Contextualising Narrative Inquiry

Developing methodological approaches for local contexts

Sheila Trahar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135096403
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Narrative inquiry is growing in popularity as a research methodology in the social sciences, medicine and the humanities. In narrative inquiry, the transparency of interactions between researcher and research participants, together with rich, contextual descriptions, help to shape and structure research texts rendering them engaging and readable.

Contextualising Narrative Inquiry argues that all researchers should foreground the importance of the context in which research takes place and develop methodological approaches that are grounded in their local contexts. To do so, they need to pay attention to how knowledge is constructed, shared and understood in those contexts. This is particularly important when contexts have been subjugated historically through colonialism and when local, indigenous ways of knowing have been ignored or dismissed.

The contributors to this edited collection have all used narrative inquiry for a range of topics and in a range of contexts, including:

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• Leadership styles of Asian women

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• The Deaf community in the UK

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• Voluntary celibacy in Malta

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• Administrators in Ghanaian higher education

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• Multiculturalism in primary education in Cyprus

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• Teacher identities in Hong Kong

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• The reflective practitioner in higher education in Malaysia.

The diversity of the topics illuminates the potential for narrative inquiry to be used to investigate a broad range of issues in many contexts by people with a wide range of backgrounds. A common thread throughout is a reflexive discussion of how each contributor used narrative inquiry as a methodological approach; highlighting not only its affordances, but also the complexities of using it in specific cultural, social and historical contexts.

Chapter 1

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What's in a sign? Narrative inquiry and deaf storytellers

Donna West

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Introduction

Deaf culture and storytelling go hand-in-hand. Deaf stories, jokes, poems and fables are passed down through the generations in sign language. They are not usually written down (unless linguists, researchers and historians decide to translate them): the sign language is the text. The research on which this chapter is based is a narrative inquiry with three deafhearing families¹ who told me their stories of family life. One of the major challenges of this type of inquiry is the need for culturally sensitive and appropriate re-presentation of stories that are told in British Sign Language and set down in written English. This involves not only negotiating the minefield of translation between languages and cultures, but also imaginative and creative rule-bending, where a text-based document becomes a visual artefact, and the gap between signs and words on the page is reduced. It also involves facing up to the fact that written English has severe limitations when translating hilarious, moving, mischievous and downright angry stories. Narrative inquiry, which foregrounds the ‘voices’ of participants (Chase 2005) and respects them as agentic and performative narrators is a particularly powerful methodology where the documenting of deaf life is concerned. This chapter tells a reflexive and tricky tale of how sign-language stories might make it faithfully to the page: one of the affordances of narrative inquiry when researching with members of the deaf community.

Locating myself within the inquiry

My name is Donna and I am hearing. I started learning British Sign Language (BSL) when I was 24 years old. I have taught deaf children and worked as a communication support worker with deaf college students. I have also engaged in research with deaf children and adults who use BSL as their first and preferred language. I am not an interpreter, nor have I any formal training in translation. I would somewhat reluctantly describe myself as bilingual in English and BSL. When I asked three deafhearing families to tell me their stories for my PhD research I already knew that, whether my narrators were deaf or hearing, whether they spoke or signed, I was expected to produce a written thesis. That is to say, I would be transcribing their signs and words; I would be transforming speech and sign ‘acts’ into a text-and-paper artefact in order to fulfil the requirements of my university examiners. Rather than struggle with this process in isolation, as a ‘responsible and able’ doctoral student, I chose to treat the production of narrative transcripts and re-presentations as an integral and affirming part of the research collaboration between me and the families.

My early research experience – as a Master's student and junior research assistant – with members of the deaf community followed a largely critical-ethnographic tradition of participant observation and interviewing. Informants' signed ‘data’ were translated, analyzed and documented. While ‘voice’, reflexivity and representation were central to the work, and while the principle of respondent validation (Lather 1986) informed my practice, data in the form of interviews and journal notes were mostly sorted and organized thematically and as such, I would argue, rendered several-steps-removed from the original positioned, temporal, contingent, signed performance. Moreover, re-located ‘chunks’ of translated text often appeared so distant and transformed from the original telling that they risked becoming unfamiliar, unrecognizable and disconnected from deaf people's experiences and constructions.

Documenting the stories (and the story of the stories, West 2012) therefore became integral to this inquiry; deaf family-members specifically were invited into the translation/representation act, as editors, critics, theorists and authors. While not solely the remit, nor the exclusive domain of narrative methods, I suggest that such a democratic process, based on genuine curiosity and respect for each others' translation views, abilities and insights, offers collaborative opportunities that continue up to the moment of the Final Print. This is not to suggest that such intentions are always greeted with enthusiasm, willingness or interest, but that the spirit of the intention often opens doors to new ways of seeing and understanding, when (hearing) researchers and (deaf) participants come together in the re-presentation of their narrated lives.

