Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol. 13, No. I, pp. 75-83, 1997
Copyright 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd
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Abstract-The conduct of narrative research gives rise to a range of political issues which include
the validation of narrative knowledge, the relationships of power and authority among research
participants, and the distinction between the public and private domains. In this article three
issues will be examined: The politics of research in a "narrative" mode which challenges traditional
research; issues of power that arise in collaborative research relationships; and the political implications of studying the private domain of life story and autobiography. Copyright 1997 Elsevier
Science Ltd
Introduction
1n considering the different ways in which the
adjective "political" comes to qualify the
strand of inquiry into teaching and the knowledge of teachers often referred to as "narrative
research," I found myself caught up in a web
of diverse, interrelated questions and issues.
Looking at the "political" as concerning questions of power, authority and legitimacy, I
identified a series of methodological and epistemological issues about what narrative research
is, how it is conducted, what its purposes are,
how narrative knowledge is validated and what
the roles and responsibilities of the various
participants are. Each of these issues gave rise
to questions that have political implications.
For example, I wondered about who has the
authority to legitimate new varieties or conceptualizations of knowledge; about how power is
used and shared in interviews and other
research activities; about the nature and existence of such entities as subjects and objects,
and who makes the distinction between them,
granting equality or supremacy to one or the
other; about how new ways of understanding
human nature gain legitimacy; about how the
distinction between public and private is
currently changing, and what the implications
are for society, and for social and educational
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Narrative Research
meter (which has yet to be fully understood), I
wish to introduce one additional dimension on
which narrative research should be viewed:
The relationship between theory and practice.
The way this relationship is conceived is one of
the central commitments of any educational
researcher (Clandinin & Connelly, 1987); hence
looking at the way this issue is treated can help
to further unpack some of the differences
among various understandings of narrative
and their political implications.
Since Dewey (1904), the relationship between
theory and practice has been much discussed by
educators. I find most helpful the treatment by
McKeon (1952) who spelled out different ways
of conceptualizing the connection between, in
his terms, philosophy and action. In what he
terms the "logistic" method, theory is seen to
direct practice; in the "problematic" method,
practice drives the development of theory to
the solution of practical problems; and in the
"dialectic" method, theory and practice are
seen as interrelated and mutually influencing
one another. Each of these different conceptualisations of the theory/practice relationship has
implications for the kinds of theories one
values, the perceived roles of practitioners visa-vis academics, and for the way that narrative
research will be understood. Connelly and
Clandinin (1987) drew on McKeon's analysis
in a discussion of the "personal" aspects of
studies of teaching. I will examine some of the
implications of McKeon's analysis for an
understanding of the political aspects of narrative research; how we understand the personal
is, of course, one of those aspects.
Narrative analysis constitutes a challenge to
the prevailing logistic view which underlies the
technical rationality of most educational
research and development: In the background
of narrative work is a critique of top-down
curriculum development and of processproduct research on teaching. Like any new
methodology competing for attention and
acceptance, narrative research encounters difficulties; the nature of the difficulties will be
heavily influenced by social and cultural
context. In North America, the number of
researchers doing narrative work seems to
have reached a "critical mass," and narrative
researchers no longer need to argue for the
legitimacy of their methods with every new
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Narrative Research
events; this knowledge is no less valuable than
the theoretic formulations of the researchers.
Likewise, the researcher contributes to educational practice by virtue of his or her presence
in the setting as an observer, by virtue of questions asked, of active listening in interviews,
and through participation in the mutual process
of elaborating the stories of all the participants
to the process. This, admittedly, is an idealized
account of dialectic method: True collaboration
is extremely difficult, and the status differential
between teachers and university researchers
(each of whom has quite different purposes
and rewards for participating in research)
always plays a role. Much has been written
about the problems and pitfalls of collaborative
research (e.g. Clandinin & Connelly, 1988). The
development of a collaborative relationship
takes time, and coming to a mutually illuminating rendition of a teacher's story can be a
long process whose outcome is uncertain.
In the past year, I have watched the frustrations of students taking part in undergraduate
and graduate courses in teachers' knowledge
and narrative research, when the teachers they
were interviewing suddenly became unable or
unwilling to continue, or insisted on making
major deletions in the interview transcript; this
doesn't happen very often, just often enough
to bring home the risks of doing such work,
and the personal cost of collaboration for the
researcher. Another difficulty with collaboration is highlighted by the experience of Anat
and Yael, two students who had become
friendly while studying in the same department.
Anat, an experienced teacher completing her
BA, interviewed Yael who was in the teacher
training program. The two women had very
different views on religion and consequently
quite different lifestyles. These differences had
not interfered with their friendship, but when
Anat interviewed Yael she discovered that the
differences went deeper than previously
realized, and was troubled by some of Yael's
views on education. Unwilling to discuss these
differences openly with Yael for fear it would
affect their relationship, Anat was unable to
transform the work into a fully collaborative
product. This is another twist on the personal
cost of narrative research.
The context in which collaborative work is
undertaken influences the way that the work
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Narrative Research
story. In a problematic view the focus is on the
problem to be solved, and giving account of
personal matters may be seen as self-indulgent.
In narrative research understood as a dialectical
process in which teachers and researchers learn
together about the life of the classroom, it is
both an outcome and a condition of the matters
discussed above that narrative method redraws
the distinction between public and private,
holding that the materials of one's personal life
are essential to an understanding of one's
work, and particularly so when one's life and
work are concerned with education (Pinar,
1994). All who were trained never to use the
first person singular in academic writing can
appreciate the difficulties involved in this
change; we have invested a lot of energy in
making a clear distinction between our personal
and professional knowledge, and in keeping our
personal stories out of the picture. Further,
since all of us have private lives and are equal
in this respect, the focus on the personal is yet
another respect in which academics must relinquish their power over practitioners. Finally,
as researchers in a field which is unsure of its
status in the academy, we risk ridicule and deligitimation in bringing personal materials into
the scientific endeavour. Recently I have been
working on the stories of immigrant teachers;
this project was a long time in the formulation,
because I somehow "forgot" that J too was an
immigrant and it took me time to realize that
my own story needed to be heard in this work.
Another concern about immersing ourselves in
the personal is explored by Goodson (1995) (p.
90) who looks at the recent spate of stories, anecdotes and personal material flooding the media;
he argues that "in the cultural logic of late capitalism, the life story represents a form of cultural
apparatus that accompanies an aggrandising
state and market system," and his fear is that we
are approaching "the closure of cultural contestation as evidenced in theoretical and critical
discourse," with a decontextualized and ultimately disempowering discourse of stories about
local practice taking the place of theory. This
warning is important, but in our search for
models of personal writing we are not confined
to the evening news and popular magazines.
Barone (1995) offers several examples of "emancipatory-minded stories" which are of different
genres from the novelistic to the journalistic; all
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