there is more than one way to tell a story and more than one story (Pagano, 199 in Munro, 1998) Beginnings

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1 Telling the Tale: An exploration of Narrative Inquiry Revathi R. School of Language Studies and Linguistics Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, Selangor. Abstract: Qualitative researchers seek to tell stories about their engagement with the worlds that they have studied. One method of telling these stories is Narrative Inquiry. Human existence has always been storied as stories are an integral part of our lives. Therefore, narratives are forms of knowing that are familiar to the ways in which we understand the world and how we relay these understandings to others. It is through stories that we make sense of our experiences and structure them so that others can partake of these experiences. This paper will discuss the uses of the term narrative and attempt to share the researcher s experiences in using Narrative Inquiry as a framework for writing and as a methodology of inquiry. there is more than one way to tell a story and more than one story (Pagano, 199 in Munro, 1998) Beginnings The purpose of this paper is to share some understandings and insights of the narrative inquiry approach to qualitative research. I came to discover the narrative method out of dissatisfaction with the traditional academic discourse that left me feeling as if my participants and I were one dimensional entities. My perspective when I embarked on my research project was that the purpose of research is one of making meaning. Whilst, traditional academic discourse seeks for essences universally true principles, it is devoid of the subjective individual, it lacks the particulars of experience and the lifelikeness that evokes meaning when researchers address real-life problems (Richardson, 1992). I was working with teachers who were grappling with a new medium of instruction to teach science. My background as a science and language teacher sensitized me to some of the unsaid subjective aspects of teaching so called content through another medium of instruction. I desired to make sense of my research through an approach that was meaningful to me and my participants. My search for such an approach led me to Narrative Inquiry - researching and writing in this form, I believe, would enable me to create a dialogic genre in which knowledge is created and (re)presented at the same time, as suggested and demonstrated by Ellis and Bochner (2002). The word narrative is often used synonymously with the word story. Polkinghorne (1988) goes to the extent of saying that stories are powerful means of communication for the qualitative enquirer. Labov (1997, p.2) points out that the narrative and the broader field of story telling has become a keen focus of attention in many academic and literary disciplines. During the past 20 years, educational researchers have taken up narrative inquiry to research teacher lives, teacher thinking and the curriculum in general (e.g., Elbaz, 1991; Carter, 1993; Clandinin and Connelly, 1988,1991). The use of Narrative Inquiry in these instances allows one an insider view - an understanding that comes from the participant s perspective. But,

2 the insider view is not simply one that is easily reflected as the truth. I will pursue this discussion in other parts of this paper. Narratives and Narrative Inquiry Polkinghorne (1995) explains that the word narrative can denote any prosaic discourse, that is, any text that consists of complete sentences linked into a coherent and integrated statement (p.6). However, Polkinghorne points out that in recent years, the word narrative has taken on a different meaning for researchers. Their understanding of the word narrative refers to the story and not just coherent text. A narrative in this sense refers to the process of creating a story its plot and theme and its resolution. Sarbin (1986 : p.9) describes the organizational aspect of a narrative as a way of organizing episodes, actions, and accounts of actions; it is an achievement that brings together mundane facts and fantastic creations; time and place are incorporated. The narrative allows for the inclusion of actors reason for their acts, as well as the causes of happening. Whilst a narrative has an organizational frame, these forms may vary. Aristotle wrote that a narrative has a beginning, middle and an end. This suggests that a story s events unfold chronologically and thus have linearity. However there have been counter arguments. Young (1987) proposes that causality takes precedence rather than the chronological telling of a story because it is one event that often leads to another. Still others, such as Reissman (1987) have pointed out alternatives to the Aristotelian form. Narratives may be organised thematically (events linked according to topics), habitually (the case where events happen repeatedly without any peak in action) and hypothetically (events that did not take place). Thus the word narrative is not confined to a particular story. Similarly, narrative inquiry is also viewed differently by scholars. Lieblich et.al (1988, p. 2) propose that narrative inquiry is any study that uses or analyses narrative materials. The data can be collected as a story (a life story provided in an interview or a literary work) or in a different manner (field notes of an anthropologist who writes up his or her observations as a narrative or in personal letters). It can be the object of the research or as a means for the study of another question. Educational researchers Clandinin and Connelly (2000, p. 20) say that narrative inquiry is a way of understanding experience. It is a collaboration between researcher and participants, over time, in a place or series of places, and in social interaction with milieus. An inquirer enters this matrix in the midst and progresses in the same spirit, concluding the inquiry still in the midst of living and telling, reliving and retelling, the stories of the experiences that make up people s lives, both individual and social..narrative inquiry is stories lived and told. The focus on lived experience corresponds to Bruner s (1990) suggestion that narrative analysis is how participants come to understand their experiences. However, these notions of what a narrative represents can be understood to be modernist notions. They suggest that there is a direct correlation between experience, meaning and the emerging narrative - that the experiences of participants can be pinned down and mapped to portray their realities. Epistemologically, narratives can be organised to reflect four different stances (Banks and Banks, 1998). These are: modernist narratives that attempt to portray the truth, narratives of understanding which are hermeneutic in nature, critical narratives that question issues of justice and equity and finally, vulnerability narratives narratives of postmodernist thought. My inclination is towards narratives of vulnerability because I believe that the narratives that we encounter in our lived lives seldom offer transparent explanations. Our experiences do not simply come to be, they are constructed as we negotiate constantly shifting meanings. As such, I have come to understand that my stories of the teachers that I am studying could not merely represent their so assumed

