffixes added to the endings of words, unto nouns as it were. She states that her bilingual language ability became a cognitive tool that allowed her to compare meanings between what she knew intuitively and what she wanted friends to know about her mother tongue. It is from the realization of the role of language that bilingual kids learn to manipulate the world around them, language gives access to other worlds, and is a great sharing vehicle for comparing diverse experiences. So she has been working from that position, always trying to see the added value in diversity, in difference of opinion. This does not always suit the climate of the pedagogical space, especially if it is based on monocultural and elitist values that base their existence on absolute truth values of singular meanings. Voicing intercultural views might then incorrectly be interpreted as political housekeeping at a micro-cultural level. The additional cognitive tools of bilinguals can by some monocultural teachers be experienced as threatening of their



Chapter 10.╇ Negotiating intercultural academic careers 

intellectual subject competencies, and the injections made by well-meaning bilingual students might mistakenly be taken as sabotaging the learning event. Thus, intercultural pedagogy brings to the fore the knowledge of the additive educational measures that can be implemented to enrich rather than thwart the quality of deeper learning. The Finnish indigenous cultural conventions were partly a point of reference as she learnt to make sense of social boundaries in her formative years living in mainstream society. The human defined factors that sanctioned the formation of certain boundaries and in particular ways were at times at complete opposites among the Sami and the Finns. One such example is the communicative convention of eye contact, where e.g. in the north not looking straight into the eyes of elders for prolonged conversational periods was the norm. This in the south was a complete contrast, where not looking one’s elders in the eyes while talking signified communicative untrustworthiness, such as lying. Throughout her childhood years she learned to negotiate such communicative rules through trial and error and the quickest and most salient ways of bringing conversations to their pragmatic end by adapting to the in-situ conventions that prevailed. She has subsequently pursued epistemologies that highlight situated cognition as powerful sense making machinery that lends itself to describing interaction in cultural, linguistic and physical border regions. Her research has brought her to the conclusion that in social encounters sense making between individuals is predicated upon the immediate cultural demands of the situation at hand, where these demands vary greatly between people, places and taken – for-granted communicative patterns, but also on personal biographies. Thus, she is against the principles of a static identity, and her research proves that identity cannot be measured numerically or quantitatively, as it is accomplished in and through the practices that shape experience, which are boundless and ever evolving. She rather believes that social identity is an artificial communicative category that helps distinguish our practices and experiences. Nevertheless, she believes that we have a true personal identity in a deeper sense, but the analysis of such should be approached very carefully. But the exploration of identity as a professional sense making category is an interesting one, she continues. This is best illustrated by cultural anecdotal evidence in the sense that difference makes us aware of our own affiliations. When working in monocultural and monolingual work environments, such as some of the academic communities she recounts having been a member of in Australian higher education (which is documented as predominantly white, middle class culture), she has identified herself as merely one among other fellow academics: a researcher, a writer, and a teacher. The self-defined identity in such a work context has been defined publically, that is, ‘an academic’. She maintains that her ethnicity

 Meeri Hellstén & Katrin Goldstein-Kyaga

as a ‘Finn’, a fellow ‘Sami’, or indeed a ‘Scandinavian’, has not been a salient identity marker to herself in such official work contexts. Rather, she has acted out her professional practice out of a more or less ethnicity-free identity. She has therefore found herself particularly astounded by (Australian) peer comments that have drawn attention to her favouring this or that opinion ‘because she is Finnish’. Hence, learning to deal with common stereotypical behaviours even among her highly educated peers, has been part of her professional narrative. She recounts the key people to whom she owes her professional career as jointly sharing a passion for the ‘human-ness’ and generation of knowledge through intercultural encounters. They have in common an interest in seeing beyond, for example, the boundaries created by second language barriers, and have been able to value underlying qualities in thinking and action. Some examples are teachers who allowed her to shine amidst great intercultural transitions challenges and ‘bosses’ who encouraged brave and innovative initiatives of new strategies. There were mentors who ‘allowed you to be free’ which came into expression in their lack of showing their judgments, and who enjoyed working within the narrowness of limitations that any new learning situation can house at times. 4.â•… Analysis of story 1 A re-reading of Story 1 makes evident the consideration that the narrator’s whole life history is relevant for developing an understanding of her professional identity as a senior lecturer. Her childhood experiences of transition between cultures, social contexts and later the migration to other countries has in certain ways informed her choice of research area and the ontological interpretation of the data she collects. She is open and curious to cultural encounters and she appreciates mentors and peers who are able to see beyond cultural boundaries. It is possible to discern various events in a chain which contributed to the development of her unique professional identity. These encompass both smaller and sizeable events: a teacher who ‘let her shine’, the long history of Finnish-Sami relations, and her taking part in the stream of Finnish emigrants who left the country during the 1960s to 1970s. She was part of and acted within a repertoire of narratives that all contributed to her special life history. Another narrative was the academic concepts such as the Vygotskian cognitive view that she integrated and interpreted from her personal cultural, ethnic and social perspective. Thus, not merely did she tell the story of her personal and academic life, but she interpreted her life in the process of creating the narrative. Not merely did she tell a story, but this story was told in a specific nuance due to the interplay with the narrator of ‘Story 2’ and her reaction to that story. Moreover, the story was told to suit the requirements of this



