The methodology of a study serves to describe and analyse the methods which have been employed in that study. It is essentially concerned with understanding the research process used in particular methods (Cohen et al., 2007).
The methodology I have selected for my study is narrative inquiry which is defined by O’
Reilly-Scanlon (2000) as one which brings to the fore people’s personal stories. It is a methodology which enables people to speak in their own voices as opposed to one which strives for quantitative precision. Its main concern is to understand how individuals construct, change and make sense of their worlds (Cohen et al., 2007). The underlying premise is that human experience is essentially ‘storied experience’ and that
listening to people’s voices in their stories is an excellent way of discovering what is really going on in the world (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999).
A central premise of narrative inquiry, according to Chiu-Ching and Yim-Mei Chan (2009), is that narrative is grounded in experience which has about it a ‘temporality’, a
‘sociality’ and a sense of ‘place’. As I apply this to my study, ‘temporality’ is seen in the fact that the events and people of my experience have a past and a present. There is also a future orientation since I anticipate a better future, both for myself and for those readers who co-research and co-produce with me. ‘Sociality’ is present in my study in that there is both a personal nature to my experience and a socio-political context which accommodates it. ‘Place’ is of central significance to me since it refers to the unique southern African geopolitical spatial contexts of my story, and the political, geographical and educational spaces within them, which are so powerfully at work in framing the events and people of my experience. This is the ‘spatial turn’ of my study to which reference has already been made.
I use narrative inquiry because of the centrality of my own story. If I am to be understood, as learner and teacher, and a white South African male, with the attitudes, beliefs, feelings, past experiences, hopes and fears that accompany me, what better way than to listen to me as I tell my story? Furthermore, since narrative inquiry gives a better understanding of the person that I am it is possible that the methodology will help me to understand the process of my socialisation and also to engage in new ways with the people of present day South Africa. There are also implications for me as a professional educator in respect of my understanding of my past practice and sensitising me to current teaching realities.
Having said this, I acknowledge that while I tell my story, there are other perspectives of this story and the socio-political context in which I grew up. I give my story primacy in my narrative chapters which is where I think ‘with’ my story. Other voices about me, and my context, drawn primarily from published and archival material, and from the responses of the people I asked to read my narrative, are presented in my analysis chapter which is where I think ‘about’ my story. This is in accordance with my identification of silences within my narrative. It is as I move between my story and these other voices/stories that my study becomes autoethnographical and a more balanced
account of me emerges. My thinking ‘with’ my story and ‘about’ my story is discussed in detail further on.
I believe that it is also appropriate to mention that since I regard mine as a ‘writerly’ text (in which readers are invited into my text to deconstruct and reconstruct for themselves) my story cannot be regarded as mine alone. It cannot, in this sense, be regarded as having primacy over the stories others might construct about the same or similar experiences in the past. I discuss ‘writerly’ texts in more detail further on, distinguishing them, as I do so, from ‘readerly’ texts.
It is important to note that while I relied on certain visual material I did so as a means of prompting memory only. I decided not to employ visual methodologies in this thesis. I used text as image and in doing so agree with La Spina (1998) that image is text and text is image. I have, nevertheless, included a few selected photographs (Appendix …) taken in the significant spaces of Springs, Luanshya, St. Stephen’s College, the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg and the Edgewood College of Education (Fig. 1).
While it is my intention that they should do no more than illustrate key parts of my text it does seem appropriate to comment briefly upon them.
Although they were selected at random they present a narrative of their own, one which is strongly supportive of key threads within my written narrative. They ooze whiteness and I am immersed in it from the time of my being a young child. There is nothing to show any connection with a non-white world. When I engage with Africans it is only with them as a servant class or when they agree with me and my fellow whites, and on my terms, as is shown so well in the Edgewood boardroom. The proud Victorian architecture of the Arts block of the University of Natal, along with the bourgeois notion of dressing for dinner at both university and school, with white school boys being served by African men in the case of the latter, are supportive of the notion of whites being privileged and in charge. Even the African landscape is there for the taking. Privilege abounds and yet, given the focus on classrooms, formal study spaces and university buildings, and what they represent in terms of academic achievement, it is as if I deserve nothing less.