ORIENTATION
Cubist principle: Three-dimensional figures and space reconfigured in a new dimension of time and space.
Picasso restructured and transformed the female forms into a series of harsh angular planes.
of Coloured facets shaded in a way that gives them a certain three-dimensionality.
("Culture Shock: Flashpoints" 2002)
This chapter has two sections depicting the storied lives of the research participants. Section A presents an argument for representing the storied narratives in two different narrative forms.
Included is a discussion of my interpretative struggles as co-constructor of the storied narratives, having to deal with issues of representation of the participants' voices. It briefly focuses on the process of ensuring validity of the research stories created.
Section B is a representation of the stories. Part One includes four storied narratives in first person and Part Two includes life stories of two teachers written in the third person.
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SECTION A: ISSUES OF SUBJECTIVITY
The "crisis" of representation
THE STORIED NARRATIVES
I write up four stories in the role of the ventriloquist and assume the role of first person narrator in the storied narratives that I have referred to as Text One, Text Two, Text Three and Text Four. These stories are presented in Part One. In this layer of interpretation, I consider the particular, individual account within its Coloured and faceted form.
In Part Two, I have chosen to write two of the stories in the role of "evangelist" or "interpreter".
This was a consciously chosen decision by me to write the stories in the third person narration, a form in which a "reporting" of the teacher's "voice" is an interpretation of the words and message of the teacher, by the narrator (the messenger). In retelling the teacher's life story in a third person narrative, I would like to make overt my presence by moving my standpoint, as in the cubist work. These two stories are likened to the two outer figures (Chapter Three, page 76) with the "accentuated mask-like appearance" (Arnason 1969). The mask symbolically represents the "face" I give to the figures, asserting my perspective of the teacher's life, in my words, to a large extent.
While I sought to fulfil the ground rules in this biographical narrative, I created the space for further learning about knowledge and meaning. Narrating the story differently was enticing as well as challenging. However, as much as I acted as the vehicle for transmission (as messengeribearer) of the narration, how I narrated the stories, and what narrative forms the stories take acknowledge my power in this relationship. Essential to the activist stance that I take in the research process, is also my critical awareness and sensitivity to the power relations in these conversations and the teller's vulnerability when they enter into this relationship with me.
I am able to "freeze frame" this layer of reconfigured time in a kind of traditional research manner for in-depth analysis. All the stories were co-constructed or co-created within a bounded temporal period marking a beginning point, a middle and an end (Polkinghorne 1995, 17). In synthesising the data, in the form of stories within the two different representational styles, I had to provide the specific contexts and enough detail so that they appear as unique individuals within particular situations, and I had to be able to differentiate one teacher's life story from the next (Polkinghorne 1995). The power of a storied outcome was therefore derived from its presentation of a distinctive individual, in a unique situation, dealing with issues in a unique manner.
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However, while I took on this stance of anonymity to tell the teacher's story, what was narrated was a co-construction between the teacher and myself. In the storied narratives I have consciously left room for openings, not closures, through the expansion of our ways of knowing.
While the verbal narrative articulates the conscious, I intentionally created sites of vulnerability for the possibility of the evaded in the teachers' lives. Including photographs chosen by the teachers, the favourite songs we listened to, poems they wrote of themselves and diagrammatic illustrations, extended the dialogue about how they experienced their lives, their silences, desires and needs. Including these cultural forms into the storied narratives is useful; as clues or elements of verbal realism they validate my concern about "what is reality?" I found the cultural forms powerful for transforming the less clearly articulated, to unfreeze memories and to trigger off critical moments in the teacher's life. They also serve as faithful "realities" to the actual data produced by the researched acting as real themes in counterpoint to the co-construction of the story.
Through their narratives, the teachers have given me ways of penetrating their thoughts and desires, the unarticulated silences and absences that shaped their practices and the potential ways of performing their success in their teacher position. Although I know that what I perceive is only part of the reality before me, every teacher creates her/his own world and it is through the narratives that I learn to understand "a life" told and experienced through, with, and against other ways of knowing.