Chapter 10.╇ Negotiating intercultural academic careers 

collection as in order to fit in with the theme of the book certain elements of her life were highlighted whereas others were left untold. As mentioned above, narrative that is seen as something deeper, i.e. locating oneself in a repertoire of emplotted stories, rather than simply telling a story has been termed ‘ontological narrative’ by Somers and Gibson (1994). The latter introduce four dimensions of narrativity: ontological, public, conceptual and metanarrativity. Whereas the ontological narrative is used to define who we are, the public narratives are attached to cultural and institutional formations larger than the single individual. In this case it is for example the story of her family with a strong sense of integrity and a virtue of determination through effort. The Sami, Finnish, Swedish and Australian cultural contexts are also public narratives. Her interpretation of subjects within the area of international education is influenced by theories and concepts within her academic field, which is part of conceptual narrativity. Moreover, she acts within in an even larger narrative, a metanarrative, of contemporary society with its accelerating streams of migrations and intensification of global communication. Lastly, our fifth dimension of intercultural narrative is accomplished by the story’s many disjunctive spaces, in that of the transition between the national, geographical, and personal boundaries inherent in Story 1. 5.â•… Recounting the second narrative Our second senior academic begins her talk by providing a chronological account of her academic achievements. Currently holding a professorship in education, she started off in social anthropology specializing in sociology and Indology. She started educational research in 1977 and has explored the Indian concept of ‘purity’ and rituals of purity among the Gypsies. Her research focused on immigrants and Gypsies (from various countries) in Swedish labour market training, (including literacy training). A main concern of the authorities at that time was a public assumption of a lack of interest in education and work among the Gypsies. The official explanation given was that the ‘Gypsies lack tradition in education’. This was an explanation that she never accepted. Rather she wanted to find out what hindrances and positive parts there were that influence the urge to achieve an education. While in India, she had come in contact with Tibetan refugees and had been surprised to find that the Tibetan refugees had been able to build up an educational system in a very short time in spite of the fact they had come as refugees to one of the poorest countries in the world and in spite of the fact that most of the refugees were illiterate peasants and nomads. This seemed to contradict her experiences

 Meeri Hellstén & Katrin Goldstein-Kyaga

of research about the training for Gypsies. The Tibetan peasants and nomads had little tradition of education, so what was the difference? Her research conclusion was that the ethnic context of a refugee group and their sense of control over educational institutions play an important part in the educational success of students. These findings influenced her to continue her teaching in and research on ethnicity, migration and learning. The transmission of the Tibetan culture of nonviolence from the older to the younger generation in the family and at school became a focus of research. One conclusion was that the culture of nonviolence had become a part of the identity of many refugees and this was partly connected to their worship and identification with their leader the Dalai Lama. Another research project dealt with relationships between globalization and identity among young people in multicultural contexts in Sweden that emanated in a new concept of a third identity which is neither the identity of the host population nor the identity of the parents. She speaks about the element of surprise as influencing her professional and personal development. For example, the ‘surprise’ in the difference regarding education in the situation between Gypsies and Tibetan refugees. This is connected to her personal childhood experiences of growing up in a family with a father who had to escape from Nazi Germany, and thus not being allowed to continue his education. Another aspect influencing her development has been the element of negative emotions, for example, in how students or interviewees show anger or hurt in relation to her interviewing or lecturing. She reconciles that such reactions have been connected to students’ own identity work. For example, when discussing culture, ethnicity and identity with youngsters of Syrian Christian origin in Sweden and in talk about how both Western and Eastern cultural traits may have influenced their way of being, she asked whether they considered themselves Western or Eastern. One girl angrily answered that outsiders always tried to categorize Syrian Christians. She exclaimed: “Damn it, I am a human being!” Her utterance was one of the reasons that she and her colleague later coined the term a third identity. She admits that this term is of course also a way of categorizing, but found it useful in analyzing the ‘in-between-area’. Students have given similar emotional responses at her lectures, when talking about ethnicity and identity. A girl having been adopted from India, angrily said that she always had to talk about India despite never having been there. However, positive emotional responses to our research about identity have also influenced her thinking. Many interviewees have liked being interviewed because it has given them the opportunity to reflect about their life and identity. Some young people have told her and fellow researchers that they recognize a lot about what has been



