Limitations of language: developing arts‐based creative narrative in stories of teachers’ identities

This paper is based on a multidimensional study employing a heuristic methodology termed ‘creative narrative’ that combines arts‐based methods with narrative inquiry. Six female teachers’ narratives of identity are explored through artistic, visual images to illuminate if and how they story ‘unconscious’. The creative narratives, illuminated through a multi‐layered extract from one creative narrative, illustrate various ways in which the participants imputed meaning and power to tacit and non‐conscious influences which were emotionally potent but previously hidden from themselves and others and that continued to affect their professional identities. The paper argues that such unconscious or non‐conscious dimensions to teachers’ lives are crucial to the experience and exercise of professional identity and yet are largely absent from our understandings and outside the capture of narrative inquiry as it is presently conceptualized. Narrative inquiry should strive to extend its theoretical boundaries and incorporate non‐verbal arts‐based research methods in order to go beyond the limits of language and capture the meaning of lived experience in more holistic ways.     

The post-human I: encountering ‘data’ in new materialism

The editors of a recent special edition of Qualitative Studies in Education map a new field of post-qualitative research and raise fundamental questions about core concepts such as ‘method’ and ‘data.’ They ask whether qualitative inquiry as we know it is any longer possible if we understand language, the human and the material as completely imbricated. In taking up the relation between language and representation as core to what is proposed as the ‘new new,’ the paper examines these questions in relation to data generated in a project called ‘Love Your Lagoons’ conducted with 10 schools and 300 children in Sydney’s water catchment. In particular, the paper focuses on data from one secondary school that offered ‘Regeneration’ as a sport option in which the students walked to their local Redbank Creek every week and spent time there. By closely attending to the circumstances of the collection of data and analyzing it through approaches offered within the ‘new new,’ insights into the relationship between language, materiality, and the human are offered. Summary comments are made about the politico/ethical project of the post-human I and the relevance of data and method to such post-qualitative inquiry.     

Using appreciative inquiry to explore the professional practice of a midwife lecturer

This paper reports on an exploration into the professional practice of a lecturer using the appreciative inquiry (AI) approach. This facilitated inquiry intentionally sought to apply the AI approach to the practice of an individual, an application that is different to its predominant usage with groups. The context for this research was the professional practice of a lecturer within an innovative narrative curriculum for midwifery. Evidence was gathered through the re-telling of moments of peak performance. The AI process starts from actual practice and returns to the implications for practice. In the process, the inquiry explores questions such as, when am I at my ‘best’ as a lecturer? What patterns and themes exist across the stories of peak performance? How can my future practice be influenced by these themes. An important aspect of this research was the facilitation of the process which supported the movement of the research process and the critical reflection that is integral to such an inquiry. Such facilitation is particularly critical to the development of provocative propositions and an action plan for future practice. The experience and findings of this research suggest that the AI approach is well suited to a holistic consideration of an individual's professional practice.     

Writing and Dialogue In,and Around,a Senior Secondary Literature Classroom

The tradition of teachers engaging in narrative-based inquiry is now well established, as is its value for creating situated knowledge about teaching. This reflexive autobiographical article weaves together narrative accounts around a senior literature classroom environment. The article features two voices: a teacher (Natalie Bellis) and a Year 12 literature student (Jessica Garcia). Through this process of narrative inquiry, the teacher reflects on her experiences of exploring literary texts with senior students within a landscape of high-stakes assessment. In this way, the teacher engages with Dorothy Smith’s notion of ‘writing the social’, by using narrative to illuminate and critically inquire into the lived experience of teaching and learning. The motif, or thread, that binds these three narrative accounts is the act of letter-writing, which serves as a metaphor for the foregrounding of the personal within a context that is shaped by external forces that can result in conformity and generality. This tension between the ‘local actualities’ of experiences and the institutional structures that govern them is theorised using de Certeau’s metaphor of the city map.     