Relationships and issue of voice
I was aware as researcher that I had to make certain inclusions and exclusions in generating the story from the data, decisions that were shaped by the research questions that this study sought to explore. Therefore, as much as the relationship between the researcher and researched is a dynamic one, it was very difficult sustaining and maintaining that dynamism. As the researcher I did have the final authority to describe and re-inscribe the stories in the way that I did in terms of the research focus and my responsibility to offer an explanation for the study I set out to research. The narratives were not simply a matter of compiling or aggregating happenings or events: they also had to be drawn together into a systemic whole. Once again, I find drawing parallels with the visual metaphor of a cubist work appropriate at this point. Just as a cubist painting is a visual representation of reality re-configured in a new kind of space so is narrative a verbal representation of reality re-configured in a new dimension of time (Vanhoozer 1991, 37).
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As researcher, I faced the complex task of constructing a "story" of peoples lives, "of complex human experiences unfolding through time, as it stands out at any present moment through recollection and imagination" (Heidegger 1962 cited in Polkinghorne 1995). These storied narratives are therefore not objective representations or mirrored reflections of the teachers' lives as they actually occurred; they are rather a series of constructions. As the cubist work reveals, lives are a complication of different levels of reality (Arnason 1969). These stories are dialogical (re)productions resulting from the interactions between the teachers and myself, a composition of events and happenings Coloured and filtered by my views, - by my views from the time of its collection and my own subject positioning as an Indian woman educator.
Experiences of "member checks"
The choices I make reflect my power as researcher. While these stories were told in particular ways by the different teachers, I made choices about how I described and inscribed these stories, what I included and marginalised. I have actively composed the shape and form as I narrated the stories. As the narrator, I provided another layer of meaning to the story being told. I have a story, one that is embedded in my culture, language, gender, race and beliefs.
This is how I came to the decision to send to the teachers the stories that describe their ways of existence before I wrote out the final version of their narratives. I sent them this section of the study in which I produced a storied narrative that focuses on their ways of existence, that included the following: the significant relations in their life, practising religion, practising politics, practising education, practising affirming, desirable and joyful moments in their lives and learning how to practise successfully in their teacher position. This portion of my study was about clarifying and elaborating certain issues, and as I found, collecting additional information.
I had conducted member checks as I interviewed them. After a series of interviews, I would often ask the teachers what they thought about the interpretations I was making about their lives.
I also member checked in this fashion with my supervisor, my colleagues and my husband.
Two-and-a-half years later, after I had a "final" version of the interpretation, I visited each one of the teachers and presented them with a copy together with scanned photographs that were going to be included. In the time that lapsed between the interviews and the written interpretation, one of teachers suffered a serious medical setback, losing her "voice" due to the paralysis of the muscles in her throat.
The teachers and I agreed to meet two weeks later. After my initial doubt about their response, I met with each of the teachers, in their homes, eating houses and workplaces. I was anxious about their response, but more than that I wanted to know how it mattered to their lives. I
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wanted them to know how I struggled to write these stories, that they had consumed my life in many ways and transformed my practices. I suppose that is what a study of this nature should do. I hear their words in my lectures with the student teachers I teach, and in the lectures I have with the teachers who attend post-graduate studies.
When we did meet my questions to them were simple: What do you think about the story I have finally written? What aspects of the interpretation do you disagree with? What do you like about the story? One of the teachers requested that I remove from the story certain details about her family members. But she also offered me additional information on other aspects of her life, which I found very helpful and which assisted me in the theorising.
On the other hand I was really disappointed when one of the teachers explained to me in my telephone conversation with her that she had not yet opened the envelope. "I will do so soon"
she replied. This really "sunk" me. Only later she explained how low she had been feeling and that not reading the story did not in any way show a lack of interest. My real dread happened when one of the teachers who described to me how much she loved what I had written and acknowledged how much work I had put into it, phoned me to let me know about her father who had passed away. However, our conversation did not end there. She expressed her desire to meet with me because his death had affected her and what she told in the story needed to be reconsidered. There was a tone of censure.
The other teachers found this an opportune time to offer me additional information. The captions that I asked each teacher to provide for their personal stories worked very well. I also requested them to include captions and descriptions of the photographs.
I am not really sure even now as I offer the storied narratives in the written form in this chapter, whether the member check really helped me to get an honest critique from the teachers.
Generally it was a kind of silence and politeness that was also troubling me about the teachers' responses. One teacher was just glad that someone had listened to her story. At the end of all of this, I am still not sure if I have it "right". I just have to know that the approval and the silence are a reminder to be responsible to these lives. As I continue to write these stories through which I offer my interpretation and critique, I continually think about what responsibility to these teachers' lives actually mean. It is on this note that I go on to write the next section of this chapter.
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