Methodological Framework: What is Narrative Inquiry?

Clandinin and Connolly (2000) do not offer an exact formula or prescribed way of doing narrative inquiry, instead proposing general guidelines for designing and engaging in

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narrative inquiry. Drawing on their work, this section will provide a summary of narrative inquiry as a research methodology.

Clandinin (2013) is careful to point out that narrative inquiry as a methodology is distinguished from other forms of narrative research and narrative analysis, as well as from other forms of qualitative research, by a particular ontological view of experience. To use narrative inquiry methodology is to adopt a view of human experience as a storied phenomenon; people by nature lead storied lives, and tell stories of those lives. These lived and told stories, both personal and social, are one of the ways in which we fill our lives with meaning. According to Clandinin and Connolly (2000), since human experience is storied in nature, narratives are the best way of representing and understanding our experience. In a narrative inquiry, the term narrative describes not only the quality and nature of the phenomenon we hope to study (experience), but it also describes the method of how it should be studied.

Narrative as Phenomenon

Narrative inquiry is “the study of experience as story” and is therefore “first and foremost a way of thinking about experience” (Clandinin and Rosiek, 2007, p. 38). In Chapter 3, I have given an overview of Dewey’s philosophy of experience which is centered on two criteria for experience - continuity and interaction. Narrative inquirers adopt these criteria to form the basis of their understanding of experience as a narrative phenomenon.

Human beings both live and tell stories about their living, and these stories are how we interpret our experience in the world and construct personal meaning. Connolly and Clandinin (2006) drew on Dewey’s concept of continuity when they wrote that “[people]

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shape their lives by stories of who they and others are and as they interpret their past in terms of these stories” (p. 42). The narrative structures that have characterized our prior experiences will have an effect on present experience. Human beings structure their experiences according to personal narratives, as well as larger cultural, institutional, political, and social narratives, not only in the stories they tell retrospectively, but in the lived immediacy of that experience (Bruner, 2004).

Dewey’s second criterion for experience, interaction, also provides helpful insight into the understanding of experience as a storied phenomenon. It is not just our own personal stories that will be significant to our experiences. In addition to being an examination of personal experience, narrative inquiry is also “an exploration of the social, cultural and institutional narratives within which individual’s experiences are constituted, shaped, expressed and enacted” (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p. 42). Life stories are the results of a convergence of social influences on a person’s inner life, social influences of their environment, and their own personal history.

If one views human experience as a storied phenomenon, Clandinin and Connolly (2000) argue that stories must be the best tool for representing and understanding experiences.

Narrative as Methodology

Narrative inquirers begin their inquiries either by engaging with participants through telling stories, or by coming alongside participants in the living of stories. Whether they

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begin by living or telling stories, they are always entering the field in the midst of ongoing narratives. Participants’ stories, inquirers’ stories, as well as social, cultural, and institutional stories, are all in progress as the inquiry begins, and are not completed once the inquiry ends (Clandinin & Connolly, 2000). Narrative inquirers enter the field with a particular set of research puzzles, understanding that these questions are not fixed, but must be free to develop throughout the inquiry.

Throughout their time in the field, narrative inquirers collect and generate field texts to document their experience, and these form the ‘data’ of the narrative inquiry. A field text is any piece of writing or artifact reflective of the experiences of researchers and participants. Field texts can have many forms: autobiographical writing, journal writing, letters, conversations, character sketches, interviews, photographs, student work, or poems. Narrative inquirers use the term field text rather than data to convey that these texts are experiential, intersubjective (not objective) accounts which reveal only “those aspects of the experience that the relationship [between researchers and participants] allows” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 46).

In order to reflect a Deweyan understanding of experience, and to assist narrative inquirers in creating richly detailed field texts, Clandinin and Connolly (2000) suggest that the field texts should be composed along three major dimensions: temporality, sociality, and space.

Temporality (Continuity): All experience is shaped and informed by previous experiences, and has the potential to determine the scope and nature of future experiences. When inquiring narratively into an event, one must consider its past and future: what previous

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events and experiences are shaping the way inquirers and participants are experiencing the present event? How are these present and past experiences likely to affect future experience?

Sociality (Interaction): Sociality refers to the interactions between internal and external aspects of experience. The goal of attending to sociality is to consider what wider narratives (of family life, culture, institutions, etc.) the participant is relating to, and what role these narratives may be playing in shaping their present experience. For example, one prevalent sociocultural narrative about mathematics is that you are either ‘a math person,’ who ‘gets it’ or you are not, and that one’s mathematical ability is to some extent fixed and determined. We could ask ourselves whether this narrative appears to be present in the participant’s experience.

Place (Situation): Attends to specific concrete physical and topological boundaries to the space in which the experience is taking place. How does this environment shape the experiences that are possible within it? What expectations does the environment create? From my perspective, the environment also includes institutional practices, norms and strategies (discussed in chapter 3).

At some point, the inquirer moves away from the close, intensive contact with participants in the field to begin to work with the field texts and begin to shape them into research texts. In narrative inquiry, there is no linear path from data gathering to data analysis to publishing research findings. Moving from field texts to research texts is a complex, iterative, and often tension-filled process (Clandinin, 2013).

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Field texts are created in the field, in the midst of the relational phenomenon under study, and represent fragments of our lived experiences. Over time, layering the many field texts alongside each other, narrative threads, patterns, and themes become visible. By revisiting and re-reading what is often a considerable volume of field texts, the inquirer’s task is to discover and construct meaning across an individual’s experience.

The transition from field texts to research texts is rarely a linear path, nor is it self- evident. Given the quantity and variety of field texts that are generally created, the research potential is vast and rich. Often, in re-searching and re-storying the field texts, new questions and interpretations will emerge. Narrative inquirers frequently engage in writing a variety of different interim research texts – partial texts that are open, allowing both researchers and participants opportunities to “further co-compose storied interpretations and to negotiate the multiplicity of possible interpretations” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 47). Interim research texts seek to make sense of multiple and diverse field texts, and often take the form of narrative retellings of the experiences as they relate to the evolving research problems.

Narrative inquirers cannot seek to separate themselves from the inquiry but rather need to find ways to inquire into participants’ experiences, their own experiences, as well as the co-constructed experiences developed through their relationships with one another. Through this iterative process of re-living and re-writing stories, attending closely to the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space, eventually researchers move toward final research texts. Final research texts do not provide answers, since narrative inquiry does not begin with questions. What we present as the product of our inquiries are stories that seek

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to capture and situate these experiences; stories of particular people in a particular time and place.

The two main goals of this thesis are to construct a characterization of mathematical behaviours and to explore a methodological approach that allows us to discuss and construct accounts of these behaviours as they emerge in the classroom. In the language used by Dewey, we could say that we are trying to understand experiences (our student’s and our own). Following the framework of narrative inquiry, I take the position that these experiences are storied in nature. My goal is to construct an account of students’ experiences through the personal stories they are living, the storied landscapes in which they are living (institutional, cultural, etc.), and my own stories of the experiences I shared in living alongside them.

Narrative inquiry, as described by Clandinin and Connolly (2000) provides a framework for thinking about and discussing the lived experiences of ourselves and those of our students. In this chapter, I have provided a general description of this methodology. These are the principle ideas and guidelines which constitute the methodological framework of this thesis - they are the implicated in every methodological decision I made throughout this research. In the following chapter, I will provide a detailed account of how I engaged in this narrative inquiry.