Exploring Learning, Identity and Power through Life History and Narrative Research

Ann-Marie Bathmaker, Penelope Harnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135163679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What stories can we tell of ourselves and others and why should they be of interest to others?

Exploring Learning, Identity and Power through Life History and Narrative Research responds to these questions with examples from diverse educational and social contexts. The book brings together a collection of writing by different authors who use a narrative/life history approach to explore the experiences of a wide range of people, including teachers, nurses, young people and adults, reflecting on learning and education at significant moments in their lives. In addition, each chapter provides an account by the author of the process of constructing research narratives, and the second chapter of the book focuses specifically on ethical issues in life history and narrative research.

This book:

• provides vivid examples of a narrative/life history approach to research
• uses narrative/life history to explore identity, power and social justice
• offers an effective model for practice.

With contributions from a number of international experts, this book addresses key issues of social justice and power played out within different contexts, and also discusses the ethics of narrative research directly. The book makes a timely contribution to the growing interest in the use of narrative and life history research. With the increasing importance of continuing professional development for many working in education, health and social service contexts, the book will be of interest to both students and researchers, as it provides clear examples of how researching professionals can use narrative research to investigate a particular area of interest.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Ann-Marie Bathmaker

What stories can we tell of ourselves and others at the beginning of the twenty-first century and why should they be of interest to others? This collection of narrative and life history research responds to these questions by offering a range of examples from diverse educational and social contexts. What we offer here are narratives, which illuminate what ‘troubles’ us. Writing these narratives has enabled us, as educators and researchers who are concerned with learning, and with what it means to have opportunities to engage in learning, to explore how that is bound up with identity and power, and with the relation between individual agency and social structure. Narratives have helped us to do what C. Wright Mills (1959: 248) would refer to as linking ‘personal troubles’ to ‘public issues’.

How the connections between personal and public concerns may be understood and interpreted are important questions for narrative and life history research. This is particularly so at a time when such research is shaped by ‘the ubiquity of personal narratives in contemporary Western culture and politics’ (Chase 2005: 669). Our news is filled with personal stories of success and despair, our television is saturated with the melodrama of the ‘real’ lives of ‘ordinary’ individuals staged on TV through contrived scenarios, produced for entertainment, focusing on the personal and the spectacular (Wood and Skeggs 2008), and our policymakers use individual narrative vignettes to promote their causes. As Chase cautions, we need to be wary of ‘the extraordinary self-conscious fascination with story telling that prevails at present’ (Chase 2005: 212). The creation of what Berlant (2008) calls ‘intimate publics’ through such story telling links to political processes that work at the level of sensation and emotion (Wood and Skeggs 2008). In educational contexts, Ecclestone (2004; 2007) has raised concerns about what she describes as a therapeutic turn, where students are encouraged to tell their personal stories and explore their emotions in the public space of schools. Though not intended for sensation and spectacle, Ecclestone argues that such practices diminish individuals and provide the state with new opportunities for surveillance and control.

Narrative and life history research face the challenge that they too may open up personal lives and experience for scrutiny, but do no more than satisfy the curiosity of a wider audience, if this is not linked to what Lincoln and Denzin (2005: 1117) call ‘an engaged social science’. This is what Goodson and Sikes (2001) mean when they make the distinction between life story and life history. Life stories may be a starting point, the initial exploration of a life as lived, but life history grounds these stories of personal experience in their wider social and historical context, and pays attention to social relations of power.

The distinction above hints at the multiple layering of narrative research. An important recognition in narrative inquiry is that narratives are collaborative constructions, and involve different participants in their construction. These include the subjects of the inquiry (who might be termed the ‘respondents’ in other forms of research), the researchers (who might also be the ‘subject’ of the research), others who become involved in the inquiry (such as the bilingual interpreter in Jane Andrews’ chapter in this volume), as well as the readers, who will form their own construction of the text that is presented.

What work can our narratives do?