Chapter 10.╇ Negotiating intercultural academic careers 

written in themselves, which has helped them to better understand themselves. For one foreign adopted girl it almost seemed like a relieving matter of ‘life and death’ being able to realise that she could be something “third”, feeling like a Swede but being imprisoned in her Asian looking body. All these emotional reactions, whether positive or negative have been important to understand the situation of many students. Being ashamed of an ill-prepared utterance or happy about unintentionally having helped a girl in an ‘existential crisis’ is a powerful means for developing an academic identity. Simply having studied an academic text would not have given the same “aha”-experience. The narrative tells of contextual influences on academic identity development and especially of the role that language has played in intercultural encounters. She has early personal and childhood recollections of interacting with people from different countries through her father’s refugee status in Sweden. She always had people from different countries visiting or living with her family. Not being able to understand the language of most such people she met seemed to be a very natural thing. Having grown up in a culturally very mixed social environment has both given her personal experiences and an interest in intercultural education and research. Also her travels especially in India for altogether two years, and whilst living mainly among Tibetan refugees, were also important for her personal life and professional career. The 35 year-long marriage to a Tibetan refugee and visits to his family in India of course also influence her personally and professionally. She recounts that having Buddhists, Jews and Christians as close family members forced her to think a lot about identity, interreligious dialogue and cross-cultural communication. As for most people, her family has played the most important role in supporting her professional career. She mentions her mother, who both inspired her to pursue her studies and scolded her if she was veering away from them. Due to family reasons, her mother had not been able to study. Instead, her mother helped her gain work at a teachers’ college and also later persuaded her to take up doctoral studies. Her husband is also mentioned as a mentor and has been very helpful as a “cultural guide” and helping her to gain access to the Tibetan society on a deeper level in her research on Tibet. The director at her previous work place was an inspiring but also a ‘hard’ mentor. He forced her to apply for research grants and threatened to ‘fire her’ if she would not succeed. This she tells, helped her to develop a good fund-raising ability. Her Ph.D. supervisors were important even if she says she mostly appreciated supervisors who let her work independently without attempting to direct her work. Also, a professor at a previous place of work provided great support during

 Meeri Hellstén & Katrin Goldstein-Kyaga

her 15 years of work there. There were also many colleagues and students who were very supportive, just as there were those who were a hindrance. 6.â•… Analysis of case Story 2 Overall, the narrative provides a rich picture of personal and professional interplays between an intercultural and multi-lingual work-life balance. Throughout the story the ontological narratives intertwine between ethnic and migration theories, keeping at the fore the histories of anti-Semitism, refugee movements and related modern day refugee ontologies, without which a full depiction of the narrative would be rather meagre. Inherent in the story are the cultural and social narratives that make up the public narrative outside of the personal, and which significantly shape the contours of her professionalization, career choices, and research interests. For example, the Tibetan ‘culture of non-violence’ is offered as a publicly available epistemology that grounds the foundations of her research rationale on the topic of developing refugee identities. The conceptual narrative is composed of the personal experiences closest to emotionally charged concepts such as family and kinship. The pursuit of education, professional skills and work is conceptually narrated and attributed to family members, concurrently external to the self, but through their connection to intimate emotional relationships, for example in the mention of ‘husband as cultural guide’, determining access to deeper level research on Tibet. Religion is provided as a central conceptual narrative from which the formation of her professional identity is shaped. Religion is here also a meta-narrative without which her mention about learning cross-cultural communication, identity and interreligious dialogue would not be available. Thus, the narrative aligns religious denominational categories (Buddhists, Jews and Christians) with intimate familial ones (‘close family members’) in being the ‘force’ that enabled personal development through emotional reflection. This can be analysed in clear contrast to the narration about mentors and their role in shaping her professional experiences in which abilities gained at work are aligned to public narratives as opposed to conceptual ones. The meta-narrative of the chase on research funding currently well-known to many academics, is also available in her story about the ‘director’ who ‘forced her to apply for research grants and threatened ‘to ‘fire her’ if she would not succeed. As in Story 1, this narrative gives only a selection of many possible professional stories, chosen for the specific purpose of an invited chapter in a collection with a specific focus on narrative inquiry. The story is not complete and within it are further tellable tales determined by the deeper meta-narratives shared with the narrator herself.



