Narrative Inquiry in Early Childhood and Elementary School

Learning to Teach, Teaching Well

Stephanie Sisk-Hilton, Daniel R. Meier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317409038
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

As top-down educational reform policies at local and national levels increasingly isolate teachers from their own professional and instructional agency, and stultify children's passion for learning, new techniques are needed for understanding and transforming educational practices. Narrative Inquiry in Early Childhood and Elementary School: Learning to Teach, Teaching Well facilitates meaningful change in early years education by providing early childhood and elementary school teachers with methods to incorporate narrative into their instruction and inquiry. This book offers practical strategies for incorporating narrative tools and structures into the classroom, and encouraging effective conceptual, pedagogical, and personal avenues for engaged teaching and learning across languages and cultures. The book's chapters promote a lively discussion of central tenets of narrative inquiry and illustrative examples of teachers at work with narrative and inquiry for improving their practice and children's learning.

1

WHY NARRATIVE INQUIRY?

In this chapter we discuss particular forms and functions of narrative inquiry for teaching and learning from early childhood through elementary school. We emphasize the power of narrative inquiry for observing student learning and engagement; reflecting on one’s teaching philosophies and practices; promoting teacher agency and voice; and creating transformative communities of teachers, students, and families. In doing so, we discuss the place of narrative inquiry in educational research, basic tenets of narrative inquiry, connections to practice, links to content standards, and the value of narrative inquiry for professional growth and development. We intend this opening chapter as a foundational piece for the rest of the book, and invite you to begin your own narrative inquiry story here. You might ask yourself the following questions as you read and consider the connections to your teaching and professional work: How do I value story in my daily life? In my professional life? What stories are central to my personal and professional identity and to my practice? How might stories as combined with an inquiry stance toward teaching and learning improve my work? Where might I start in my work to include elements of narrative inquiry?

What is Narrative Inquiry?

Narrative inquiry is a subset of qualitative research, and has a large extended family of “research cousins”—teacher research and inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Hubbard & Power, 2003; Meier & Henderson, 2007; Zeichner & Liston, 2014), self-study and inquiry (Kroll, 2012; Strong-Wilson, 2006), action research (Pushor & Clandinin, 2009), arts-based approaches to research (Eisner & Barone, 2011), the qualitative approach of portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997; Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2005), life histories in medicine (Coles, 1990) and in psychotherapy (Speedy, 2008), narrative-based essays (hooks, 2008), case studies (Merriam, 1988), phenomenological interviewing (Seidman, 2013), narrative-based poetry as research (Boylorn, 2011), autobiography and fiction (Bold, 2012), auto-ethnography (Jones, 1998), and anthropological accounts and field notes (Geertz, 1988). All of these approaches make use of narrative accounts in different ways, as part of the research process. However, what makes narrative inquiry for teaching distinct from these related methodologies is the reliance on narrative as the unit of analysis for identifying and examining issues of teaching and learning. That is, the stories collected directly or constructed from artifacts of children’s and teachers’ experiences in and out of the classroom become the dataset that the teacher researcher analyzes for meaning, for existence of counter-narratives, and for ways to address ongoing puzzles and problems of practice.

Narrative inquiry has gained increasing attention as a methodology or approach in educational research for promoting teacher knowledge of student learning, effective instructional practices, and teacher agency and professional growth. Narrative has been shown to strengthen the voice of researchers, uncover and chronicle life histories and critical events, and connect the personal and professional lives of participants in educational settings (Barone, 2001; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Clandinin, 2013; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Coulter & Smith, 2009; Lyons & LaBoskey, 2002; Pagnucci, 2004; Riessman, 2008). Proponents of narrative inquiry and story have pointed their lenses at a host of critical issues and topics in teaching, learning, and schooling—child development (Edwards & Rinaldi, 2009), children’s play (Paley, 1981), language and literacy education (Goswami, Lewis, Rutherford, & Waff, 2009), racism and social justice (Bell & Roberts, 2010; Diaz Soto, 2008; Winn, 2010, 2011), notions of special needs and identity (Valente, 2011), invisibility and recognition in educational institutions (Reddick & Saénz, 2012), immigrant teachers (Elbaz-Luwisch, 2004), and trauma and resilience in childhood (Wright, 2010). In a fundamental way, narrative inquiry relies on particular forms and functions of narrative for understanding experience and constructing reality (Bruner, 1991; Hardy, 1977), for human creativity and imagination (Egan, 1986, 1992), and for social and educational change (Freire, 1967/1976; Gadotti & Torres, 2009).

