Using Narrative Inquiry for Educational Research in the Asia Pacific

Sheila Trahar, Wai Ming Yu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317686484
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

Narrative inquiry is being used more widely in the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Northern European countries to conduct research across a range of disciplines. It is gaining popularity in Hong Kong, Macao and Mainland China, but research in these contexts continues to be dominated by quantitative and more traditional qualitative approaches. Narrative inquirers in these areas can, therefore, find it problematic to have the value of their work acknowledged. This book demonstrates creatively, accessibly and rigorously the ways in which narrative inquiry as a methodological approach, already more firmly established in Australia and New Zealand, is gaining a foothold in other parts of the Asia Pacific region. Contributors to the book write about their use of narrative inquiry in, for example, the Confucian heritage cultures (CHC) of Hong Kong, Mainland China, Singapore, Macao and the Anglo-Celtic cultures of Australia and New Zealand.

Chapters in the book include:

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• Creative Non-Fiction Across Cultures in Asia Pacific Contexts

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• Riding the Wave of Education Reform: Using a Reflecting Team to Explore the Professional Identities of School Counsellors in Hong Kong

• 
  
  

• Is the Silent Mode On? Re-searching Teachers' Voices in Macao through Narrative Research

• 
  
  

• Narrative Inquiry and the Exploration of Culture for Improving Teacher Education

This book will appeal to researchers across all sectors of education, in particular those who are exploring, the use of qualitative research methods in their context. Those interested in comparative education and cross-cultural studies will also find this book valuable.

1 A journey in the land of the long white cloud

A Thai academic doing narrative inquiry in Aotearoa New Zealand

Adisorn Juntrasook

DOI: 10.4324/9781315775128-1

Prologue

My parents never read me bedtime stories. I didn’t even realise that this was a thing that parents might do for their children, until I saw it in American films. I’m sure it would be easier to present such a romantic story about growing up with these rituals to help me explain why I became interested in stories. But that is not my story. Life is never simple – often things do not unfold like they do in the (American) films. To tell you the truth, I don’t know why I became interested in stories. As a child, I recall myself enjoying books and watching films; and later, listening to people’s life stories became one of my passions. It was through stories that I began to recognise other perspectives that were different from, or seemingly in opposition to, my own – sometimes with doubt, and other times with acceptance. Stories have enabled me to imagine what it might be like for someone to experience a certain thing, in a certain way, within a certain situation. It is through stories too that I became interested in narrative inquiry. This chapter is about my becoming a narrative researcher in a ‘foreign’ context. I am going to tell how I encountered my research topic, leadership in higher education, and my methodology, narrative inquiry. My research focussed on how academics at one university in Aotearoa New Zealand experienced and understood themselves as leaders in their everyday contexts (Juntrasook, 2013, 2014; Juntrasook et al., 2013). I will share my reflexive account of how my thinking and practice of narrative inquiry shifted during my fieldwork. Finally, I will conclude this chapter with a narrative of my own dilemmas and illustrate how I negotiated them. By the end, I hope to engage you, the reader, to imagine what it might be like for a researcher with an ethnic minority background to use narrative inquiry in a white-dominant context like Aotearoa New Zealand.

But before I tell you these stories, let me introduce myself.

Me, myself and the researcher

I grew up in a Thai family where both of my parents were ‘leaders’ in their work. My mother worked as a director at an international higher education institution and my father was a deputy managing director at a large government agency. Their positions often required long hours of work and generated a lot of stress that I could not fully appreciate as a child. The story I have told myself and others is that this background influenced my disinterest in pursuing positions of leadership, let alone working in a large organisation. I did not want to be like my parents – I did not want to be a leader.

Throughout my teens and young adult life, I continually positioned myself as an outsider who did not belong to the system. When I began my undergraduate degree at the age of 16, I decided to study theatre and journalism, believing that cultural work would not require the same kind of responsibilities as larger organisations. However, after I graduated my interests shifted toward education and social development. I ‘accidentally’ became a secondary school drama teacher and had an opportunity to work with many ‘at-risk’ teenagers both in and out of the school context. I learned that the work I wanted to do with young people required more than passion – I needed knowledge and skills. This experience inspired me to further my education in counselling psychology and expressive arts therapy, in Thailand and later in Switzerland. After gaining two postgraduate qualifications, I began my work as an art therapist with young terminally ill patients at a hospital in South Africa. Although this work was only for one year, it sparked a deep interest in social justice and transformation.

