MAPPING THE RESEARCH JOURNEY - MY RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY
4.3 Research methodology: Positioning career life stories
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removing some part of the research. Sometimes, I was obliged to talk to Rwandan colleagues to share some related ethical matter or thoughts before proceeding with the writing. In summary my instinct and lived experiences helped me in making judgements regarding certain challenges and ways of proposing possible solution (McLaghlin, 2003).
My reflections and engagements showed me that ethical research on sensitive topics was possible when employing appropriate research methods. Consequently, the research methodology was designed to help me to present participating teachers through their own voice. Therefore, the use of career life stories was preferred in this research. In addition, it is quite evident that research aimed at how to better understand a phenomenon could help policy makers and other stakeholders in education to work towards a better Rwanda are worth pursuing even when faced by ethical challenges. It is necessary to note that the technical team in the Rwandan Ministry of Education in charge of issuing ethical clearance should provide appropriate guidelines when ethical problems should arise. The more practical aspects of this research are discussed through the next sections including the research methodology which explains how data were gathered and analysed.
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overarching research methodology are also outlined. In particular, attention is paid to the benefits and shortcomings of using career life stories as a methodology.
Regarding the conceptualisation of career life stories, the latter are located in the broad category of narrative research. Therefore, life stories are close to other narratives such as life history, oral history, biographies or autobiographies.
Concerning life story, it is conceptualised as,
the story a person chooses to tell about the life he or she has lived, told as completely and honestly as possible, what the person remembers of it and what he or she wants others to know of it, usually as a result of a guided interview by another. The resulting life story is the narrative essence of what has happened to the person. It can cover the time from birth to the present or before and beyond. It includes the important events, experiences, and feelings of lifetime (Atkinson, 1998, p.125) … “and is a way of understanding better the past and the present and a way of leaving the legacy for the future (Atkinson, 2007, p.
233).
According to the above quote, life stories are accounts about a person’s past, present and future. Regarding the form, life stories can be in a written or oral format or in people’s minds. Life stories express lived human experience. In different cases, people narrate their memorable times to others by bringing together into a coherent text disparate ideas, characters, events and other ideas of life that were not linked before (McAdams, 2008).
The demarcation between life stories and life history seems not to be very clear. Life history “attempts to locate the individuals in their overall life experiences as well as broader socio-historical background within which they live” (Seetal, 2005, p.65). Both life story and life history have been used interchangeably and have little difference based on emphasis and scope. An oral history or life story are mainly concerned with a specific aspect of a person’s life, such as work life, or a special role in the life of a community. Therefore, the focus is about a specific historical event, issue, time or place. When the story is about a person’s entire life, it is referred to as a life story or life history (Atkinson, 1998). The last category, life story which deals with work life, is my focus for this research.
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Autobiography is also considered as a version of life history (Seetal, 2005) and McAdams (2008) includes autobiographies in life stories. But, due to the focus of some studies on teachers’ lives and careers, it was found necessary to maintain a distinction between biographies/autobiographies and life history (Connelly &
Clandinin, 1990; Goodson, 2008). In addition, autobiographies are personal stories that include the perspective of the writer who is also the participant, whereas life history is biographical but involves the researcher who has to use different methods and sources (Seetal, 2005). According to Atkinson (1998), the difference between autobiography and life history lies in the use of interviews and documents for autobiographies. In other words, autobiographies do not only rely on memories but rather on other sources to confirm the facts (Pasupathi, 2003). Another difference between life story and other forms of narratives is their use. For instance, life story is mainly used in folklore whereas the others are mainly used in anthropology. There are also historical biographies that use archival research. Historical biographies have, however, been criticized for their uni-dimensional and simplistic approach (Barman, 2010). They want to understand an individual life. But, some collective biographies work on several persons at a time.
Confusion may also rise between life stories or other narratives such as annals or chronicles. Annals are concerned with dated records of events. They do not attach importance to specific links between events and an interpretative purpose is not considered. Chronicles on the other hand are composed of events in a chronological way but the explanatory structure for linking the events is unspecified. When these matters are present, chronicles become narratives (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990).