Using narrative and discourse analysis in researching co‐principalships

After completing a longitudinal study of co‐principal shared leadership initiatives in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the author discusses some of the issues raised by her research design and methods. First, she explains the storying techniques she used to construct case narratives of each initiative. While these accounts drew largely on the participants’ own words, she shows how her own narrative analysis shaped them. She then explains a ‘pragmatic’ discourse analysis that combines elements of Foucauldian and feminist critical and poststucturalist theory (Fraser, ). In using this for a secondary analysis of the case narratives, the aim was to illuminate some of the discursive influences that were shaping, and being shaped by, the individual co‐principals and their evolving shared leadership practices. The author encountered a range of dilemmas, however, as she tried to cross boundaries between these ‘realist’ and poststructuralist research approaches. She reflects here on the implications of what Lather () has called ‘the ruins of a feminist ethnography’ and associated issues that have been raised around authorial distance and representation and participant voice and confidentiality.     

Narrative inquiry as a mediational space: examining emotional and cognitive dissonance in second‐language teachers' development

In the practice of teacher education, most would agree that critical reflection in and on the process of learning to teach and the activities of teaching play a central role in teachers' professional development. Using Vygotskian sociocultural theory, we examine how narrative inquiry functions as a culturally developed tool that mediates teachers' professional development. We analyzed narratives written by three teachers of English as a second/foreign language set in three different instructional contexts. Our analysis suggests an interwoven connection between emotion and cognition, which drove these teachers to search for mediational tools to help them externalize their experiences. The activity of engaging in narrative inquiry created a mediational space where teachers were able to draw upon various resources, such as private journals, peers and ‘expert’ or theoretical knowledge, that allow them to reconceptualize and reinternalize new understandings of themselves as teachers and their teaching activities. The intersection of experiential and ‘expert’ knowledge provided a discourse through which these teachers named experiences and constructed a basis upon which they grounded their transformed understandings of themselves as teachers and their teaching. Depending on where these teachers were in their professional development when they wrote their narratives, we uncovered evidence of idealized conceptions of teaching with commitment to action as well as the transformation of teachers' material activities. Implications for the role teachers' narrative inquiry may play in teacher education programs are provided.     

Understanding stories of professional formation during early childhood education and care practice placements

Narrative inquiry as a methodological approach enables us to examine how people represent their experiences and selves through storytelling (Chase, S. E. 2005. ‘Narrative Inquiry: Multiple Lenses, Approaches, Voices.’ In The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln, 651–679. London: Sage). To understand these constructions, other kinds of knowledge are required. Theories of social life, for example, help to interpret areas which narrative inquiry is good at revealing about human experiences such as the animation of temporality, sociality and place (Clandinin, J., V. Caine, A. Estefan, J. Huber, M. S. Murphy, and P. Steeves. 2015. ‘Places of Practice: Learning to Think Narratively.’ Narrative Works 5 (1). Accessed November 30, 2017. https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/NW/issue/view/1799). Drawing on interviews with practice educators and final-year undergraduate early childhood education and care (ECEC) students in North-West Ireland, this paper considers how narrative inquiry and education theories work together to illuminate key learning experiences of ECEC undergraduate students during 12-week practice placements. In this paper I attempt to show how two education theories – ‘Threshold Concepts’ and ‘Communities of Practice’ – shed light on the nature of these key learning experiences. The paper suggests that narrative inquiry offers an emancipatory research approach by uncovering human and reflective elements of learning journeys made by ECEC students during their practice placements.     

Theory and Practice in Mathematics Teaching Development: Critical Inquiry as a Mode of Learning in Teaching

In this paper I address the challenge of developing theory in relation to the practices of mathematics teaching and its development. I do this by exploring a notion of ‘teaching as learning in practice’ through overt use of ‘inquiry’ in mathematics learning, mathematics teaching and the development of practices of teaching in communities involving teachers and educators. The roles and goals of mathematics teachers and educators in such communities are both distinct and deeply intertwined. I see an aim of inquiry in teaching to be the ‘critical alignment’ (Wenger, 1998) of teaching within the communities in which teaching takes place. Inquiry ‘as a tool’ and inquiry ‘as a way of being’ are important concepts in reflexive developmental processes in which inquiry practice leads to better understandings and development of theory.     

Teachers' environmental education as creating cracks and ruptures in school education: a narrative inquiry and an analysis of teacher rhetoric

This article discusses a narrative inquiry as a methodology for understanding and examining teachers' interpretations of their environment‐related teaching experiences. Focusing on the value of teacher stories for interrogating the discursive practices of schools as institutional contexts, four main rhetorical themes are identified to illustrate how teachers' engagements in practice and thinking with environmental education display ongoing identity work. Five Korean secondary science teachers' stories illustrate the dynamic processes and interplay between multiple discourses, such as the ‘proper’, ‘good’, ‘science’ teacher, and the cultural norms, resources and subject positions available to them, as they take up and explain their own and others' meanings and subject positions in science education and environmental education. The paper discusses the value of narrative inquiry to conceptualising teacher agency in ways that offer alternatives to conventional research perspectives in this field, and in taking account of the possible meanings of environmental education, the possibility of creating cracks and ruptures in the ‘sense‐making’ discourses and ‘sense that is made’ of experiences of environmental education and school education more widely.     