Chapter 10.╇ Negotiating intercultural academic careers 

7.â•… Summary The common readings in the above two narratives can be summarised in their alignment with our fifth dimension of analyses, or intercultural narratives. The senior lecturers are both self-defined and are concurrently other-defined by their affiliations with various social, cultural and ethnic life events which have been negotiated in disjunctive spaces. It is in a relational position to contrasting ontologies, public-, conceptual-, and meta-knowledges, that they come to know and act upon their task at hand. The life stories that emerge and upon which their daily practices are assembled, share in common their awareness of disjunctive issues such as the social and political boundaries within which their careers have become enforced. The daily workings-through of significant transformations through either inter-language or (inter-) cultural diversification events culminate in a sense making process that accomplishes the core upon which these two academics negotiate their professional and personal opportunities, including their family biographies. The intercultural narrative construction is here seen at work in constructing the everyday events and belief systems of coming to know the perimeters and inner machinery of their contemporary professional and personal encounters. These are importantly, always and everywhere negotiated from the ontological grounding of the comparative, international and intercultural knowledge pillars of their varied life experiences. 8.â•… Utilizing narratives as intercultural pedagogy At this point we wish to turn our discussion to the pedagogical vantage points offered by narrative inquiry. As we realise the possible meanings available from the stories, we offer the opportunity for academics to think about and experiment with the use of narratives as a teaching tool. The use of narratives provides an influential resource for constructing meaningful learning opportunities and furthering learning pathways especially in the context of higher education. However, the method requires some prior exploration of the self, and at least openness towards some adverse reactions that the use of narratives for teaching may provoke. We take heart in the eminent theorising of Bruner (1996), who stated that teaching in general is made up of stories and storytelling. He famously claimed that teachers1 make good story tellers, and pointed out the cognitive advantages embedded within the utilization of new learning materials into a well-known

.â•… We use the term ‘teachers’ and ‘teaching’ generally to include academic and professional learning situations.

 Meeri Hellstén & Katrin Goldstein-Kyaga

narrative. Story telling in the classroom is a great motivator for learning, as the sequential order of tellings raise both curiosity and interest in discovery of what lies ahead. Unfortunately, only a modest amount of university teaching is provided in this entertaining but effective way. In this final section then, we offer two pedagogical examples that have seen the benefit of time, evaluation and improvement in methods and forms of delivery. The first example for using narratives as a pedagogical tool is provided by the senior academic in Story 2. The life history narrative is utilized in teaching global identity construction at undergraduate levels. The students attend theory-based lectures about identity, globalization and methodological lectures and seminars teaching the analyzes of life histories. The lecturer often uses his or her own life history as a base upon which the theory and methodology are based. This models an example of openness and inclusivity about narrating about the self. Students are then given ample opportunity to reflect on their learned content and vent any emotional responses the content might invite. At this stage it is important that teachers remain reciprocal in sharing experiences and reactions. The written assessment task consists of individual interviews and subsequent analyzes applying the theories and methods introduced. All the interviews are collated, presented and discussed during a full day workshop and the written papers are submitted to a public online forum for comments and subsequent summative assessment. Another pedagogical example of using narratives in teaching is provided by the senior academic presented in Story 1. In a curriculum task, postgraduate students of education, studying intercultural and international pedagogy are given the assignment of exploring new theoretical concepts by way of personally exploring their own development of key concepts, such as ‘ethnicity’, or ‘culture’, and by relating it to the main theories introduced in the subject. Tracking one’s development of ethnicity or cultural awareness can at times feel confronting. Students are therefore offered the opportunity of seeking emotional support in consultations with teachers during the analytic phases of writing. Teachers on the course have been given instruction to lead the assignment work by giving examples from their own life experiences. The teacher examples that students have been provided with have all required honesty and trust, especially when linked to sensitive social, cultural or political retellings. The method of linking new academic theories and concepts with personal and familiar life narratives has in the subsequent subject evaluations been rated as beneficial for learning. It has motivated personal engagement with the learning content aligning learning objectives with subject content through attainment of deeper knowledge. Over the years the curriculum tasks have been positively welcomed by students, by way of the benefit they provide in the opportunity to reflect and conceptualize theoretical implications