Looking broadly on a global scale, narrative inquiry has the potential to strengthen local practices in international contexts and to promote the exchange of professional stories across geographic, cultural, philosophical, and political boundaries. Many cultures and educational practices place profound importance on story as ensuring cultural continuity, moral development, and social cohesion. In numerous international contexts, for instance, religious texts and teachings rely on story as a primary vehicle for moral and religious teaching and observance. In cultures and traditions that emphasize oral traditions, story is central to one’s worldview and to one’s relationship to self and others and notions of time, development, and learning.

In early childhood education, the Reggio Emilia educators in Northern Italy have garnered international interest in their approach to teaching that features multiple linguistic modes of learning and the use of narrative as a foundation for documentation (Edwards & Rinaldi, 2009; Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 2012). Educators in New Zealand (Pohio, Sansom, & Liley, 2015) believe in the power of narrative for creating engaging curriculum for young children that features storytelling by adults and children, and the use of teacher reflection and documentation that affirms the bicultural and bilingual identities of children and adults within the teaching-learning process. Japan makes use of lesson study (Lewis & Tsuchida, 1998) that emphasizes the exchange of stories, key incidents, and insights between teaching colleagues within and amongst more than one school. Finland’s preservice and inservice teacher education (Sahlberg, 2014) places a premium on the intellectual exchange of information and insights into one’s teaching and that of others. This exchange and dialogue is designed to promote teachers as inquisitive lifelong learners who work in an environment of trust and the general Finnish professional milieu of teachers as foundations for a democratic and ethical society. While the approaches above would not necessarily be classified as research through narrative inquiry in that they do not always engage in analysis of story or narrative, all show the compelling nature of story to document, consider, and exchange ideas about teaching and learning.

Narrative inquiry, though, is not without its detractors, who point to the problematic aspects of narrative regarding the trustworthiness and rigor of narrative-based data, its objectivity and distance from one’s bias and individual perspectives, and its purported lack of generalizability to disparate participants and contexts. However, we acknowledge that there is bias in every form of research, in terms of what is chosen as the topic of study, what features the researchers attend to, and who or what serve as subjects of study versus creators of knowledge. For those who approach narrative inquiry for teaching as a way of examining their own practice, accessing one’s own stories and deliberately seeking out those of others often makes clear that our judgments about students and the learning environment are, in fact, just that—judgments, not “objective” assessments of the way things are. As the authors of this book, we show the power of narrative inquiry to take on relational aspects of teaching and learning that are often obscured by other research methodologies but which are critical to how teachers and learners operate within classrooms and beyond. While we are interested in addressing some of the problematic aspects of narrative inquiry, we primarily want to describe and show how narrative inquiry can be a positive force for improving student achievement and empowering teachers across the early childhood and elementary school continuum. We emphasize, then, several key elements of narrative inquiry that we argue are central for the linking of “points of inquiry” with “points of practice” that lead to “points of educational change.”

We define narrative inquiry as the valuing of story as a way of life, as a way of remembering, as a form of educational research, and as a way to understand and improve our educational practice. Our stories come in many forms—oral, written, drawn, photographed, dramatized—and are essential to improving teaching and educational transformation. Teacher narrative inquiry embraces the collection and analysis of stories as a means to examine puzzles of practice through the lens of understanding and unpacking relational elements and participants’ lived experiences in and out of the classroom. Narrative inquiry moves beyond a single story to purposefully identify counter-narratives to understand and transform the complexity of classroom life.