3 normal realities. It is these so assumed normal realities that I sought to trouble, to search for the unsaid so that different stories that allow for multiple identities, that challenge commonsense assumptions which perpetuate oppression and injustice, can be told. Only then would we be able to renegotiate traditional practices and move towards change. My preference for narrative inquiry comes from the need to understand the phenomena being studied from the ever-changing perspectives of my participants. The self is not a stable entity and is constantly constituted by the discourses that it engages with, at the very same time it re-constitutes these very discourses that it encounters. In the case of my teacher participants, they are often fixed to undertake a certain identity that has elements that are contrary to their personal beliefs and needs. In this case then, the personal is pushed aside but the personal is always political. It is the personal that determines what gets done, how it gets done and why it gets done. Narrative inquiry allows the qualitative researcher to foray into the personal with sensitivity. Instead of looking at the participant as a resource to be mined, narrative inquiry allows the qualitative researcher to understand the participant s experiences through building a relationship which will allow for deeper insights resulting from shared understandings. I believe shared understandings would make it possible for me to explore parts of the non-unitary self of my participants the selves that are often held back because they are not legitimate in the eyes of what Foucault describes as the regimes of truth that regulate. Furthermore, Narrative Inquiry will allow me space to struggle, to understand how my own discursive practices, my own stories; intersect with those of my participants. The why of Narrative Inquiry.. Stories are ancient forms of knowing (Carter, 1993). From the earliest days, humans have passed on cultural knowings in the form of stories. Etchings in bone fragments, cave paintings, are human ways of storying. Cultures were constituted by stories and went on to constitute stories. However, stories were only seen as relevant to research with the interpretive shift, when it was realised that stories were a form of explanation of life (Martin, cited in Carter, 1993). Meaning was made through these stories. Carter (1993: p.6) points out that story is a mode of knowing that captures in a special fashion the richness and nuances of meaning, in human affairs. Thus, information generated by stories is multi-faceted it is not only able to structure events or incidents but has the textual means to convey emotions. As Carter reiterates This richness and nuance cannot be expressed in definitions, statements of fact, or abstract propositions (p.6). It is these features of the story that permits it to be a mode of explanation that carries a multiplicity of meanings. In my quest of finding meaning, I find the potential of generating multiple meanings from the narrative appealing. Furthermore, it is understood that stories emerge from action (Mitchell, 1981; Bruner, 1985) and action is subject to a multiplicity of influences which is complex and unpredictable (Carter, 1993 : p.7). Thus, stories allow complexity to be explored and the knowledge that comes from it, to be troubled. Framing the Inquiry My experience and beliefs of teaching have led me to believe that while teachers may seem to be people with power in the classroom, they are subjected to even higher hierarchical power structures that prescribe not only the curriculum but almost everything within the teaching context. As such, the teacher s agency is