We are still faced with questions of what work narratives can do, what insights a study of individual accounts can give us, and how we can learn from a study of the singular. An essential aspect of data relating to the singular and particular rather than to large samples and statistical generalisability is that ‘good narratives typically approach the complexities and contradictions of real life’ (Flyvbjerg 2006: 237). They reveal ambiguity rather than tidy it away. In Hodkinson and Hodkinson’s words (2001: 4), individual cases ‘retain more of the “noise” of real life than many other types of research’. Indeed, as they argue, other forms of research aim to exclude noise, yet ‘the excluded noise may be a highly significant part of the story’. This emphasis on context-dependent knowledge makes it possible to develop a nuanced view of reality, including the view that human behaviour is not simply about rule-governed acts (Flyvbjerg 2006). Individual cases and narratives can in this way help us to understand complex interrelationships (Hodkinson and Hodkinson 2001).

In writing the chapters in this book, it is the detail of everyday life that we have aimed to explore. The title of this volume, Exploring Learning, Identity and Power through Life History and Narrative Research, identifies the key threads that run through the chapters. All of the chapters are concerned with learning, sometimes, but not always, in formal educational contexts. Questions of identity and power weave in and out of the chapters, offering a diversity of insights into the constructions of identity, and the workings of power, and also showing the spaces and limitations for the taking of power through individual agency. While the authors of each chapter offer their own answers to the question of the purposes of their narratives, I want here to emphasise what is crucial to me, which is the possibility that narrative and life history research might ‘speak truth to power’ (Coffield 1999; Watts 2008). By this, I mean the ways in which narrative inquiry, through rich accounts of the complexities of real life and an emphasis on the particular, may call into question dominant narratives that do not match the experience of life as lived.

A significant and important feature of narrative and life history research is that they provide a means of getting closer to the experience of those whose lives and histories go unheard, unseen, undocumented – ordinary, marginalised and silenced lives (Riessman 2008). Riessman emphasises how ‘Narratives invite us as listeners, readers, and viewers to enter the perspective of the narrator’ (2008: 9), that is, the person who is telling their own story to the researcher. This is very different to the way that reality TV encourages us to become voyeurs in the spectacle of the lives of others. Narrative research respects individuals as subjects, with both histories and intentions.

Exploring identity/ies

In focusing on the detail of individual lives, a major concern in narrative inquiry is the construction and enacting of identity/ies. Why does identity matter, and why does it matter now? McCarthey and Moje (2002) argue that identity matters, both because identities shape people’s practices and ‘because people can be understood by others in particular ways, and people act toward one another depending on such understandings and positionings’ (2002: 228–9).

At the present time, the significance of identity is heightened by analyses that point to the breakdown of the set ‘trajectories’ for people’s lives. These trajectories may have formed a common experience according to class, gender and ethnic origin in the past (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991), but there is no longer a script that can be lived out in a relatively prescribed way. We are forced to cobble together a biography in Beck’s (1992) words, to construct our identities, rather than just live out a predetermined path through life. The implication is that it is no longer possible not to work on the self.

Narrative research is therefore seen as providing opportunities and spaces for research participants as well as researchers. Riessman (2008) suggests that encouraging and allowing people to tell their narratives to us as researchers allows participants to negotiate their identities and to make meaning of their experience, and Lieblich et al. (1998: 7) comment similarly: ‘We know or discover ourselves, and reveal ourselves to others, by the stories we tell.’

In this respect, narrative and life history research are strongly associated with moves to restore individual agency, that is, to focus on the ways in which individuals may choose to shape their own lives, and a shift away from what Plummer (2001: 4) describes as ‘the big stories of the recent past’ such as Marxism and earlier forms of feminism, which tend to emphasise how social and economic structures determine individuals’ lives. At the same time, various life history and narrative researchers emphasise that it is important to understand individual lives and identities as constructed in the context of particular social structures and material conditions, which lock people into various forms of subjectivity (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2000).

