CHAPTER FOUR: MAPPING THE METHODOLOGICAL ROUTE- PROCESS, PARADIGM AND PROCEDURE
4.4 Life History Research: Methodology for Exploring Identity Formation
represents and explains experience' (Bruner, 1990, in Cortazzi, 1993:19). The study of narrative is therefore, the study of the ways in which humans experience the world.
My purpose in the preceding discussion was to demonstrate that life history methodology has its own sophisticated organizing principles. Whether retrospective or contemporaneous, a life history involves five broad research processes. These have been identified by Plummer (1993) as preparation, data collection, data storage, data analysis and data presentation. Contrary to the belief amongst empiricists that with life history research 'anything goes', I want to assert that while narrative research challenges the canon imposed by propositional discourse, it is not a laissez-faire indulgence. While these organizing principles cannot and should not be equated with the principles of validation associated with empirical research, they provide a framework, which enables the biographer to preserve the credibility of his/her artistic endeavour without constraining the fertile imagination from discovering its limits (Eisner, 1981).
4.4 Life History Research: Methodology for Exploring Identity
research is suitable because it allows engagement with all of these dimensions, the personal, social and temporal.
Life history research foregrounds individual subjectivities in the process of knowledge construction. Itis methodology that is biographical, person-centred and a science of the singular (in society) that seeks to understand the particular and illuminate diversity rather than suppress variability. Life history is always concerned with the history of a single life and is designed to 'explain, describe and reflect upon life' (Tillman-Rogers in Hatch &
Wisniewski, 1995). Since it is characterized by a focus on the individual, the data are produced with the participants themselves. Within the context of individual lives, life history has particular appeal as Sparkes in Hatch and Wisniewski (1995),explains:
'The ability of life history to focus upon central moments, critical incidents, or fateful moments that revolve around indecision, confusion, contradiction, and ironies, gives a greater sense of process to a life and gives a more ambiguous, complex, and chaotic view of reality. It also presents more 'rounded' and believable characters than the 'flat' , seemingly irrational, and linear characters from other forms of qualitative inquiry.'
The individual subjective account is celebrated as a singular strength because it allows each to speak his own truth. Life history creates a space for the researcher to suspend his own views and beliefs. This is not done to agree necessarily with the participant but to empathise with the worldview and beliefs of reality that are constructed by the individual.
Itilluminates how s/he views the world, interprets experiences and attaches meaning to such experiences (Armstrong, 1987). In the context of exploring identity formations, Sachs (1985) explains that it is through life stories that people make sense of that which they are creating their identities and act accordingly:
'It might be said that each of us constructs and lives a narrative ... this narrative is our identities .. . if we wish to know about a man, we ask what
is his story, his real innermost story? - for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative which is constructed, continually, unconsciously by, through and in us - through our perceptions, feelings, our thoughts, our actions; not least our discourse, our spoken narrations.
Biologically and physiologically we are not different from each other historically,as narratives,each of us unique' (Sacks, 1985:105-106).
I want to endorse what Cremin (1976),in Walford, 1994:99) said:
'Individuals come to educational situations with their own temperaments, histories, and purposes, and different individuals will obviously interact with a given configuration of Education in different ways and with different outcomes.'
Dhunpath (1998) suggests that the life history approach is probably the only authentic means of understanding how motives and practices reflect the intimate intersection of institutional and individual experience in the postmodern world.
Life history methodology illuminates the changing nature of experience and identity formations over time and is suited to this study. Researchers (Portelli, 1991; Thompson, 1988; Denzin 1989; Plummer 1993; Hatch & Wisniewski 1995) have highlighted the contributions life history research can make. The focus on the individual is the primary characteristic that sets life history work apart from all other qualitative research. In sociology, Denzin (1989) and Plummer (1993) argue that by using a life history approach, human phenomena can be studied and understood from the perspective of the persons involved. The centre of life histories is the continuous lived flow of historical situated experience with all the ambiguity, variability, malleability and uniqueness that such experiences usually implies (Plummer, 1993). Life history research uses primarily oral sources. Oral sources have the advantage to tell us not just what people did,but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing and what they now think they did.