4 restricted in relation to what goes on in the classroom. It is precisely for this reason that it is important for teacher voices to be heard to understand the teacher s perspective of the situation. As such, my research is based on a critical poststructural framework - critical because I want to create a space to pose certain questions. The questions that I want to put forward concern the inequitable distribution of knowledge, power, and resources and the influence of that distribution (Scheurich, 1997, p.9) in the teaching of science in English. I believe that these kinds of questions will allow me to undertake a holistic exploration of the situated context of my participants to uncover the underlying structures that play a part in constructing the discourses that they engage in. I subscribe to poststructural sensibilities because it allows me to look at how social structures work to either limit or enable my participants. Poststructuralism is understood as an epistemological perspective that sees knowledge as partial, power as in being constantly fluid and identity as unstable within the discourses that we engage in. Davies (2000, p.9) points out: that poststructural understandings make visible the shifts not only in interpretation, but also in the living of life that come about with the taking up of a new discourse. Along the same lines, poststructural understandings allows one to be reflexive, giving room for new modes of interpretation (Davies, 2000). In this case then, in telling my participant s stories, I also weave my own stories of the phenomena that I am engaging in, in other words, exploring my subjectification because I was as a teacher of similar circumstances myself, constituted and reconstituted by these very discourses that my participants are engaged in. Narrative inquiry with its reflexive, inclusive nature allows room for a critical poststructural framework. Hatch and Wisniewski (1995. p.121) propose that life history and narrative approaches and poststructural thought are related. They mention the following reasons: the connections between poststructural conceptions of texts and its ability to represent lived experience in multiple, conflicting perspectives; the concept of identity the possibility of how the coherent self does not really emerge in the stories of lived experience; and (drawing from Bloom) how poststructuralism can be seen as a technique of interpreting narratives such a perspective offers researchers means of deconstructing the storied lives of their participants. The how of my story My principal method of data collection was interviews which were tape recorded. Kvale (1996) describes two classifications of interviewers, which he describes as miners and travellers (p. 3). The miner is the researcher who is seeking to uncover truth that is embedded within the subject of the interview. On the other hand, the traveller is the researcher who chooses to wander along with the participants, to journey with the purpose of gathering stories to retell. I chose to be the traveller, my interviews were not structured, even though I did have some kind of agenda, I allowed my participants space to tell their stories stories of who they were, what they felt or were feeling, their educational background, their inclinations what Labov describes as continual engagement with the discourse as it was delivered gains entrance to the perspective of the speaker (p.1). This was done by putting forward open-ended questions which allowed the participant to construct answers narratively. For example, I would say Tell me how you felt when the change in the medium of instruction was announced. Throughout their story sessions, I was sensitive to voices I listened for hesitations, for feelings of unease, pause, selfinterruptions, self-criticism and re-phrasing of said statements. These interviews or I would rather refer to them as conversations were conducted very casually. I imagined

5 these conversations as collaborations and my interactions with my participant as interactive (Ellis and Bochner, 2002). I supplemented interviews with classroom observations, I also observed my participants in their interactions with other members of the school community. My reasons for doing so, was to look for a wider context in order to understand my participant s perspective (Munro, 1998). I took field notes during observation with a focus on recording what was not possible to be caught in the audio mode. I also employed other ethnographic techniques such as the collection of personal and school documents. Alongside the collection of these artifacts and recordings, I maintained my own journal to record my personal reflections. My purpose for looking for multiple sources of data was to allow room to search for the unsaid and also for multiple tellings and multiple plots of the tale (Phillips, 1994 in Ellsworth, 2005). From field notes into text There are primarily two kinds of analysis in respect to narrative inquiry. Polkinghorne (1995) addresses this distinction by examining Bruner s (1985) suggestion of two types of cognition. Bruner refers to these two modes of thought as paridigmatic and narrative. Each mode has a particular way of understanding experience and representing reality. The paradigmatic or scientific mode is related to the objective world. According to Polkinghorne, the kind of narrative inquiry that follows paradigmatic reasoning seeks to transform stories into categories or groups of common elements. Its thrust is for establishing universal truth conditions and empirical verification. In order to do this, researchers collect stories as data and then analyse these stories to search for categories. The narrative mode of thought concerns itself with the details of experience. In this mode, researchers collect descriptions of events and happenings and synthesize or configure them by means of a plot into a story or stories (Polkinghorne, 1995, p.12). In this case then, the researcher s goal is to construct good stories that are credible because of their lifelikeness. In order to construct such stories the researcher would have to collect diachronic data, that is, data that has notions of time descriptions of events and goings-on framed temporarily. These events are then written up to form a story a story that answers the questions that the researcher started off with. When I first started my research project, I was concerned with imparting the realist s tale. I had thought it was possible for me as a researcher to make transparent recordings of what I was seeing on the field and to map these findings objectively. At that point, I was working with paradigmatic understandings trying to code and look for themes or categories that described the tensions that my participant faced in trying to cope with the change in the medium of instruction. As, I continued with fieldwork, I came to realise that the tensions were not only those of my participants but also mine intertwined with theirs. This experience left me bewildered; I could not resolve these tensions into neat objective little packages. It was in the light of this discovery that I went in search of other forms of understanding the world and making meaning. Poststructuralism as a research paradigm offered me a way of making sense of these unresolved tensions and I have come to understand that the stories that I wanted to tell were not the paradigmatic sort. Clandinin and Connelly (2000, p.132) point out that [T]he move from field texts to research texts is layered in complexity. And so it is, whilst there are many ways to approach transcription and analysis, I found Riessman s (1993) suggestions useful for dealing with transcription. Reissman recommends that the researcher should transcribe for words and non-lingual features and attempt to put down a first draft on paper. She then suggests that portions can be selected for re-transcription and