Making sense of life as lived

The role of the researcher in interpreting the stories that are told is therefore a significant one. Biesta et al. (2005) make this point very clearly when they argue that life history research is more than the collection of stories about individuals’ lives:

Although the collection of such stories is a crucial first step in life-history research, and although such research is fundamentally interested in the ways in which people ‘story’ or narrate their own lives, life-history research aims to understand those stories against the background of wider socio-political and historical context and processes.

(Biesta et al. 2005: 4)

Goodson (2005) also argues that a preoccupation with the individual life history and its analysis is not enough. This tips into individualism, and a ‘fiction’ of an isolated, self-sufficient individual. What is central is the relationship between the individual and wider structures – in the words of C. Wright Mills (1970), how smaller milieux and larger structures interact.

Narrative inquiry therefore goes beyond the telling of stories and involves trying to make sense of life as lived (Clandinin and Connelly 2000). In particular, narrative research can help to make visible taken-for-granted practices, and structural and cultural features of our everyday social worlds (Chase 2005). Chase argues that such work may reveal the stranglehold of oppressive metanarratives that establish rules of truth, legitimacy and identity.

Engaging in ‘little science’

This returns to the question that challenges narrative and life history researchers, including the authors in this book. What is the purpose of our narratives? What work is it we hope they will do? It is here that I find the words of C. Wright Mills helpful, who says:

Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues – and in terms of the problems of history-making.

(Wright Mills 1959: 248)

This is what he calls the sociological imagination, explaining: ‘The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society’ (Wright Mills 1959: 12).

However, whilst the connections he makes between biography, history and society are an important touchstone, which is shared by numerous narrative and life history researchers (for example Chase 2005; Goodson 2007; Plummer 2001, and Waller and Brine in this volume), a key aspect of narrative inquiry is also that it is concerned with what Denzin (2008) calls ‘little science’. It concerns itself with the small, the local, the fragmented, historically emergent, contradictory and accidental.

While speaking truth to power may therefore include finding ways to make narrative inquiry heard by national and international policymakers, it may also involve what Casey (1995) describes as:

a reconceptualization of what it means to be ‘political’. Central to this definition is the recognition that the personal is political and, further, that power is exercised in all relationships, not just those connected to the state.

(Casey 1995: 223–224)

In the chapters that follow, what stands out clearly is that possibilities for social change need, at least in part, to be understood and conceived of through the small everyday acts of individuals, and the histories that have brought them to their present place. It is the narratives such as those presented here that get behind the ‘now-ness’ of current policy-making, and offer not just a means of making some sense of our increasingly complex lives, but also glimpses of the possibilities that are realised in the everyday.

The chapters in this book

This volume starts with a chapter by Pat Sikes which addresses a major concern in narrative inquiry at the present time – the ethics of writing life histories and narratives. Sikes emphasises the responsibilities involved in narrating others’ lives – the ‘heavy ethical burden’ involved – and asks ‘what constitutes ethical research and writing practice?’ In particular she stresses the power that is invested in the researcher–writer who creates a particular version of reality, and how our own lives, beliefs and values are implicated in our practices, so that we have a duty to explain our positionality in the context of the research.

This point is taken up by the authors of the subsequent chapters. Each of the chapters starts with a reflexive introduction, where the writers talk about their own life histories and identities and how they came to write their chapter, providing a personal contextualisation for the narrative/life history which follows. At the end of each chapter, the authors reflect on the professional and research implications of the narratives they have presented. But this does not mean that the authors all approach life history...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 The ethics of writing life histories and narratives in educational research
• Chapter 3 A process of (un)becoming
• Chapter 4 Becoming a gay male primary teacher
• Chapter 5 Changing identities through re-engagement with education
• Chapter 6 Interrogating identity and belonging through life history
• Chapter 7 Researching learning in and out of school
• Chapter 8 Going to the pictures
• Chapter 9 In our own words
• Chapter 10 ‘I lived down the road from you’
• Chapter 11 This do in remembrance of me
• Chapter 12 Life history and narrative research revisited
• Recommended reading
• Index