Journeys in Narrative Inquiry

The Selected Works of D. Jean Clandinin

D Jean Clandinin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000690552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Organized around a metaphor of an academic journey, D. Jean Clandinin offers published tracings of an unfolding journey over 40 years that, at its outset, appeared to focus only on questions of epistemology. However, the book illuminates how that apparent beginning focus shape-shifted to questions of methodology, ethics, ontology, and subsequently, political concerns.

Clandinin shows that, even at the outset, her research wonders were grounded in relational understandings of experience, understandings that were simultaneously ontological, methodological, epistemological and ethical. Jean's work is collaborative, an engagement alongside others and within the contexts in which they and she lived and worked, including those who were participants in the research. She continues to acknowledge that narrative inquiry changes people's ways of being in the world, and those changes have ethical significance. While what she and her colleagues now call relational ethics has always been central, recently her sense of ethics has become more explicitly political. She shows the development of ideas over time, beginning as she entered doctoral work and continuing through 2019 and onward.

Jean's work, centered on relational understandings of experience, highlights ethical dimensions, and has come to define narrative understandings for generations of researchers. This book will be an invaluable resource for researchers and graduate students, and professional researchers in both educational and healthcare settings.

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Section IV
Journeying with narrative ideas

Considerations of the ontological, methodological, ethical, and political

13
Narrative Inquiry

Both a view of, and a methodology for, studying experience

Introduction

It has been 13 years since Michael Connelly and I wrote Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research, and more than 23 years since we wrote the first article (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) that began to address our understandings of narrative inquiry as both a methodology and a way of understanding experience narratively. Michael Connelly and I began this work on narrative inquiry many years ago, in part because we were trying to give an account of teachers’ experiential knowledge. We wanted to find a way to build on what Dewey (1938) wrote of experience, and to use his ideas to think about teacher knowledge as knowledge that was personal, practical, shaped by, and expressed in, practice. Mark Johnson, in the early 1980s, turned our attention to how thinking narratively could help us do the work we were imagining.

In March 1983, we invited Mark Johnson to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto to spend time with us on a project focused on how we could understand policy implementation from the perspective of teachers when new policies were implemented at a school district level. We framed the study as a problem in understanding both teacher knowledge, and change in teacher knowledge. We situated it as a reconceptualization of knowledge utilization. We were well into the study in March 1983 when Mark arrived to talk with us. At the time I was struggling to find ways to represent the experiential knowledge of the two participants in my doctoral study. I was concerned that my analysis of what I was calling their images, part of their personal practical knowledge, had resulted in my taking away, or diminishing, the wholeness of their lives. I had, in a way, dissected them. Dissection had not been my intent. Mark talked with me at a local hotel bar after he worked with the research team for the day. As we talked, he suggested that I should read Alasdair MacIntyre’s book, After Virtue (1981). “Not the whole thing,” he said, “Just the chapter on narrative unity.” He wrote on the hotel note paper, “So say more about how you see knowledge as embodied, embedded in a culture, and based on narrative unity.”

With those words, he gave me a way forward to finishing my dissertation. I read the chapter and realized that what I was then calling interpretive accounts were ways to write of the two teachers in the study as people composing, and living, complex lives. I did not yet call these interpretive accounts narrative accounts. Looking back on my much marked-up copy of MacIntyre’s book I noted that I underlined the words “a concept of self whose unity resides in the unity of a narrative which links birth to life to death as narrative beginning to middle to end” (p. 191) and

it is because we all live out narratives in our lives and because we understand our own lives in terms of the narratives that the form of narrative is appropriate for understanding the actions of others. Stories are lived before they are told.

(p. 197)

While I marked many other lines, those lines were the introduction of the idea of narrative into the work with which Michael and I were engaged. We began to think narratively about the lives of the teacher participants, about the school, and about the school contexts in which we worked. However, our shift to thinking narratively about lives also brought us into thinking narratively about methodology, and the methods, we used for the study of lives. When we wrote our article for Educational Researcher (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990), some 7 years after the completion of my doctoral work (Clandinin, 1983), we made explicit our interest in narrative inquiry as a research methodology. While there were other ways of making the turn to narrative ways of thinking, our turn to narrative came through our interest in understanding experiential knowledge.