Memoir, Memory, and Identity

Well-told stories that resonate with us personally and professionally are often linked to our lived experiences, feelings, thoughts, hopes, and dreams. They connect with us because they touch critical aspects of who we are as members of social and cultural communities with particular values, beliefs, and practices (Loseke, 2007). The stories that touch us exist internally (in our mind and heart and soul as internal monologue) and externally (in our actions, talk, movements as external dialogue with objects and others), and pertain to what matters most to our success as educators and as professionals.

We view the landscape as narratively constructed: as having a history with moral, emotional, and aesthetic dimensions. We see it as storied. To enter a professional knowledge landscape is to enter a place of story. The landscape is composed of two fundamentally different places, the in-classroom place and the out-of-classroom place. (Clandinin & Connelly, 1999, p. 2)

In the course of our professional growth, wherever we might be on the novice to veteran span, we carry with us an accumulated deposit of valuable observations and insights into our teaching and our own learning. We catalogue, whether consciously or not, a myriad of moments, vignettes, events, objects, and interactions that we sort and filter as we teach and learn and grow. We tend to remember those details of feeling and thought and action that matter to us, that impinge upon our professional philosophies, interests, goals, and practices. In essence, the accumulation of these memories helps form our identities as individuals and as professionals, providing us with our foundational interests, strengths, and areas of educational expertise.

Much of the power of narrative inquiry, as linked to memoir and memory, is predicated on the value of remembering, of reliving and re-seeing. As the writer Garrett Hongo (1995) wrote in his memoir, “An old story, deep in my memory, had emerged out of the fogs and into the light. I must have heard it dozens of times during my childhood. My mother would speak it like a myth or a fable . . . ” The process of narrative inquiry enables us to “re-vision our narratives” (Strong-Wilson, 2006), and as we engage with our own narratives and others’, educators are “more likely to commit” to “reflecting on the implications of those [narrative-based] constructions for practice” (p. 61). Much of our “success” with narrative inquiry in educational contexts is predicated on our openness to embracing our memories and those critical events, experiences, ideas, and feelings that intertwine our personal and professional lives, as well as our openness to counter-narratives, the stories of others that may interpret events and actions completely differently than we do. As we ponder a particular teaching and learning puzzle in a deep way, more often than not, the process of going back in time to revisit an event or idea impinges upon our memories. There are two critical forms of memory that narrative inquirers touch upon—episodic, which refers to those events or experiences that happened at a particular place and time, and semantic, referring to events and experiences that continue and evolve, and are not associated with specific times or places (Engel, 1999). For instance, we might puzzle over a particular series of events that occur during a particular classroom routine at a certain time each day, which would involve elements of episodic memory. We might also puzzle over a recurring feeling or idea that has accumulated over time, which would involve elements of semantic memory. Often, in narrative inquiry journeys, there is a combination of both forms of memory.

Wrestling with our personal and professional memories around a particular teaching and learning puzzle often takes us on an unexpected journey of remembering, reflecting, and changing. As Engel (1999) notes, “Every memory journeys from its first vivid moment within a person to its multifarious transformations and uses within the world” (p. 3). And when we engage in narrative inquiry with others at school sites and beyond, our memories further evolve—“When a memory takes a public form it doesn’t necessarily lose its internal psychological intensity, but it may subtly transform it . . . Sometimes the public use of a memory gives it a definition and substance it didn’t have when it lived only in one’s mind as a fleeting and infrequent visitor” (p. 16).

The narrative inquiry process of remembering, reliving, and reflecting also has implications for changes in our identities as educators and as narrative inquirers. Looking for and finding particular memories of certain children, actions, ideas, strategies, or materials in our memory banks complicates the narrative plotlines of who we are as educators. The narrative theorist Paul Ricouer (1988) wrote,

In the first place, narrative identity is not a stable and seamless identity. Just as it is possible to compose several plots on the same subject of the same incidents (which, thus, should not really be called the same events), so it is always possible to weave different, even opposed, plots about our lives. (p. 248)

The process of remembering critical stories helps us see multiple storylines and plotlines for teaching that complicate our narrative inquiries, and thus deepens our identities as richly textured educators. Part of this deepening of our identities can bring about a more prominent role for imagination in our work lives—“Our analysis of the act of reading leads us to say rather that the practice of narrative lies in a thought experiment by means of which we try to inhabit the worlds foreign to us” (Ricouer, 1988, p. 249). The process of engaging with narrative, of looking into our memories, can thus bring about new possibilities for identity formation as educators.