Teaching and Teacher Education: Complexity Redux

Using narrative inquiry, these authors explored the diverse types of reasoning that seem to direct stakeholders’ approaches to educational decision-making. They labeled these approaches as simple, complicated, and complex. They begin their account by explaining the attributes of narrative inquiry that guided their work. Through the scholarly space their conversations created, they charted distinctions within the field of education between simple, complicated, and complex reasonings and solutions. They then turned to a selection of anchor texts from existing scholarship that furthered their grasp of these three approaches and their application to educational challenges. As suggested by the title, their ultimate leanings favored complexity. In combination, their ideas strengthened a claim that the choice of a decision making option differentially influences policy and classroom actions.     

Plotting intersections along the political axis: The interior voice of dissenting mathematics teachers

The supposed apolitical nature of mathematics is an institutional frame that functions to sustain specific power structures within schools. This paper disrupts the common assumption that mathematics (as a body of knowledge constructed in situated historical moments)is free from entrenched ideological motives. Using narrative inquiry, the paper examines the ways in which novice mathematics teachers negotiate the intersection of curriculum and institutional politics. After outlining a theoretical framework, the paper performs a story entitled ‘political text’ which reveals the plaintive, dissenting voice of a novice teacher as she negotiates the friction between her life history and the ossified canonicity of mathematics curriculum. Through the critical and reflexive voice of the novice teacher, the naturalized concepts of counting and measurement are playfully revisioned. The frequent silencing of such oppositional readings underscores the deeply embedded conflict between voice and text in the contemporary mathematics classroom.     

Institutional storytelling and personal narratives: reflecting on the ‘value’ of narrative inquiry

With the ‘narrative turn’, a momentum gathered in the wider social sciences that asserted that listening to, asking for, gathering and analysing stories provided a new impetus to researching human behaviour. The argument evolved: people are storied beings and to generate a more in-depth understanding of people and their experiences, researchers need to begin with their stories. But the stories people tell are also deeply embedded in narrative frameworks and narrative environments that make up what I conceptualise as institutional storytelling. Arguably, institutional storytelling has a profound impact on the stories people can and do tell. Narrative inquiry has much to offer to the analysis of institutional and personal narratives. In this article, I will address the question of the relevance of narrative inquiry to gather and analyse the stories that people and institutions tell. Drawn from an empirical sociological study of women’s narratives of their weight management experiences in the context of their participation in weight management classes, I present a case for narrative ethnography as a critical methodological strategy to analyse the complex relationship between institutional and personal narratives.     

Quality Assurance with Respect to University Teaching in South Africa: a narrative analysis

In this paper, national research projects underway which are aimed at establishing national standards on lecturing capabilities within a new national qualifications framework, are argued to typify a policy narrative informed by functionalist understandings of education, curriculum and evaluation. This narrative is counter‐posed with two others, found largely but not exclusively in the historically white liberal English‐speaking universities, which critique that narrative, arguing that curriculum development, the evaluation of courses and programmes, and the assessment of teaching, are complex activities which are context‐bound, and incapable of being reduced to the measurement of the performance of certain capabilities. In the analysis undertaken in the paper, the two critiques identified are argued to be at odds with the dominant policy narrative partly because, although much of the language and the intentions are similar, at base lie fundamentally different concepts of quality. The dominant narrative is argued to regard quality as ‘fitness for purpose’, where the overall purpose of higher education is assumed to be singular and uncontested, and as meeting certain pre‐specified standards. The critiques understand quality either in the liberal sense as an absolute to be aspired to, or in a more constructivist way, as significantly adding to existing levels of development in particular sectors, thereby contributing to greater justice and equality in South African society. These different understandings have different implications for the assurance of quality in university teaching. The power differentials between the narratives are explored and it is argued that unless a way is found to accommodate the different perspectives, resistance to the dominant narrative might undermine its implementation. In this paper a metanarrative ‘told’ by the comparison of the three narratives, which attempts to take into account the conceptual dissonance examined, is put forward. It is suggested that, in order to lead to a policy‐relevant narrative on quality assurance with respect to university teaching, a conceptual distinction between ‘quality’ and ‘standards’ be made. With this conceptual separation, policies may be developed to assure both standards and quality, using different methodologies and different implementing bodies in such a way that potential resistance to the dominant narrative may be averted.     