Upon returning to Thailand, I became involved in a social movement centred around transformative education and was invited to take a leading role in the establishment of a new higher education institution in Bangkok. Despite my desire to have a different life to my parents, as a 26 year old, I ended up working as a mid-level ‘leader’ at this institution. At that time, I had to learn about how to lead and manage and I turned to scholarly and ‘self-help’ books for advice. But I was dissatisfied with these resources. First, they were boring, and second, they usually failed to speak to my situation as a ‘young leader’ working in a cultural context where seniority was considered of utmost importance. Alongside this experience, I also started recognising that many of my academic colleagues, especially those who did not hold formal leadership positions, often acted like ‘leaders’ in their work. Conversely, many people who were in formal leadership positions did not necessarily act like ‘leaders’ themselves all of the time. My observation seemed at odds with the majority of literature on leadership in higher education, where there are both the leaders and the led.

Among existing studies of leadership in higher education, two foci seem to be most prevalent. First, researchers tend to focus on what works, asking questions such as, ‘What is effective leadership?’ and, ‘How can we develop an effective leader?’ (Simkins, 2005). These questions seem to be embedded in the assumption that knowledge situated in one context can be generalised and replicated in others. The second focus has been associated with formal positions including institutional and departmental headships or managers (Middlehurst, 2008). Within this focus, to be considered a leader, one needs to hold one of these positions within the institution or department. As a result, many individuals in academia – who do not hold formal positions – may remain overlooked and, to a certain extent, ‘marginalised’ by mainstream leadership researchers.

Ultimately, my professional experience, along with the results from reviewing the existing literature, attracted me to study higher education leadership in a more nuanced and critical way. I chose to conduct my doctoral study in Aotearoa New Zealand, primarily because I was interested to learn about an academic culture different to my own and partly because it was more practical to stay in the country where I was studying. I did not realise at the time that my decision would create a number of dilemmas for me, as a Thai academic conducting narrative research in a Western country.

My initial doctoral proposal sought to explore how academics at a university in Aotearoa New Zealand experienced and understood their leadership – whatever it meant to them – with a particular focus on how institutional, socio-cultural and political contexts may have shaped their sense-making. It attempted to disrupt taken-for-granted premises about leadership in higher education, questioning what we have come to know and accept as ‘reality’. In other words, I explicitly challenged the dominant understandings of leadership that render certain ways of thinking, practising and ‘becoming’ intelligible within the context of higher education and not others. Early on in my research I believed that, by collecting academics’ stories of their leadership experiences, I would be able to give ‘voice’ to those who are rarely recognised as leaders in public or scholarly spaces. In searching for a methodology that would allow me to follow this interest, I came across narrative inquiry, which seemed to be a perfect fit for both my research and for my own background, as a person with an abiding interest in the life stories of individuals.

Contemplating narrative inquiry

During the past 30 years, there have been an increasing number of studies in the social sciences that deploy narrative as a method of data collection, a tool for methodological analysis and a mode of representation. Scholars working within this ‘narrative turn’ have broadly come to agree that we live and make sense of our lives through stories (Clandinin, 2007). Narrative, in this sense, is an ontological condition of social life:

[I]t is through narrativity that we come to know, understand, and make sense of the social world, and it is through narratives and narrativity that we constitute our social identities... that all of us come to be who we are (however ephemeral, multiple, and changing) by being located or locating ourselves (usually unconsciously) in social narratives rarely of our own making.

Somers, 1994, p. 606, original emphasis

Despite the notion that identities are narratively constructed, scholars may still find themselves disagreeing about the nature of narratives and how they should be studied (Smith & Sparkes, 2006, 2008). Recent overviews of narrative studies suggest scholars approach the conceptions of narrative differently, depending on their theoretical orientations and foci. For example, scholars may view narrative identities through a (neo)realist perspective wherein narratives have the capacity to represent unique, coherent, authentic and trustworthy experiences of our selves in the world (Bochner, 2001; Crossley, 2000; Polkinghorne, 1988). On the contrary, social constructionist scholars often view narrative identities as multiple, fragmented, discursive, emerging, incomplete, performative and contextual (Gergen, 1991; Holstein & Gubrium, 2000; Sparkes & Smith, 2008). These contrasting views have also sparked ongoing debates across continents and disciplines in recent years, particularly over the issues of voice, authority and representation (see Atkinson & Delamont, 2006; Atkinson & Silverman, 1997; Bochner, 2001; Bochner & Ellis, 1999).