6 content that is finally selected may emerge or change as the researcher constructs the story through a process of retrospection. I found this recommendation helpful in constructing narrative segments of text. This process of construction is carried out after every episode of data collection that involved interviews or observation. These narrative segments of text are the parts that would go into the story that I am constructing. Other forms of analysis that are relevant to my research endeavour are content and discourse analysis. As I have used a critical poststructural paradigm to frame my research, I have to look for themes related to issues of power, knowledge and meaning, language and difference to be able to construct a tale with multiple plots. Thus, the artifacts that I have collected have to be submitted to content analysis. Stemler (2001) drawing from Berelson, GAO, Krippendorff and Weber says that content analysis is a technique of reducing a text into a number of categories based on coding. He goes on to say that it is particularly useful in examining trends and patterns in policy documents. Discourse analysis is an important tool in poststructural ways of understanding. The term discourse used in this context not only refers to all spoken and written forms of language use as social practice (Wood and Kroger, 2000, p.19) but also discourse in the Foucauldian sense which sees discourses as systems of language and power. Foucault s understanding of discourse is not limited to language or social interaction but extended to areas of social knowledge (McHoul and Grace, 1993). In other words, speech, writing or thinking about social objects, events or practices occurs in particular ways, according to shared assumptions and unspoken rules that regulate what can be said and cannot be said, what is valued as knowledge and what is not. Thus, the purpose of using discourse analysis is to find threads or strands that allows us to understand and explore links or ruptures in these shared assumptions and unspoken rules. The analysis and the writing of the narrative can be pictured as a simultaneous dance one which steps move back and forth, between analysis and writing, between writing and analysis. As Clandinin and Connelly (2000) state: There is no smooth transition, no one gathering of the field texts, sorting them through, and analyzing them. Field texts have a vast and rich research potential. We return to them again and again, bringing our restoried lives as inquirers, bringing new research puzzles, and re-searching the texts. (p.132) As for the construction of the narrative itself, there are many ways of going about it. I am inclined to Labov s (1972, 1982; Labov and Waletsky, 1967) model which has a six part structure abstract, orientation, complication, evaluation, resolution and coda. These six elements make up a particular narrative. Positioning the Researcher I understand that as I write stories of my participants, I also write stories of myself. I have come to understand that I am not without governing assumptions and commitments. My experiences and what I make of them are very much a part of this research as my participants. As a researcher, I cannot be a transparent conduit of reality. Since what I see, think and talk about is always filtered through my perception of what exists and my perception is shaped by my race, gender, class, religion, culture and personal values. Thus, the stories that I tell of my participants are coloured by my subjectivities. I am aware that that my interactions with my participants will shape and reshape the understandings that spark my learning. I believe that the voices of my participants, along with mine have the possibility of providing new insights that will enhance our understanding of the phenomenon.

7 Issues of Standards Notions of credibility in research are actually discourses of power that deem the sorts of knowledge that are acceptable and legitimate. In order to be acceptable, research has to be valid, reliable and generalizable in the eyes of powerful research communities. Traditionally, the issue of validity, reliability and generalizability in qualitative research has revolved around a psychometric perspective that has been modeled on procedures associated with quantitative practices. However, narrative inquiry does not lend itself to these criteria, as its location falls between the spaces of social science and aesthetics (Blumenfeld-Jones, 1995). Barone and Eisner (1997) propose that inquiry that is more artistic in nature is arts based research. Good arts-based research has particular qualities such as the creation of virtual reality and the promotion of empathy. These qualities have the power of evoking feelings, what Banks (1998, p.11) refers to as the emotional texture of human experience. Standards to judge this sort of work cannot adhere to traditional notions that come from a positivist paradigm. As pointed out by Denzin and Lincoln (2000), members of the critical theory, constructivist and poststructural schools of thought believe that criteria that ensue from the positivist paradigm is irrelevant and reproduce only a certain kind of science, a science that silences too many voices (p.10). Alternatively, there are other ways of ensuring the trustworthiness of narratives. Banks (1998) suggests criteria like verisimilitude and veridicality. Verisimilitude is the evocation of feelings in the reader that the experience being narrated is lifelike, believable, and possible (Ellis & Bochner, 2000). Veridicality, according to Banks and Banks (1998) is the representation of reality or fact (p.23). Verisimilitude is actually linked to veridicality. Simply said, the issue of credibility in the narrative approach is related to resonance. Can the audience identify with narrative? Do their experiences resonate with events described and related in the narrative. Denzin and Lincoln (2000) suggest other alternative forms of evaluation, such as emotionality, personal responsibility, an ethic of caring, political praxis, multivoiced texts and dialogues with subjects. Afterthoughts As Tallulah says, Good explanations are like bathing suits, darling; they are meant to reveal everything by covering only what is necessary. (E.L. Konigsburg, 1986, p. 68) I have not provided you, the reader, with a comprehensive explanation about narrative inquiry. What I have attempted to do is to share some signposts that might be of help in your own exploration of narrative inquiry.

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