Sharing practices,but what is the story? Exploring award-winning teachers’ conceptions of teaching

This paper critically considers the attempt by a research-intensive university in Asia to draw on and make public the practices of teaching award winners in different disciplines through the use of narrative vignettes. More specifically, this paper examines what the vignettes suggest about the connection between award-winning teachers’ conceptions of teaching (CT) on the one hand, and scholarly investigations of practice on the other, and to what extent the vignettes meet the aim of using the scholarship of teaching and learning as an instrument of effective academic development. Content analysis of the vignettes revealed that award-winning teachers’ CT tend to focus predominantly on enhancing learning, followed by encouraging collective knowledge creation and transmission of knowledge. A two-dimensional framework was also used to analyse the vignettes along a tacit-integrated continuum and within an intuitive-reflective frame of inquiry. The findings are discussed in relation to teachers’ perception of their impact on students’ learning and ways to enhance their own practice, with implications for teaching awards, documentation, and dissemination of high-level teaching achievement.     

Research paradigms and adult education

Those who see research as structured by ‘paradigms’ of inquiry are often unclear about the precise nature of these paradigms due to the complexity of the concept. It is argued that there are competing understandings of paradigm, not simply different substantive paradigms. A ‘strong’ or socio‐historical account associated with Kuhn's work is contrasted with a ‘weak’ or philosophical account of paradigm that has become influential in educational circles. This analysis is applied to adult education as an academic field, which in terms of the ‘strong’ account of paradigm is not a unified scholarly enterprise but one animated by divergent, institutionalised research traditions. Three traditions are discussed in detail: participation studies, adult learning theory and participatory research. It is concluded that the field will be advanced by recognising the paradigmatic depth of its scholarly conflicts, and relating these differences to developments in other fields of human inquiry.     

Basic qualitative analysis with QUALPRO

This paper examines a method for having preservice teachers engage in narrative inquiry with students in practicum schools. The inquiry entails: conducting a tape‐recorded interview with a student using a supplied, semistructured interview schedule; transcribing the interview; writing a narrative portrait of the student; and writing reflections. Theoretical rationales for the methods are presented as well as student teachers’ responses to the component parts of the assignment. What student teachers do and learn when they carry out this assignment was studied with reference to the work of 150 student teachers. The study clarified the ways in which the narrative inquiry supported a more self‐reflexive, connected, and friendly way of being with children or young people. In learning to relate to children, student teachers also learned how to teach. The assignment provided a contextualized and empowering way of taking up questions related to teaching and learning and of becoming critical inquirers about themes of oppression. Besides particular knowledge about children, themselves, and teaching, the student teachers also acquired a mode of inquiry for understanding new teaching situations.     

An entry into a creative,rhizomatic narrative inquiry into young people’s identity construction

Located in a larger study that attempted to challenge taken-for-granted or homogenizing assumptions about constructions of adolescent identity and to interrogate radically the process of qualitative research in this field [O’ Grady, G. (2012). “Constructing Identities with Young People using Creative Rhizomatic Narrative.” PhD Thesis. Queen’s University Belfast], the paper picks up the narrative of the research journey at a moment of meeting with Kim Etherington, Professor of Narrative Research at the University of Bristol. It opens with the conversation that ensued and my introduction to the figure of the rhizome [Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. ([1987] 2004). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. London: Continuum, 8) which, alongside other poststructuralist ideas, I subsequently used to conceptualize and frame the inquiry. In grappling with the questions posed in our conversation, I hope to make visible three interweaving themes in this paper: My difficulties initially in ‘inhabiting’ the philosophical positions I took up in this creative narrative inquiry; my growing commitment to a form of narrative inquiry that challenges inherited dominant understandings of subjectivity and research methodologies and finally, my encounters with ‘otherness’ in the construction of self/other as a thematic thread that interwove all the narratives of the young people in the larger study.