Narrative Inquiry

Schaafsma and Vinz write, "The beauty of a good narrative -- it doesn't over tell; it doesn't preach; it doesn't lecture; it doesn't explain."

In narrative research, then, the reader is "trusted to do some of the work with the narrator/researcher as guide," and because I see teaching in a similar way -- students should be trusted to do the work with the teacher -- narrative research seems most appropriate for my dissertation. But more importantly, while I am an English teacher, I am foremost a teacher of/with students, human beings, and so when it comes considering what is worth researching and writing about, the answer has to be, as Schaafsma and Vinz say, people. So then because I am a teacher of students in the discipline of English, then it is logical and necessary that I use narrative inquiry to talk about the narrative of our lives: "...narrative shapes our experiences and portrays experiences simultaneously."

Schaafsma and Vinz (2011) tell us that narrative inquiry matters because “it compels us to care about people’s lives in all their complexity and often moves us to action (p. 1). In educational inquiry, research should inform action, so what must emerge on the page is willingness for the author and participants to “grapple with issues of responsibility, power, relations, and ethics as it evidences the importance of learning with others (p. 8). In order to learn with others, I see now that I need multiple voices. And in this, I imagine the voices of legislators, school administrators, teachers, parents and genocide survivors all grappling with issues of responsibility, power, relations and ethics. I see the grappling as a unifying thread in the stories. However, I also see the grappling as a sign of what Schaafsma and Vinz refer to as “first told stories.” When a story is told for the first time, there are gaps and fissures wherein rests “deeper stories, glimpses into people’s beliefs, assumptions, and experiences” (p. 50). To me, this means that I must return for a “re-telling” or another story that goes deeper into one of those fissures; in fact, it is in the re-telling and the re-living of stories that inquiry begins.

Three other books that helped evolve my orientation to narrative inquiry are Danling Fu’s “My Trouble is My English” Asian Students and the American Dream (1995), Greg Michie’s Holler of you Hear Me : The Education of a Teacher and His Students (2009) and Arlene Elowe MacLeod’s Accommodating Protest: Working Women, The New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (1991). I realize that the subjects of these two texts are significantly different; however, I think this speaks to the evolution of my orientation to inquiry. I am beginning to read more into how texts are constructed rather than just engaging in the text's content. I see the table of contents as a strategy for telling a story and how that strategy, although deliberate, will always have gaps and fissures that warrant future work.

Danling Fu’s work in “My Trouble is My English” Asian Students and the American Dream (1995) combines narrative and case study. She situates herself in the story in her introduction by telling the reader about her own experience in learning English. Her book is organized with a chapter that is a family story, and then each subsequent chapter goes deeper into the stories of three children in this family. Within each chapter, Fu takes on the role as a research and a practitioner in some instances to draw upon her story as an observer, the teacher’s story, and then the story of the participant. Vinz (2011) expresses concern with characterization in narrative inquiry wondering if the author has the right to tell a story for a “character”: “Should he be speaking for himself? At what point to researchers become guilty of sensationalism or romanticism, especially when they write about populations historically stereotyped by the media and the academy” (p. 109)? By giving her characters a strong voice in her work, Fu avoids such sensationalism. It is clear to the reader that although Fu has a personal stake in her work she recognizes that the personal and social are not binaries but “permeable membranes” that influence and become part of the other (Schaafsma & Vinz, 2005, p. 64). The story does not belong to any one participant in Fu’s book; the stories complement one another bring both light and complexity to second language acquisition.

Michie’s work, while incorporating student narrative set off in complementary yet bold-faced font, is more about his experience than that of his students. Unlike Fu’s work where she is almost re-telling her story through the voices of a younger generation of English Language Learners, Michie is retelling his story is his own words. His story is generalizable to his readers while Fu’s story is generalizable to her participants with student voices woven into the narrative rather that set apart in another section. I think what I see is that there is an intimacy of the subject in Fu’s and an intimacy with the narrator in Michie’s work.

Macleod’s Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (1991) actually seems closest to the work that I hope to do. This is a bit closer to an ethnographic study only because she is an outsider going into a setting for research where she conducts multiple case studies. Macleod recognizes a phenomenon, lower-middle –class women in Cairo who had not previously veiled adopt the higab. Macleod explores the subculture in which the phenomenon occurs by not only listening to stories but by observing behaviors and investigating conflicting ideologies. Macleod knows that what her participants say is only one part of the story; thus, in collecting many different stories, Macleod is able to unveil the tensions that exposed this phenomenon as an “accommodating protest” or a way of redistricting power. While I include this text here as an example of inquiry, I also consider this concept of “accommodating protest” to be fascinating and wonder if teacher accommodate policy in some form or another.

I wish to study the human experience and to illuminate human actions through the study of experience. The experiences reveal complexity. As a teacher of (more often with) teachers, I see the struggle for answers, for comfort, for knowing the “best way” of achieving results or capturing the attention of students. Teachers seem fearful of doubt or swimming in the tension with their students. I think this is explored a great deal in social justice education, but I think this will be very valuable as I begin to explore how teacher accommodate policy mandates, particularly how teacher have accepted or rejected the responsibility to teach about the Holocaust and other genocides. And, I think stories are a place for me to not only collect these experiences and tensions but where teacher can ultimately go to enter into places of crises with their students, stories of survival, stories of grief, stories of disgust, and stories of regret. In the gaps and fissures of stories, we can ask questions together.


References

Auron, Y. (2005). The pain of knowledge: Holocaust and genocide issues in education. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.

Fu, D. (1995). My trouble is my English: Asian students and the American dream. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

Macleod, A. E. (1991). Accommodating protest: working women, the new veiling, and change in Cairo. New York: Columbia University Press.

Michie, G. (2009). Holler if you hear me: the education of a teacher and his students (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College.

Mikaelsen, B. (2004). Tree Girl . New York: HarperTempest.

Schaafsma, D. & Vinz, R. (2011). Narrative inquiry: approaches to language and literacy research. New York: Teachers College.

Smith, L. (1999) Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Book.

Ung, L. (2000). First they killed my father: a daughter of Cambodia remembers. New York: HarperCollinsPublishers.