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Debbie Pushor
University of Saskatchewan
Narrative inquiry is a methodology that frequently appeals to teachers and teacher educators.
However, this appeal and sense of comfort has advantages and disadvantages. Some assume narrative inquiries will be easy to design, live out, and represent in storied formats in journals, dissertations, or books. For the authors, though, narrative inquiry is much more than the telling of stories.
There are complexities surrounding all phases of a narrative inquiry and, in this article, the authors
pay particular attention to thinking about the design of narrative inquiries that focus on teachers
and teacher educators own practices. They outline three commonplaces and eight design elements for
consideration in narrative inquiry. They illustrate these elements using recently completed narrative
inquiries. In this way, the authors show the complex dimensions of narrative inquiry, a kind of
inquiry that requires particular kinds of wakefulness.
Authors Note: We would like to acknowledge the reviewers (albeit anonymous) contribution to deepening and enriching this conversation.
Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 58, No. 1, January/February 2007 21-35
DOI: 10.1177/0022487106296218
2007 by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education
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2007 American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
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which humans, individually and socially, lead storied lives. People shape their daily lives by stories of
who they and others are and as they interpret their
past in terms of these stories. Story, in the current
idiom, is a portal through which a person enters the
world and by which their experience of the world is
interpreted and made personally meaningful.
Viewed this way, narrative is the phenomenon studied in inquiry. Narrative inquiry, the study of experience as story, then, is first and foremost a way of
thinking about experience. Narrative inquiry as a
methodology entails a view of the phenomenon. To
use narrative inquiry methodology is to adopt a particular narrative view of experience as phenomena
under study. (p. 477)
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As this excerpt illustrates, in telling and retelling this storyand othersfrom several perspectives, Murray Orr framed her phenomenon
narratively as how students tell and retell their
stories to live by within the context of their
positioning on school landscapes. This narrative
view of the phenomenon of identity making
allowed her to attend to people, places, and
events as in process. As a teacher educator,
Murray Orrs inquiry into this phenomenon
continues to shape her practice, as she sees the
importance of awakening teachers to childrens
composing of their stories to live by in school.
For Pushor, it was out of telling and retelling
stories of her experiences of her sons entry into
the school system that she began to develop a
narrative view of her inquiry phenomenon. In
telling her stories, in listening to stories told to
her in response, and in listening to how others
made sense of her experiences, Pushor moved
backward and forward in time, inward and outward between the personal and social, and to
the place of many school landscapes. In this
way, she came to understand her phenomenon
narratively and to name it as the positioning of
parents in relation to school landscapes. Just as
Murray Orrs inquiry into her phenomenon
continues to shape her practice as a teacher educator, so too does Pushors. As attention to
parents voice and place on school landscapes is
virtually absent in teacher education programs,
Pushors attention to the positioning of parents
is woven through the curriculum of her courses.
3. A third element is to consider and to
describe the particular methods used to study the
phenomenon. Narrative inquirers address this in
two ways. First, we engage in imaginatively
thinking about the chosen puzzle, along with
possible participants, as existing in an ever shifting space (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 481).
A first task, then, for narrative inquirers is to
think of their inquiry phenomenon, topic,
puzzle, and participants as occurring in a
multidimensioned, ever changing life space.
To plan a narrative inquiry is to plan to be self
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the importance of the relational in her conversations with children. Murray Orr described her
use of the commonplaces to structure the analysis in her research text and returned to the commonplaces throughout her research text, making
her use of this framework visible to the reader.
5. A fifth element is the positioning narrative
inquirers do as they position their studies in relation to other research on a particular phenomenon, to related programs of research, and to
research undertaken using different epistemological and ontological assumptions. This positioning is similar to what all researchers do in their
literature reviews. Sometimes, however, narrative inquirers act as if there is no need for positioning their work relative to other research.
Pushor and Murray Orr read in areas specific
to their inquiry puzzles. The conceptualization
of involvement, and the lack of challenge to this
conceptualization, troubled Pushor when she
read in the literature of parent involvement.
Needing another literature to help her think
about transforming school landscapes, she
turned to the research on teacher knowledge.
Murray Orr used Greenes conception of
seeing big and seeing small as a literature that
helped her consider how to create spaces in her
teacher education courses where attention to the
particularities of each person would enable preservice teachers to bring in their stories to live
by and, correspondingly, be awake to inviting
children to do the same. Similarly, Greenes
(1995) conception helped Pushor imagine paying particular attention to parents on school
landscapes and to awaken preservice teachers to
seeing parents big.
A second way of positioning is to see that,
for example, there are multiple programs of
research within each area. It is important for narrative inquirers to position their work in relation
to other programs of research. Conceptually,
Pushor and Murray Orr ground their narrative
inquiries in a Deweyan view of experience, a
view that acknowledges the embodiment of the
person in the world and that focuses on not only
the individuals experience but also on the social,
cultural, and institutional narratives in which
the individuals experiences are constituted,
shaped, expressed, and enacted.
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Although Pushor was no longer engaged regularly at her inquiry site when she wrote her
research text, and Murray Orr was returning
only every few months to hers, their participants
continued to live with them as they read and
reread field texts and wrote of their research
experiences. Each story they chose to tell, or
chose not to tell, each word they selected for the
retelling, or rejected for the retelling, they did
in their participants imagined presence. Pushor
and Murray Orr considered how participants
might read their words, how vulnerable they
were making them, and how their way of seeing
a story might align with, or differ from, their participants. Pushor and Murray Orr came to know
and care deeply for each individual engaged in
their narrative inquiries. Relationships developed, trust formed, experiences were shared,
stories were told, the ways lives became connected with one another evoked an ethic of
care (Noddings, 1992) well beyond the ethical
considerations called for in formal processes and
in signed commitments to protect participants
from harm.
Pushor negotiated her research texts with her
participants to ensure she re-presented their
voices and stories in resonant ways. In these
negotiations, she received responses that were
sometimes affirming and sometimes disrupting.
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