A sharp turn to narrative

Since that time there has been an explosion of interest in narrative inquiry. Narrative inquiry is a ubiquitous practice in that

human beings have lived out and told stories about that living for as long as we could talk. And then we have talked about the stories we tell for almost as long. These lived and told stories and the talk about the stories are one of the ways that we fill our world with meaning and enlist one another’s assistance in building lives and communities. What feels new is the emergence of narrative methodologies in the field of social science research.

(Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p. 35)

Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, research in the social sciences has taken a narrative turn to studying experience (Pinnegar & Daynes, 2007). While there is a history of narrative work within the traditions of narratology (the theory and study of narrative) and narrative research, it was in 1990 that we described this research methodology we were developing as narrative inquiry. While initially we wrote of narrative inquiry as both phenomenon and method, we quickly began to understand it was a research methodology. What was apparent was how interwoven narrative ways of thinking about phenomena are with narrative inquiry as research methodology. It was “the interweaving of narrative views of phenomena and narrative inquiry that marks the emerging field and that draws attention to the need for careful uses and distinctions of terms” (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p. 36).

What we saw as a need for careful attention to terms has led to debates within the emerging methodology. Reissman and Speedy (2007) pointed out that “narrative inquiry in the human sciences is a 20th century development; the field has ‘realist’, ‘postmodern’, and constructionist strands, and scholars and practitioners disagree on origin and precise definition” (p. 429). This diversity in the various ways that narrative inquiry is taken up both enriches, and troubles, those of us engaged in narrative inquiry. Without a clear sense of the epistemological and ontological commitments of those who work within the field, much is blurred.

Narrative has, for example, come to refer to almost anything that uses, for example, stories as data, narrative or story as representational form, narrative as content analysis, narrative as structure, and so forth. I had, for example, a well-known editor point out to me that s/he had found many references that I had omitted from a review manuscript on narrative inquiry. When I questioned him/her about what s/he had found, and that I had missed, it turned out that s/he had used the search term “narrative” alone and the search engine reported links to many articles with often tangential links to what we are calling narrative inquiry. What is apparent is that some forms of what is called narrative analysis such as thematic analysis, linguistic analysis, structural analysis, and, more recently, visual analysis, are used as methods within other qualitative research methodologies. While they are all grouped under a label of narrative analysis, what narrative refers to as a descriptor varies widely. Within the field of qualitative research, there are many analytic methods or forms of narrative analysis (Josselson & Lieblich, 1995; Josselson, Lieblich, & McAdams, 2003; Polkinghorne, 1988; Reissman, 2008). Stories or narratives are also used as data in other qualitative methodologies such as phenomenology and case study. Narratives or stories are used as representational forms for results or findings in various qualitative and quantitative methodologies. More recently narratives or stories are used in knowledge translation in health science, education, and other professional disciplines. Questions about just what each of us means by our use of the term narrative is becoming increasingly important.

Narrative inquiry, as its own methodology, has developed important terms and distinctions that have become more apparent and well-recognized as guiding what counts, or what fits, within the field of narrative inquiry or narrative research. There is now a well-established view of narrative inquiry as both methodology and phenomena (Clandinin, 2007).

Dewey’s theory of experience (1938) is most often cited as the philosophical underpinning of narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Dewey’s two criteria of experience – interaction and continuity enacted in situations – provide the grounding for attending to a narrative conception of experience through the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space with dimensions of temporality, place, and sociality. Paradigmatic and narrative knowing (Bruner, 1986), narrative structure and coherence of lives (Carr, 1986), concepts of continuity and improvisation as a response to the uncertainties in life and life contexts (Bateson, 1989; 1994), and narrative in life and teaching practice (Coles, 1989) also ground our understandings of experience as narratively composed. Drawing on all of these works, Clandinin and Rosiek (2007) point out,

Framed within this view of experience, the focus of narrative inquiry is not only on individuals’ experience but also on the social, cultural, and institutional narratives within which individuals’ experiences are constituted, shaped, expressed, and enacted. Narrative inquirers study the individual’s experience in the world, an experience that is storied both in the living and telling and that can be studied by listening, observing, living alongside another, and writing, and interpreting texts.

