Chapter 3 Research methodology
3.2 Using narrative inquiry to explore teachers’ learning and change
Reading and telling stories have always played an important role in my life. I have vivid memories of my childhood, engaging the neighbourhood children with fascinating stories that I had heard, read or created. When I became a mother I used stories to entertain my children and their friends. In my practice as a teacher of English and Dramatic Arts I naturally turn to stories to illustrate my lessons. Whilst considering a research method that would be most suitable for this study I was drawn to narrative inquiry. I remember sitting in the library sifting through some books for my research when I was captured by the title of a book, Stories Lives Tell: Narrative and Dialogue in Education (Noddings & Witherell, 1991). “What stories do teachers’ lives tell?” I knew at that moment that if I wanted to learn more about teachers and how they learn and change as professionals, I had to delve deeper into their lives, and narrative inquiry would allow me to do this.
Teachers “not only possess knowledge; they can also be creators of knowledge”
(Johnson & Colombek, 2002, p. 2). The narrative inquiry approach is useful in exploring the lives of these teachers who learn, change and become creators of new knowledge. It is through their stories of past and present that we are able to understand their self-directed learning and change. Connelly and Clandinin (2006, p. 477) state that:
Arguments for the development and use of narrative inquiry come out of a view of human experience in which humans, individually and socially, lead storied lives. People shape their daily lives by stories of who they and others are and as they interpret their past in terms of these stories.
Story, in the current idiom, is a portal through which a person enters the world and by which their experience of the world is interpreted and made personally meaningful.
Using “stories as portals” allows me as researcher to gain access to the lives of teachers as they share their lived experiences. Their narratives provide an interpretation of how they position themselves in post-apartheid South African schools and provide insight into how, why and where they learn. The use of stories also provides me with a glimpse into teachers’ lives and their fluid identities (Woodward, 2000).
Chapter 3 Research methodology
Teachers live “storied lives” and various social contexts shape their lives. Through stories we can enter into the otherwise private worlds of teachers and have an insider’s view of their learning and change. I am aware that teachers share only what they want to share and present particular pictures of themselves, “Yet this telling gives access to lives as told and these acts of telling are an act of creating one’s self” (Hatch & Wisniewski, 1995, p. 129). As Polkinghorne (1988, p. 150) adds, “The life as told may be different at different times, with a different audience, or when told with a different purpose.” Through narrating particular critical incidents in their lives, teachers give us a sense of who they are and we get glimpses of their identities as dynamic, partial, fragmented and context-dependent.
3.2.1 Understanding and exploring teachers’ self-directed learning and change
As a researcher I am interested in exploring the learning practices that some teachers adopt and how learning contributes to teacher development for change. In order to do this I had to focus on teachers’ experiences, past and present, and how these experiences contribute to future experiences as outlined by Creswell (2008), and Clandinin and Connelly (2000).
Aligned to John Dewey’s (1944) ideas on experience and how one’s experiences affect the next learning experience, I want to understand and explore how teachers’ learning is continuous, and how every experience, whether negative or positive, has an impact on their learning.
As teachers learn and one learning experience has an impact on another, they become reflective practitioners and, as Dewey states, “knowers who reflect on experience, confront the unknown, make sense of it and take action” (cited in Johnson & Colombek, 2002, p. 4). According to Dewey (1938), when we learn we make connections among experiences which Dewey terms the continuity of experience. Together with continuity of experience, Dewey (1998) speaks of interaction – the interaction between the self and the context, which, he argues “is whatever condition interacts with personal needs, desires, purposes, and capacities to create the experience which is had.” (Dewey, 1998, p. 44). As teachers interact with their worlds a change occurs – change within the self and in the world.
Gergen and Gergen (2008) use the term “self-narrative” to describe the individual’s recollection of relevant incidents across time. They conclude that one’s identity is a result of one’s life story and helps individuals to give meaning to their lives (Gergen & Gergen, 2008).
It is important to note that teachers have evolving identities which constantly shift as they
Chapter 3 Research methodology
encounter different learning experiences (Jenkins, 1996; Nieto, 2003). Narratives give glimpses into teachers’ lives, how they position themselves as teachers and how this gives rise to what Woodward (2000) describes as their evolving/multiple identities. What do critical moments in the narratives tell about teachers’ self-directed professional learning?
How do their social and professional contexts give meaning to their self-directed learning and how does this self-directed learning bring about change in their lives as teachers?
Narratives are a tool which allows me as a researcher to focus on “how individuals teach and learn, of how temporality (placing things in the context of time) connects with change and learning, and how institutions frame our lives” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p.1). Teachers live and learn within particular contexts, which are temporal. What are these contexts? How do teachers exert their power of agency to resist the way institutions attempt to frame them through their learning and development?