In educational research, narratives are used because people are storytellers by nature and have abilities to feel and talk about internal and external experiences (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; McAdams, 2008). The use of narratives serves to study how people experience the world. In education, personal and social stories are constructed because they help to learn about the subject matter or about the strengths and shortcomings of teaching. Some scholars posit that “this fundamental link of narrative with teaching and learning as human activities directly points to its value as an educational research tool” (Webster & Mertova, 2007, p.15). Thus,
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stories are used by educational researchers to understand some phenomenon experienced in the field of education.
It is important to specify the type of life story which is applied in this research study.
McAdams (2008) proposed two types of life stories. For him, life stories can either combine multiple aspects of a life in one story or evoke particular events and settings in everyday life. For my research, I chose the second type which focuses on particular events. Thus, career life stories are related to a specific aspect of a person’s life, teaching the Genocide and its related controversial issues in the case of my study. The major aim of career life stories is not to focus on teachers’ historical lives but on their educational experiences. However, in this research some biographical aspects of the history teachers, mainly their educational backgrounds, are also considered.
Career life stories are not only for telling stories. Rather, what is more important is the construction and meaning of career life stories (Andrews, Squire, & Tamboukou, 2013; Gubrium & Holstein, 2008; Jones, 2013). Even though, I am not working within the critical paradigm, stories help practitioners to reflect on what they are doing to change positively, not only their future, but also that of learners (Webster & Mertova, 2007). Thus, stories help to give meaning to oneself and the world at large.
Why did I choose career life stories for this research? Fraenkel and Wallen (2006) include the design flexibility amongst the major characteristics of qualitative research whereby they explain that qualitative research “avoids getting locked into rigid designs that eliminate responsiveness; pursue new paths of discovery as they emerge”. As the Genocide and its related controversial issues are historical events, I found more appropriate to use career life stories. As “experience happens narratively
… educational experience should be studied narratively” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p.19). In fact, stories are the documents of life (Gubrium & Holstein, 2008). For example, oral history was at the heart of African life even before the arrival of Europeans. People used to tell stories related to their daily lives. The importance of stories in oral cultures is significant and even Western culture retains oral practices (Webster & Mertova, 2007). In light of the aforementioned I had, an assumption that teachers’ experiences presented in forms of stories was a way of giving them a voice
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to talk about their experiences, which could be restored for the benefit of the readers of this study. In addition, stories can better present the socio-political context in which the teaching of Genocide and its related controversial issues takes place.
Teachers’ experiences keep on growing as stories are also constituted by old and new events (Webster & Mertova, 2007). The way teachers taught the Genocide and its related controversial issues for the first time is in all probability different now.
Different events happened in the interim including teachers’ personal development, new policies, possible discovery of new evidence related to the Genocide or improvement of teaching resources. Thus, the use of career life stories helped me to explain how teachers’ experiences keep changing in a changing context. In this regard, career life stories helped me to grasp different changes that happened in teachers’ professional lives in line with the teaching of the Genocide and its related controversial issues. In addition, teachers’ stories helped me to assess what they are teaching such as official and unofficial issues.
Career life stories do also have some shortcomings. In career stories, participants are required to narrate their professional life. This telling can be altered because it involves the memory (Pasupathi, 2001). Sometimes people can forget certain events. In addition to memory deficiency, narrators can include their ideologies and interests in their stories (Andrews et al., 2013; Atkinson, 1998; 2007; Riessman, 1993). Additionally people can be biased or make mistakes (Lowenthal, 1997). In fact, people tend to forget details of events as time passes while they also internalise new experiences. As a result, some events become more important than others and the meaning attributed to them can also change due to the change of personal status (McAdams, 2008). As Andrews et al. (2013, p.44) advance, “narrative cannot be repeated exactly, since words never ‘mean’ the same thing twice”. This is why stories require interpretation because stories do not speak for themselves (Riessman, 1993). In my case, I was obliged to interact with the research participants more than once by means of different methods to understand the actual meaning of some issues that were unclear. Thereafter, I used my own understanding to advance further interpretations of the stories.
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Researchers mention a series of methods that could be used for constructing stories (Atkinson, 1998; Connelly & Clandinin, 1988; Riessman, 1993; Savickas, 2005).
These include, amongst others, written and visual texts, field notes of shared experience, participants’ and their own commentaries, journal records, autobiographies and biographical writing, storytelling, unstructured interviews and personal philosophies. The following section details methods used in this research to construct the career life stories.