|
Research Methods in the Field |
Narrative |
|
Research Methods homepage
|
Massaer Paye Qualitative Research Methods Personal Stance Theories & methods: NARRATIVE INQUIRY
“The telling of stories can be a profound form of scholarship moving serious study close to the frontiers of art.” Joseph Featherstone (1989) Terminology: One of the dilemmas of studies in social sciences is that often the more positivistic research design tends to become less connected to human experiences. Narratives and story telling are the reflection of humanistic modes of inquiry. Human experience is rewritten, re-interpreted through stories that are developed by using narratives, ones that will give us a conceptual framework and a practical basis for representing human experiences that are meaningful to participants and readers. Traditions of narratives: “We must lay in waiting for ourselves throughout our lives. Abandoning the pretenses that we know.” William F. Pinar (1976) We can locate narrative inquiries in a historical intellectual context. One the one hand, narrative inquiry may be traced to Aristotle’s poetics and St Augustine’s confessions. Dewey’s work on time, space, experience, and social patterns is also central to education studies. On the other hand, narrative inquiry is acquiring its “letters de noblesse” in social sciences and in education. Theoretical ideas are brought to create a conceptual framework that will facilitate the use of qualitative research methods in order to re-interpret human experiences. Data collection, analysis, and methods of narrative inquiry: The process of narrative inquiry will revolve around various parameters that will help readers acknowledge the researcher’s role, one that is very complex because in one hand, he is a neutral observer, and on the other hand, he is an active participant. Data is represented field texts that are the written expression of narrative inquiries but they are not an objective representation or recording of human experiences. Various techniques for recording human experiences: from field texts to research texts: “The use of narrative inquiry to understand one’s life and the lives of others is but a part of the story. Literacy researchers are also exploring a variety of narrative devices that have potential for opening up new ways of making visible to their reading audiences how the choices they make in collecting, analyzing, and representing their data reflect the theoretical frameworks within which they work” From Methods Of Literacy Research, p. 50 • Oral history in the study of cultures • Story telling ( teachers, students, community) • Chronicles and Annals • Photographs, memory boxes, personal artifacts( recalling our memories) • Research interviews • Journals • Autobiographical entries • Letters, Conversations • Field notes( a standard ethnographic method of data collection) • Document analysis
Key figures of narrative inquiry: We cannot decide arbitrarily who are the most influential proponents of narrative inquiry without leaving behind some stories brought to us by researchers who revealed the compelling nature of stories that changed our lives. Narrative inquiry theoretical and methodological pitfalls: “If all knowledge is a personalized construction… then can any interpretivist claims be rejected?” (Cizek, 1995) • Interactions between researchers and their research participants display potential sources of distortion and bias. ( Subjectivity and the reflexive self) • Truth and validity claims reflect historically determined values and interests of different groups and that reality is mediated by conceptual schemes, ideologies, language games, and paradigms ( Kamil & al, 2002). • The crisis of representation: we cannot suppress ourselves in the texts we write. ( inadequacies of narrative inquiries).
Annotated articles and books Composition- and Tesol-oriented books
“My understanding of the world stems from the gifts they have given me: a commitment to justice an human life, an appreciation of the way people struggle daily against injustice, a sense of the importance of telling that story, a belief that the social and political world we live in is created by people and can therefore be changed by people, a passion for engaging in trying to understand and change this world, and ours, and the courage to put forth my own voice” Olsen L, 1997. Summary: She is telling the story of the way in which immigrant students learn to become Americans at a school she calls Madison High. This book is the reflection of immigrant’s socialization, the interconnectedness of culture and language, the personal tale that is influenced by anthropological insights and provocative educational theories. She is emphasizing the various ways in which schools are reproducing the culture of the society.
This book provides a collection of stories that will help second language teachers across the disciplines rethink their practices as teachers. There is a compelling collection of student’s stories that will lead us in a new path, one that questions curriculum development for multicultural classrooms.
“We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write”. (Deleuze) Summary: Noise from the writing center is a collection of “musical stories” that go beyond our personal beliefs, our theoretical, historical, political, emotional, and pedagogical heritages. Elizabeth Boquet, a graduate from IUP creates a new conceptual framework that will help compositionists develop, enhance, and restore complex performative pedagogies regarding the teaching of writing.
Slave Narratives:
“As our Caucasian barristers are not to blame if they cannot quite put themselves in the dark’s man place, neither should the dark man be wholly expected fully and adequately to reproduce the exact voice of the black woman” Anna Julia Cooper, a voice from the South. 1892. Summary: The Schomburg Library of the nineteenth century-black women writers allows us for the first time to see clearly the full dimension of the literary achievement of black women. This magnificent project will dramatically change the landscape of African-American cultural history. Literature is now open to minorities. This book is a collection of slave narratives: ancient slaves are retelling their stories and histories using their own voice. The textual orality of these narratives is the true reflection of the complexity of human experiences.
This book is a great collection of letters like those of Virginia Woolf. The author drew on her experiences in Africa and her earlier life in Europe to create tales in keeping with her belief that without repeating life in imagination you can never be fully alive. Bibliographical sketches
Compiled by: Kathleen Klompien, Nicole Munday and Mary Verbout |