(pp. 42–43)

Rosiek and I make clear that narrative inquiry, working from a particular ontological and epistemological stance, is a way of understanding and inquiring into experience. It is nothing more and nothing less. Narrative inquiry is situated in relationships and in community, and attends to notions of expertise and knowing in relational and participatory ways.

Ontological and epistemological commitments

Since Michael Connelly and I first began to name our work as narrative inquiry, we have held firm to our view that narrative inquirers study experience. Our argument (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, 2006) for the development and use of narrative inquiry is inspired by a view of human experience in 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. 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 view of experience as phenomenon under study.

(Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 375)

We, and others, have, over many years and many studies, continued to work from a Deweyan-inspired understanding of experience. While we continued our work from that philosophical view of experience, we were always cognizant of other views of experience. In an attempt to make clear our philosophical stance, Jerry Rosiek and I laid our Deweyan-inspired understandings of experience alongside other

philosophical treatments of the word experience, from Aristotle’s dualistic metaphysics in which knowledge of particulars and universals were considered separately, to early empiricist atomistic conceptions of experience, Marxist conceptions of experience distorted by ideology, behaviorist notions of stimulus and response, and post-structuralist assertions that state our experience is the product of discursive practices.

(2007, p. 37)

By doing this, we were able to clarify “differences and affinities narrative inquiry has with other areas of scholarship” (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p. 37). Our purpose was to make visible the distinctions among narrative inquiry and other methodologies so that scholars could understand our project as narrative inquirers as distinct from the work of those grounded in other views of experience. While that is not my main purpose here, I pull forward some of those distinctions in order to remind readers of what grounds our work as narrative inquirers.

As we contrasted the underlying view of experience held by narrative inquirers with those held by researchers working from other views of experience, Rosiek and I outlined Dewey’s conception, noting that “It does not refer to some precognitive, precultural ground on which our conceptions of the world rest. Instead, it is a changing stream that is characterized by continuous interaction of human thought with our personal, social, and material environment” (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p. 39). Drawing on Dewey’s words

In an experience, things and events belonging to the world, physical and social, are transformed through the human context they enter, while the live creature is changed and developed through its intercourse with things previously external to it.

(as cited in Boydston, 1981, p. 251)

We argued (Clandinin and Rosiek, 2007) argued that

Dewey’s ontology is not transcendental, it is transactional. The epistemological implications of this view are nothing short of revolutionary. It implies that the regulative ideal for inquiry is not to generate an exclusively faithful representation of a reality independent of the knower. The regulative ideal for inquiry is to generate a new relation between a human being and her environment – her life, community, world – one that “makes possible a new way of dealing with them, and thus eventually creates a new kind of experienced object, not more real than those which preceded but more significant, and less overwhelming and oppressive” (Dewey, 1981b, p. 175). In this pragmatic view of knowledge, our representations arise from experience and must return to that experience for their validation.

(p. 39)

Working within this ontology of experience shapes narrative inquiry in a particular way. By highlighting the temporality of knowledge generation, we draw attention to the understanding that experience “is always more than we can know and represent in a single statement, paragraph, or book. Every representation, therefore, no matter how faithful to that which it tries to depict, involves selective emphasis of our experience” (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p. 39). We used Dewey (1958) to argue “against obscuring the selection process, thus naturalizing the objects of our inquiry and treating them as if they are given” (p. 40). In this way we argued for showing inquiries “as a series of choices, inspired by purposes that are shaped by past experience, undertaken through time, and [that] trace the consequences of these choices in the whole of an individual or community’s lived experience” (p. 40). Narrative inquiry comprises a view of experience as composed and lived over time, as studied and understood as a narrative phenomenon, and as represented through narrative forms of representation.

Arguing for narrative inquiry as a way to understand experience, and a way to study experience, sharpened the distinctions between narrative inquiry and the ways that narrative forms of representation are often used in inqui...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• SECTION I Beginning in the midst: teacher knowledge as a matter of epistemology
• SECTION II Journeying with narrative ideas of teacher knowledge into teacher education and professional education
• SECTION III Journeying with narrative ideas of curriculum making: coming alongside teachers, children and families
• SECTION IV Journeying with narrative ideas: considerations of the ontological, methodological, ethical, and political