When I began my study, I found myself drawn to a more realist perspective as I saw an ethical imperative for me, as a researcher, to create space for the experiences of my participants who, by virtue of their position or identity, tended to be marginalised in thinking about leadership, by both their institution and also scholarly literature. However, not long after I submitted my proposal, I came to realise that my understanding of narrative was rather naïve. One particular incident contributed to the major change in direction of my study. I was presenting my research proposal at a national conference in my first year as a doctoral candidate. After my presentation, I asked the audience, most of whom were seasoned academics from different universities and polytechnics in New Zealand, to share stories about their leadership at work, stories that reflected their beliefs and values of professional life. One of the audience members commented towards the end of session that she thought leadership was ‘bullshit’. She said it did not really mean anything to her and that she believed people simply used it for their own advantage. When I heard her say this, in the heat of the conference presentation, I was angry and unsure how to respond. Nevertheless, the time was up and my audience had to depart for the next session. Despite receiving encouraging feedback from some of the audience members later, the comment stuck with me, and I rehearsed possible answers in my mind for many weeks afterwards. Once I was able to move on from my negative thoughts and emotions, I began to recognise that her comment may offer some insights for my study. If leadership is ‘bullshit’ as she suggested, why are institutions still expecting it from their staff? Why do many academics not refuse it, but instead take it seriously as part of their identities? Indeed, what makes it possible for them to think and talk about themselves as leaders in academia in the first place? Asking these questions completely changed how I viewed my topic and took me in a direction that I never anticipated. Instead of taking people’s stories of their experiences at face value, I became more interested in how individual academics tell their stories of leadership, how they construct themselves as leaders and how these identity constructions are located in the broader contexts of their institution and society. With this in mind, I adopted a social constructionist perspective as one of the major theoretical resources for my study. This perspective is not only relevant to my research focus but also similar to my worldview as a researcher and a human being.

Generally speaking, social constructionism is based on an understanding that what we come to account for in the world is relationally and socially constructed (Gergen, 1985). This resonates with my own worldview, which is deeply rooted in Buddhism. In Buddhist teaching, everything is understood as being in a state of constant change and meanings are mentally and socially constructed by human beings (Payutto, 1995). A number of scholars have pointed out that, as a core value, Buddhism shares some significant commonalities with social constructionism (Gergen, 2009; Sinclair, 2011). Both share a similar understanding that individuals actively construct the meaning of their everyday lives through language, which does not reflect, but constitutes, their reality.

Alongside social constructionism, I also drew on poststructuralist and Bakhtinian scholarship to conceptualise my study, esp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A journey in the land of the long white cloud: A Thai academic doing narrative inquiry in Aotearoa New Zealand
• 2 Enabling narratives in the ‘unhomely’ field of higher education research
• 3 Embracing new narratives in Singapore
• 4 Conversations with Bruce Lee: Capturing the richness and complexities of Chinese stories
• 5 Creative non-fiction across cultures in Asia Pacific contexts
• 6 Riding the wave of education reform: Using a reflecting team to explore the professional identities of school counsellors in Hong Kong
• 7 Enhancing understanding across generations through sharing personal narratives
• 8 Is the silent mode on? Researching teachers’ voices in Macao through narrative research
• 9 Narrative inquiry and the exploration of culture for improving teacher education
• 10 Ethical boundaries and considerations in cross-cultural narrative inquiry
• 11 What did I learn from studying one family? A narrative inquiry into my family’s cultural and educational experiences in Hong Kong and Toronto
• 12 In the minority yet finding a voice: The value of using narrative inquiry in exploring multiple identities in Hong Kong
• 13 Identity and identity education of Hong Kong Chinese people: A narrative self-study of an educator
• Index