Chapter 10.╇ Negotiating intercultural academic careers 

of real life events. Needless to say, there are inherent opportunities for reflective work provided by the task also for teaching staff to contemplate on their work-life balances, and the agency of culture and ethnicity in their professional collective life histories. 9.â•… Conclusion Self-reflective professional work is slowly making a comeback into academic literature. Much of this work takes a narrative approach, such as is evident in the current collection of chapters in this volume. Whether it be in response to recent economic changes in higher education, or a rekindled interest in epistemologies in human sciences, narrative inquiry methods are chosen as pedagogical alternatives in many teaching floors around the world. In this chapter we have attempted to highlight the importance of integrating narrativity that is inclusive of all participants in the teaching room, including the teacher themselves. Narratives such as the ones presented in our two case studies do not emerge by themselves, but require systematic and continual focus, the bold willingness to engage in self-reflective work, and the courage to disclose such work to the community of scholars.

References Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goldstein-Kyaga, K., & Borgström, M. (2009). Den tredje identiteten. Ungdomar och deras familjer I det mångkulturella, globala rummet. (The third identity: Young and their families in diverse, global space). Huddinge: Södertörn Academic Studies. Hellstén, M., & Reid, A. (Eds.). (2008). Researching international pedagogies: Sustainable practice for teaching and learning in higher education. Dordrecht: Springer. Lundegård, I., & Wickman, P.-O. (2009). Identity transformation in education for sustainable development: A question of location. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 53(5), 461–479. Ninnes, P., & Hellstén, M. (2005) (Eds.). Internationalizing higher education: Critical perspectives on pedagogy and policy. Dordrecht: Springer. Somers, M., & Gibson, G.D. (1994). Reclaiming the epistemological ‘other’: Narrative and the social constitution of identity. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Social theory and the politics of identity (pp. 37–99). Oxford: Blackwell. Schön, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York NY: Basic Books. Trahar, S. (2008). Close encounters of the cultural kind. In M. Hellstén & A. Reid (Eds.), Researching international Pedagogies: Sustainable practice for teaching and learning in higher education (pp. 45–64). Dordrecht: Springer.

Contributors Molly Andrews is Professor of Sociology, and Co-director of the Centre for Narrative Research (www.uel.ac.uk/cnr/index.htm) at the University of East London, in London, England. Her research interests include the psychological basis of political commitment, psychological challenges posed by societies in transition to democracy, patriotism, conversations between generations, gender and aging, and counter-narratives. Judith Barak is a teacher educator and former head of the ACE program at the Kaye Academic College of Education, Beer Sheva, Israel; Currently Head of the Graduate School of Education at Kaye College. Her narrative research focuses on understanding collaborative learning environments and their interrelations to professional development processes. D. Jean Clandinin is Professor and Director, Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development, University of Alberta. A former teacher, counsellor, and psychologist, she co-authored with F. Michael Connelly several books including Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative! Research. Jean edited the Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a Methodology (Sage 2007). Ariela Gidron is a teacher educator in the ACE program and at the graduate school of Education – Kaye Academic College of Education, Beer Sheva. Israel; academic editor of the MOFET Publishing House; narrative researcher with interests in story telling, thinking with metaphors and collaborative self study of teacher educators. Katrin Goldstein-Kyaga is Professor in Education at Södertörn University in Stockholm. Her doctoral thesis The Tibetans – School for Survival or Submission was based on comparative research in Tibet, India and Switzerland. She has also conducted research concerning education and labour market issues in relation to migration, ethnicity and refugees, including, an investigation about literacy training among the Roma in Sweden. Meeri Hellstén is Associate Professor in Education at Södertörn University in Stockholm, and honorary associate at the School of Education, Macquarie University, Australia where she previously held a senior lectureship. For the past