Narrative concepts

Our inquiry (see West 2012) was loosely framed as a narrative inquiry. At its heart, it was about telling stories; about recovering and discovering memories, about remembering and forgetting, about sharing, recalling and explaining, about scripting, repairing and crafting. Through the inquiry, we learned about each other, we disputed, we surprised, we got lost, we connected. I offered back my own stories. The process of learning about deafhearing family life was ‘thickened’ through a continuous, reflexive exchange of ideas, questions and emerging theories; through email, or face-to-face discussions, beyond what might be termed the formal research conversation (Martin 2011). What developed from a simple question – What's the story of your family? – was a relational, back-and-forth research experience, where understanding of family-life-experience, of deafness, of relationships, love, care and resilience was enhanced through the telling of, and attendance to, stories.

Arthur Frank (2008) once counselled a group of workshop participants; ‘Stories are like books, the narrative is the library.’ I found it helpful to think of stories as That Which People Tell, and narratives as the recognized, co-constructed, politicized collection; the specialist library. I found myself drawn to the idea that a narrative inquiry embraces not only the meanings that are constructed, felt, known and told (Richardson 1997), but also the very phenomena of the telling: to paraphrase Bruner (1987); the life that is lived, the life that is experienced and the life that is told. Stories – memories, observations, anecdotes, performances and reflections, be they signed, spoken or written – are the things we tell each other. I recognized them as located at the intersection of biography, history, culture and society (Riessman 2001) and we – the families and I – worked together in order to co-construct and re-present them, based on our emerging, familiar and new understanding.

In the spirit of a postmodern, post-structuralist tradition, where knowledge and understanding of family life is realized as discursively, historically and culturally situated (Davies and Gannon 2006) and narratively constructed (Richardson 2003), what I hoped for, and what the families joined me in, was a troubling of a hegemonic, ‘established way of thinking’ (Trinh 1992: 125) about deaf and hearing lives, about parenthood, about cultural negotiation and migration, about language and communication. I wanted to engage in an inquiry that explored and embraced different ways of knowing while acknowledging the ways in which the personal, the social, the cultural and the political are integral and inextricably linked in terms of meaning, experience and belief (see Domosh 2003).

Deaf culture and storytelling go hand-in-hand. Deaf stories, jokes, poems and fables are passed down through the generations in sign language. Narrative inquiry acknowledges, respects and taps into the storytelling lifeline of an often-marginalized and historically misunderstood community of signing deaf people (see Branson and Miller 2002). It draws on and foregrounds the performative act of telling stories as a way to transmit wisdom, experience and memory through the visually orientated, signing body. It also permits the creation of spaces wherein a hearing researcher can learn about the intimate, culturally specific meaning-making processes of deaf people and be trusted to write them down.

Narrative time and performance

Most of us comprehend … human actions as being organized in time.

(McAdams 1997: 30)

Throughout the inquiry, I reflected a great deal on the ways in which stories become fixed in the moment of the printing, the binding. This is not necessarily problematic: while Huber and Clandinin (2002) comment on the ways that the freezing-in-time of stories obscures or limits our abilities to perceive them in a wider, temporal context, perhaps it is the setting down of stories that serves as a reminder of the very temporality of the narrative act (Ricoeur 1984; Vigouroux 2007). Our work together, then, could be understood through a temporal lens as a convergence and simultaneity of pasts, presents and futures (St Pierre 1997). The three-dimensional space of our inquiry embraced not only a moving-about-in-time (Brockmeier 2000), but also the historicality of the cultural, social, relational and geographical. That is to say, while narrators tell remembered stories – offering performances of memory and anticipation (Genette 1980; Keats 2009) – their narratives also lie at, and circle o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 What's in a sign? Narrative inquiry and deaf storytellers
• 2 Private lives, public property: Narrating the lives of mothers whose children have significant Special Needs
• 3 Looking down on the world from a wooden balcony: A narrative autoethnographic study of voluntary celibacy
• 4 Workplace bullying in higher education: A victim's perspective
• 5 ‘The teeth and the tongue’: A narrative inquiry journey in Ghana
• 6 Seeing with new eyes: Becoming a narrative inquirer in higher education practice
• 7 Narrative inquiry in a divided island: Dealing with sensitive and complex methodological issues in Cyprus
• 8 A conversation with Ah Leung
• 9 Catalan teacher meets Chilean researcher: (De)constructing subjectivities through the interplay of textual narratives
• 10 No horror stories to tell: Critical moments in exploring the literacy practices of Jamaican–born elders in the UK
• 11 Words collide, mindsets remain: A journey of cross-cultural narrative inquiry
• Index