Macro and Micro Narratives

The art of teaching and learning is essentially the continual unfolding of the small micro level narratives enacted between children, teachers, families—all the micro interactions and activities of classroom life—that are set against (sometimes in happy concert, sometimes in conflict) the larger, macro stories of institutional and professional traditions, expectations, and power structures. While we live and work within the covert and overt parameters of these larger macro narratives, narrative inquiry encompasses and helps us integrate the range of small and large narratives that influence our teaching lives, and the trajectory of our teaching over time (Clandinin, 2013; Souto-Manning & Ray, 2007).

The macro narratives, by and large, influence the structures and resources for teachers to maximize equity and social justice for teachers, children, and their families. These larger, all-encompassing narratives are the grand, dominant narratives (Polkinghorne, 1988) that dominate the discourse on a particular approach to schooling, teaching, assessment, and reform. They constitute the larger realities of classroom life and teaching that impinge upon the teacher-student relationship, and largely determine the potential for professional growth and change outside of one’s classroom. The narratives, though, that matter most to teachers within the classroom, link one’s personal and professional lives, and help us understand and deepen our educational philosophies, curriculum, instructional practices, and human relationships.

In his last interview, Paulo Freire (1996) argued for questioning “the dominant syntax” in education and teaching—to reflect and act in opposition to those social, cultural, historical, and educational forces that exclude silent and marginalized individuals, groups, and communities. To reclaim a more rightful and just position in education and society, narrative inquiry looks at the role of counter-narratives and counter-storytelling (Witherell, 2004), placing of texts in juxtaposition to each other (Fischer, 1986; Strong-Wilson, 2006), and testimonios (Delgado, 1989) to challenge the prevailing grand narratives and the “dominant syntax.” These transformative stories have the potential to alter one’s thinking, promote the potential for action, and begin to chip away or even break longstanding views and ideas that influence our teaching and children’s learning. For instance, counter-stories can break down stereotypes promoted by the media and popular culture (Myers, 2013), views on the linguistic and cognitive capabilities of children and adults who are said to speak “broken English” (Tan, 1990), and the language and framing of an “achievement gap” as continuing a deficit view of children of Color (Ladson-Billings, 2007). The counter-stories of teachers and children can create a new kind of space and way of thinking and feeling that nibbles away at the dominant syntax. Narrative inquiry also can provide a framework for teachers and students to collaborate and become co-researchers, co-thinkers, and co-storytellers (Lewis, 2009) and to break down traditional barriers between teacher and student.

Narrative Inquiry as a Puzzle

Narrative inquiry, in contrast with more traditional modes of educational inquiry, does not advocate a problem-question-hypothesis-solution paradigm or cycle, but rather the view of narrative inquiry as “always composed around a particular wonder, a research puzzle” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 124). These “puzzling moments” (Ballenger, 2009) might entail looking at an aspect of successful classroom teaching and exploring the underlying reasons for the success. Or we might be puzzled by a recurring or recent aspect of teaching that is an impediment to more effective instruction or personal relationships in the classroom. The puzzle might focus on an aspect of curriculum, a particular child, a teaching strategy or set of strategies, the classroom environment, or human relationships. The puzzle and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Why Narrative Inquiry?
• 2 Problems and Puzzles for Inquiry
• 3 Narrative-Based Tools and Strategies
• 4 Telling Someone Else’s Story
• 5 Narrative Inquiry as a Support for Curricular Innovation
• 6 Narrative Inquiry and Language and Literacy Teaching
• 7 Pulling it All Together
• 8 Narrative Inquiry and Educational Change
• Authors’ Biographies
• References
• Index