 Learning and Teaching Narrative Inquiry

20 years Meeri’s research has focused on investigating the pedagogical intersections between language, identity and culture in diverse teaching and learning contexts internationally. Janice Huber has co-authored several publications on narrative inquiry including two books, Composing Diverse Identities: Narrative Inquiries into the Interwoven Lives of Children and Teachers (2006) and Places of Curriculum Making: Narrative Inquiries into Children’↜s Lives in Motion (2011). She was the 2006 recipient of the Outstanding Narrative and Research Early Career Award. Verónica Larrain is associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning and Educational Organization at the University of Barcelona, Spain. She is also member of ESBRINA, a Catalonian consolidate research group dedicated to the study of the conditions and current changes in education. Her Phd was a narrative research about the experiences of subjection in the research relationship. Lau Chun Kwok is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction of the Hong Kong Institute of Education. He received his education in Hong Kong and Canada. His research interests involve narrative knowledge, cross-cultural experience, and teachers’ personal and professional development. Yi Li is currently an Assistant Professor in the area of Second Language Education in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, Faculty of Education, University of Manitoba. Her research interests include teaching English as an additional language, teacher education and development, international education, narrative inquiry, and hope. Ruth Mansur is a teacher educator, ACE Program, Kaye Academic College of Education, Beer Sheva, Israel; Head of special programs at Kaye College; Came to the field from Philosophy of social sciences and Ethics; Her research interests include relation between culture and learning; role of ethnography in education; collaborative learning/teaching. JoAnn Phillion is Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Purdue University, Indiana, USA. She uses narrative inquiry in teaching graduate courses in multicultural education and dissertation research, and in an undergraduate course in preservice teacher development. Her research interests are in narrative inquiry in immigrant student education, multicultural education, and teacher education.



Contributors 

Malcolm Reed is a Senior Lecturer in Education in the Graduate school of Education, University of Bristol, where he coordinates the EdD Narrative Inquiry pathway and teaches on the Post-Graduate Certificate in Education for English teachers. Malcolm spent his earlier career teaching in inner London and his research interests have grown out of the radical situations in which he taught. Jane Speedy is Reader in Qualitative Inquiry, Graduate School of Education (GSoE), University of Bristol, where she teaches narrative inquiry and the ‘new’ ethnographies. Jane is deputy director of research (GSoE) and co-coordinator of the research Centre for Narrative Inquiry and Transformative Learning (CeNTRraL). She spent her earlier career in school teaching and counselling before moving into higher education and is committed to promoting the profile of practitioner inquiry as scholarly activity. Corinne Squire is professor of social sciences and codirector of the Centre for Narrative Research at UEL. Her research interests are in HIV and citizenship; popular culture and subjectivity, and narrative theory and methods. Among recent publications are HIV Technologies in International Perspective (ed. with Mark Davis, Palgrave 2010); Doing Narrative Research (ed. with Molly Andrews and Maria Tamboukou, Sage 2008) and HIV in South Africa (Routledge 2007). Pam Steeves, M.Ed., Ph.D. is an Assistant Adjunct Professor with the Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development. She is co-author of a number of book chapters and articles on narrative inquiry as well co-author of Composing Diverse Identities: Narrative Inquiries into the Interwoven Lives of Children and Teachers (2006.) Maria Tamboukou is Co-director of the Centre of Narrative Research, at the University of East London. Her research interests and publications are in auto/ biographical narratives, feminist theories, and foucauldian and deleuzian analytics. Recent publications include the monographs In the Fold between Power and Desire: Women Artists’ Narratives (2010), Nomadic Narratives: Gwen John’↜s Letters and Paintings (2010) and Visual Narratives, Carrington’↜s letters, drawings and paintings. (2010) Sheila Trahar is Senior Lecturer, Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol where she coordinates the Master of Education (MEd) programme taught in Hong Kong. Her teaching focuses on research methodology and academic practices in the global university. Research interests centre on inclusivity in

 Learning and Teaching Narrative Inquiry

higher education and exploration of the ways in which narrative and autoethnography can be used to research academic experiences in contexts that are increasingly diverse. Bobbie Turniansky, a teacher educator in the ACE program at the Kaye Academic College of Education in Beer Sheva, Israel, came to the field of teacher education from organizational psychology. Her research interests include organizational culture, organizational change, organizational and team learning and the professional development of teacher educators. Smadar Tuval, head of the ACE program and teacher in the graduate program for school counselors at the Kaye Academic College of Education in Beer Sheva, Israel has a background in school counseling. Research interests: narrative research and self-study in a collaborative milieu; social justice in the education system. Yuxiang Wang graduated with a doctorate from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Purdue University, Indiana, USA, in 2010. His research interests are in multicultural education, teacher education, and narrative inquiry. He uses narrative inquiry in exploring Hui minority students’ cultural recognition and identity construction in eastern P.R. China. Yu Wai Ming is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction of the Hong Kong Institute of Education. She has been actively involved in different funded research projects and her publications cover areas including narrative inquiry, teacher professional development, curriculum and assessment where her passion lies.