Lives are flooded with moments of indecision, turning points, confusion, contradictions
and ironies. The life history technique is peculiarly situated to discover the confusion, ambiguities and contradictions that are played in everyday experiences (Reddy: 2000).
Life histories allow a reconstruction of the economic,political,cultural, migratory and an educational history that are inaccessible through written documentation (Thompson &
Perks, 1993). Bogdon (1974:4) shares this view.
Life history is unique in allowing us to view an individual in the context of one's whole life, from birth to a point at which we encounter the person. Because of this it can lead to a fuller understanding of the stages and critical periods in the processes of development.
Itenables is to look at subjects as if they had a past with successes as well as failures and a future with hopes and fears. Itallows us to see an individual in relation to the history of time and how he/she is influenced by the various religious, social, psychological and economic currents present in hislher world (Reddy, 2000). It permits us to view the intersection with the history of their society, thereby enabling us to understand better the choices,contingencies and options given to the individual.
Since a life history constantly moves between the changing biographical history of the individual and the social history of hislher lifespan, it can provide powerful insights into the process of change. In life history research a proper focus of historical change can be attained in ways that are lacking in many other methods. The gathering of a life history will enable a subject moving to and fro between the developments of hislher own life cycle and the ways in which external crises and situations (wars, politics, religion and economics) have impinged on this. A life history cannot be told without a constant reference to historical change and this central focus on change must be seen as one of life history's values (Thompson, 1981).
In accessing understanding of experience over a lifespan, life history approach provides a critical temporal dimension to understanding lives and engages an understanding of variability of identity formations (Kathard, 2003). The retrospective, longitudinal approach provides an orientation which allows the life cycle of a single individual to be taken as a unit for study. There is an appreciation that with the perishing of each moment
the individual is left a different creature, never to repeat itself exactly. No moment or epoch is typical of the whole (Hatch & Wisniewski, 1995). The focus on the individual allows for a deeper understanding of the complex relationships between ideology and culture, the self and society. The human experience is relational and is shaped by (and shapes) the institutional and structural organization of society. A question often raised by life history researchers is, 'do participants embed their stories and interpretations within a social landscape?' Goodson (1995) suggests that they might or might not locate their experiences in a social context. To prevent a macro-blindness, it is imperative that the researcher is an active participant in the process to broaden the concern of personal truth and to consider the wider socio-historical concerns even if this is does not appear as part of the consciousness of the individual (Goodson, 1992;Thompson, 1981). In illuminating the sociopolitical and historical contexts, there lies the possibility that participants will gain an understanding of their experiences within a sociological context, by appreciating the forces shaping their lives and possibly leading to changes in how they understand their experiences.
Life history research has been used as means of understanding human action from a subjective perspective, that is, by linking identity formations and action. By placing the individual as active within a story, we can explain why he/she acted in a particular way.
Personal agency of participants is encouraged rather than a passive role (Dhunpath, 2000). Itis by nature, a positive, celebratory methodology that affords a discursive space for creating and celebrating self-understanding. It allows the researcher to gaze afresh, perhaps in astonishment, at a part of the world he/she thought had already seen and understood (Dhunpath, 2000).
I want to argue in this thesis for an approach that positions teachers not as objects to be changed but as complex subjects with power and knowledge to change.
Life history work has much to offer, given its focus on the construction and reconstruction of teachers' identities and the self, transformed continuously in relation to the discourses they occupy to make sense of their lives and the world. There are many
ways to consider the career of teaching, the reasons for becoming teachers and the factors associated with shaping teachers' identities. In this study I attempt to recognize the struggle over identity (who am I?),as inseparable from the struggle over the meanings of identities and subject positions that may be occupied by teachers in teaching discourses and practices (how do I make meaning of who I am?). Itis these complex identities I seek to understand, and the multiple and conflicting meanings teachers they create in their daily lives. Employing the life history approach enables me to understand teachers' lives as complex and identities as fluid and multiple.