Clandinin and Connelly (2000) expand on the notion of “temporality” by stating that every experience is temporal. They assert that as researchers, they focus not only on the present but also on life as a “continuum – people’s lives, institutional lives, lives of things”
(Connelly & Clandinin, 2000, p.19). Connelly and Clandinin (2006, p.479) add that “events under study are in temporal transition, that is, events and people always have a past, present, and a future… people, places, and events as in process, as always in transition”. Teachers are
“real people in real situations” (Noddings & Witherell, 1991, p. 279). In this study, teachers have to be understood within the social, historical, political and educational contexts of South Africa because it was within these contexts that the teacher –learner develops, and meanings are created or reworked in the position of being a teacher.
Clough (2002, p. 8) contends that “narrative is useful only to the extent that it opens up (to its audiences) a deeper view of life in familiar contexts: it can make the familiar strange and the strange familiar.” Narrative is a means by which researchers can have a glimpse of what is happening in teachers’ lives and the choices that they make that affect their learning. I am interested in exploring the factors that shape the evolving teacher-self, and the learning practices of teachers. The process of reflecting on one’s life as a teacher can also help one to examine “[one’s] own learning, beliefs, and understandings of self” (Lipka &
Chapter 3 Research methodology
When teachers shared their stories with me they allowed me into their worlds.
Sometimes their stories and the personal crises they experienced made me unsure about my role as a researcher.
...How can one person experience so much pain and still remain so strong and focused? I was so interested in using narratives in my research that I didn’t realise that it meant going into very deep places. I wasn’t prepared when Carolina started sharing very personal moments with me – very hurtful memories of abuse, betrayal and feeling like an outsider. As a woman, should I offer her advice on how to get out of this abusive relationship that seems to be strangling her? Should I offer a way out? Solutions? Promises???
Log entry: February 2007
The above is as example of one of the dilemmas that I faced as I began to delve deeper into teachers’ lives and some of them began to share very personal details that I felt inadequate to deal with. Can researchers turn a blind eye to what is happening in research participants’ lives? Are we supposed to just listen to stories for the purpose of our research and ignore the pain that surfaces? How prepared are we as researchers for details that may emerge as research participants reach deep into their past and share their lived experiences with us? Can I separate myself and hide behind the cloak of researcher? These were some of the questions that I faced constantly whilst working with narrative inquiry.
As teachers shared their stories with me they presented particular meanings of what it meant to be a teacher-learner working in a South African public school. Stories give us a sense of the teachers’ evolving self. Why do they do the things they do? What particular meanings do they ascribe to their roles as teachers? Through stories I was able to make connections between the various events and characters in the participants’ lives. Stories are important in that “they attach us to others and to our own history by providing a tapestry rich with threads of time, place, character, and even advice on what we might do with our lives”
(Noddings & Witherell, 1991, p. 280).
Chapter 3 Research methodology
The next challenge I faced was trying to differentiate between truth and fiction as teachers began to share their stories. Were the teachers’ stories the truth or particular versions of the truth? I found Reissman (2000) useful in trying to make this distinction between truth and fiction, as she states that “truths lie not in their faithful representation of a past world, but in the shifting connections they forge between the past, present and future”.
3.2.2 Evolving teacher-selves
The only way to understand our present self is to examine our past self or selves (Connelly & Clandinin, 2000). Cooper (1991, pp. 97-98) explains that “the past selves have evolved to form a present collective self. This present self can be discerned through a journey back in time, a journey that threads the past selves, like beads on a string, forming a necklace of existence, a present complex whole...the narrative is a way to tell our own story, a way to learn who we have been, who we are, and who we are becoming.” As teachers reflect on their professional development through the narrative, it provides us insight into where they have come from and meanings that shape and continue to shape them as professionals. Narratives help us to explore teachers’ lives and their learning practices within particular contexts, and to get a sense of what experiences and meanings shaped the construction of the self/selves and self-directed learning. The stories individuals tells “[reflect] the inner workings of the person’s mind: his or her identity, sense of meaning in life, moral commitments, and emotions and ways of understanding the past, present, and anticipated future” (Sparkes &
Smith, 2008, p. 297).
For the purpose of this study I was interested in the critical moments in the teachers’
lives, how these shaped and continue to shape the teacher-self and how this impacts on teachers’ learning and change. Connelly and Clandinin (1995, p. 102) support the notion that teachers “need to think through their own educational histories and what made a difference to them. How did they get to be who they are? How did they get to know what they know?”
Webster and Mertova (2007) argue that these critical moments of learning are
“unplanned and unanticipated”, and have the following qualities:
they exist in a particular context, such as formal organisational structures
Chapter 3 Research methodology
they are unplanned;
they may reveal patterns of well-defined stages;
they are only identified after the event;
they are intensely personal with strong emotional involvement (Webster &
Mertova, 2007, p. 83).
The critical moments that occur in teachers’ lives are incidental and unplanned and have lasting consequences because they have particular meanings for teachers. Dewey (1944, p.74) argues that “reconstruction or reorganisation of experience [....] adds to the meaning of experience, and [...] increases one’s ability to direct the course of subsequent experience”. As teachers reconstruct or reorganise the critical moments of learning in their lives, these moments become meaningful to them and they are able to build on these experiences.
In the next sub-section I discuss my research plan for this study which focuses on the research participants, the life-story interviews, and how I developed the framework for analysing the narratives.