Index

A Artful╇ 53–54, 107–109, 111, 113–117, 120 Arts-based╇ 9, 109–110, 112 Australia╇ 161–162 Autobiography╇ 17, 27, 39, 118 Auto-ethnography╇ 109, 115–117 B Becoming╇ 27–28, 33, 39, 45 Bumping up╇ 9, 12, 111 C Chinese community╇ 7, 69, 72–73, 79, 82 see also Mainland China Coherence╇ 6, 10, 22, 26–28, 50, 54, 125, 130, 132–135, 138 Collaborative╇ 5, 35, 51, 53–54, 66, 85, 90–91, 98, 102, 112, 141, 143, 145 Collective╇ 113, 117, 119, 171 Collective biography╇ 109, 115 Counterstory╇ 40 Critical╇ 4, 8, 11, 63–64, 85–88, 96, 101–103, 107, 111, 113–114, 116, 141–142, 150–151, 154 see also Critical multicultural theory Critical multicultural theory╇ 86 Critical perspectives╇ 85–86 Culture╇ 9–11, 55–58, 65, 87–90, 94–100, 117, 132–133, 147, 162–163, 166, 168, 170–171 see also cultural cultural background cultural identity Cultural╇ 11–12, 23–24, 28, 30, 33–34, 43, 54–57, 66–67, 85–90, 92, 94, 96, 99, 101–103, 110–111, 117, 127, 141–142, 146, 149, 157–158, 160–170

Cultural background╇ 8, 57, 67, 68, 86, 90, 101 Cultural identity╇ 56–57 Cumulative╇ 114, 116, 120 D Deconstruction╇ 125, 137 Deweyan theory of experience╇ 33 see also Dewey’s educational philosophy Dewey’s educational philosophy╇ 54, 74 Dialogue╇ 22, 40, 42–45, 48, 58–59, 85, 87–88, 101–103, 111–113, 142, 145, 147, 167–168 Dialogic/performance analysis╇ 11, 142–143, 145, 148, 151, 155 Diaries╇ 4, 17, 25–27, 71 Doctoral research training╇ 143 E Emplotment╇ 10, 133 Ethical know-how╇ 113–114 Ethnography╇ 80, 126 Evocative(ly)╇ 114–115 F Fictionalised╇ 5, 114–115, 118, 147 Field texts╇ 50, 118 Finland╇ 12, 161–162 G Gypsies╇ 165–166 H Higher education╇ 5–7, 11, 67, 109, 144, 151, 154, 157–159, 163, 169, 171 Hong Kong╇ 3, 7–8, 69, 72–74, 76, 78–82, 89

Hui (Muslim) students╇ 86, 89–93, 95–100, 102–103 I Identity╇ 4, 10, 12, 18–19, 23, 37, 49 - 50, 54–59, 63, 89–92, 94–95, 97–99, 109, 111, 113, 116, 128–138, 141–142, 152, 157, 159, 161, 163–164, 166–168, 170 Identity forming experience╇ 128–131, 134, 136–137 Imagination╇ 39, 50, 109, 118 Inclusivity╇ 170 Institutional change╇ 35 Intercultural pedagogy╇ 163, 169 see also pedagogy Interdisciplinary╇ 108 Interpretation╇ 10, 54, 72, 92–93, 95, 98–100, 102, 111, 126, 157, 164–165 Interview╇ 4, 17, 20–21, 24, 71, 100, 113, 143–144 Intra-action╇ 26 Israel╇ 5, 54 L Language╇ 69–70, 72–73, 89–90, 93–99, 111, 115, 117, 127, 132, 137, 149, 160–162, 164, 167, 169 Learning community╇ 58, 63, 65–66, 109 Learning texts╇ 55, 58, 62 Letters╇ 4, 25–27 Liminal╇ 116, 120 Lines of flight╇ 27, 29 Literary╇ 27, 97, 112, 118, 126 M Mainland China╇ 7, 69–73, 81 Memory╇ 22, 28, 36, 38, 47, 50, 117

 Index Messy╇ 16, 22, 107, 116, 119–120, 135 Mindfulness╇ 5, 113–114, 118 Multicultural and crosscultural narrative inquiry╇ 85–86, 88–90 Multicultural education╇ 86–87, 89, 91, 97–99, 101–102 N Narrative analysis╇ 21, 27, 148, 157 see also narrative constructionist research narrative inquirer narrative phenomena narrative therapy Narrative constructionist research╇ 10, 125 Narrative inquirer╇ 9, 33–34, 38, 48–49, 85, 115, 120, 125, 127–130, 135–138, 145 Narrative phenomena╇ 25–26 Narrative therapy╇ 2, 11, 112, 114, 144–145 Nomadic inquiry╇ 108 O Ontological commitment╇ 34 Other╇ 10, 27, 56, 91, 130, 136–138, 142 Othering╇ 116 P Pedagogy╇ 9, 30, 110, 146, 163, 169–170 see also intercultural pedagogy Performativity╇ 9, 109, 116, 137 Place╇ 33–34, 37–39, 44–45, 50, 56–57 Poetic(s)╇ 111–113, 115, 117, 143, 151 Positioning╇ 10, 23–24, 47, 93, 103, 111, 115, 133, 144 Postcolonial theory╇ 97, 99, 101 Power relations╇ 86, 88, 98, 116, 126 Professional development╇ 6–7, 37, 62, 67, 69, 71, 73–76, 78, 82, 158–159

Professional life stories╇ 157 R Reflecting team╇ 1, 11, 141–142, 144–147, 150–156 Reflexive(ly)╇ 108, 112–113, 117, 119–120, 129 see also reflexivity Reflexivity╇ 114–115, 138 Relational╇ 33–35, 38, 40, 44, 107, 110, 118–120, 127–128, 138, 160, 169 Relationship╇ 10, 15, 27, 75, 78, 87, 90, 101, 127–131, 138–139, 160 Representation╇ 74–75, 85–86, 89–90, 99–103, 116, 135, 137–138 See also Social representation Visual representation Research methodology╇ 2, 8, 10, 72, 74–75, 126, 138, 143 see also Doctoral research training Safe space╇ 66–67 Sami╇ 163–165 Self-study╇ 55, 62–63, 65–66, 157–158, 161 Silence╇ 37, 77, 108–109, 120 Slippages╇ 119 Small stories╇ 10, 24, 128, 130, 132, 134 Social╇ 35, 39, 42–43, 47, 49–50, 141–142 See also social change social context social constructionism social identities social inquiry social justice social representation Social change╇ 22–23 Social context╇ 22-23, 54, 56, 79, 129-130 Social constructionism╇ 145 Social identities╇ 50, 159 Social inquiry╇ 109, 111-112 Social justice╇ 8, 85–88, 101 Social representation╇ 4, 22

Sociality╇ 5, 33–34, 37, 44 Space╇ 40, 58, 66–67, 79–80, 82, 98, 110, 116–120, 138, 160, 162 Storyteller╇ 19, 40, 113, 128–131, 135–139 see also small stories storytelling Story telling╇ 19, 40 Sweden╇ 11–12, 161–162, 166–167 T Taiwan╇ 7, 69–73, 81, 85 Teacher education╇ 6, 35, 41, 53–54, 56, 67, 69, 73–74, 79, 82, 97 see also teacher knowledge teaching strategy Teacher knowledge╇ 76, 82 Teaching strategy╇ 7, 69, 73, 78–79, 82 Temporality╇ 5, 33–34, 37, 39, 44, 50 Tension╇ 17, 28, 38, 45, 50, 131, 134 Thinking narratively╇ 38, 44 Three dimensional narrative inquiry space╇ 33–36, 44–45 Three dimensions╇ 110, 116 Tibet╇ 12, 167–168 Time╇ 27, 29, 109 Timescapes╇ 117–118 V Visual representation╇ 111 W Way of thinking╇ 34, 79–80 Wisdom of practice╇ 53, 55, 58–59, 62, 64–65 Work-life balances╇ 171 Works in progress╇ 5, 38, 40–45, 48, 51 Writing╇ 6, 9–10, 21, 27, 35, 39, 57, 59–60, 64, 73–74, 88, 92, 96, 108, 111, 113, 115–118, 125, 132–133, 135 Written/visual account╇ 131