Part Four Narrative inquiry

Narrative inquiry27 is a form of qualitative research that I implemented both as a primary method during the study and as a ‘meta-method’ or overall methodological approach for the purposes of analysing and presenting the data afterwards. According to Barrett and Stauffer (2009), the process of narrative inquiry requires the narrative researcher to ‘live and work alongside research participants in order to understand the ways in which individuals and communities story a life and live their stories’ (Barrett and Stauffer, 2009: 2). My selection of narrative inquiry arose as a result of my commitment to accurately representing the ‘real-life’ ethnographic context of the three classrooms in which I was working.

Barrett and Stauffer describe narrative inquiry as being:

[…] more than the collecting and re-telling or re-presenting of stories; it requires the careful analysis of narrative data against a series of frames including those of the research participant, the researcher, and the larger cultural narratives in which those individuals are situated. (Barrett and Stauffer, 2009: 11)

27_{I use the spelling of ‘inquiry’ as it is the most commonly accepted spelling within the fields of}

Furthermore, they speak to the relevance of narrative inquiry in the context of my study in terms of its focus on relationships and on challenging educational hierarchies in relation to both research and music education practices:

For us, narrative inquiry projects are deeply relational and committed to the pursuit of questions of educational significance – questions that challenge taken-for-granted notions of the nature of life and learning in and through music. (Barrett and Stauffer, 2009: 16)

In addition to its suitability for application to a study concerned with relationships between teachers and musicians, narrative inquiry offered me a way in which to acknowledge and address my own position in relation to the study. Firstly, as the ‘outsider’ described previously by Nettl (2005), and secondly, as empathic researcher concerned with the wellbeing of the participants and with shared experience with the teachers of feelings of musical and hierarchical deficiency. Clandinin and Connelly (2000: 70) speak to the centrality of the researcher’s own autobiographical experience in conducting narrative research and Clandinin later extends this by saying:

Narrative inquirers cannot bracket themselves out of the inquiry but rather need to find ways to inquire into the participants’ experiences, their own experiences, as well as the co-constructed experiences developed through the relational inquiry process. This makes clear that as narrative inquirers, inquirers too are part of the metaphoric parade…they too live on the landscape and are complicit in the world they study. (Clandinin, 2006: 47)

By supplying my own lived experiences in the prologue to Chapter One of this thesis, and later in Chapter Six, my autobiography acts as foundation for the co-constructed narratives that follow in Chapters Four, Five and Six. In this way, narrative inquiry ensures the ‘polyvocality’ of the research findings, according to Gallagher’s (2008) definition given earlier, enabling me to present the ‘frames’ suggested by Barrett and Stauffer of both my own interpretative ‘story’ of my musical history, the field study and those of the teachers, before drawing them together for analysis in the discussion chapter of this thesis28, in which the pertinent issues of socially constructed notions of musicality and how these commonly accepted notions are perpetuated within the primary school music curriculum and practices are interrogated.

28_{My own ‘story’ is presented in Chapter Four, the teachers’ in Chapter Five and the discussion of}

Furthermore, Pinnegar and Daynes suggest that, ‘narrative inquiry embraces narrative as both method and the phenomena of study’ (Pinnegar and Daynes, 2007: 5). This being so, beyond being utilized for data collection, narrative inquiry forms an integral tenet of the dialogic methodology of partnership that I sought to develop.

Pinnegar and Daynes also allude to narrative inquiry’s potential to ‘re-shape’ the relationship between those conducting research and those being researched (Pinnegar and Daynes 2007: 7). As already discussed, I was fundamentally concerned with this very idea of approaching this relationship differently as a result of my own negative experience of being ‘researched’ within the Music Potential study and so the use of narrative inquiry neatly intersected with my striving to approach the research empathically and to reconsider my role as researcher in relation to the research and the other research participants.

Being, as it is, concerned with life experiences, what narrative inquiry does not provide is statistical data or empirical ‘truth’. It is an interpretative method and is, therefore, potentially open to critique as to the validity and generalizability of the findings derived through it. However, Pinnegar and Daynes (2007) argue that narrative inquiry is indeed a valid way of ‘knowing’ the world. In explication of this they describe four ‘turns’ made by the researcher as they move toward narrative research:

How fully the researcher embraces narrative inquiry is indicated by how far he or she turns in his or her thinking and action across what we call here the four turns toward narrative. The four include the following: (1) a change in the relationship between the person conducting the research and the person participating as the subject (the relationship between the researcher and the researched), (2) a move from the use of number toward the use of words as data, (3) a change from a focus on the general and universal toward the local and specific, and finally (4) a widening in acceptance of alternative epistemologies or ways of knowing. (Pinnegar and Daynes, in Clandinin ed. 2007: 7)

Eisner further supports a move away from clinical detachment by researchers in relation to the presentation of their research in favour of a more personal, ‘lived’ understanding and presentation. He argues for:

[…] the use of expressive language and the presence of voice in text. The kind of detachment that some journals prize – the neutralization of voice, the aversion to

metaphor and to adjectives, the absence of the first person singular – is seldom a feature of qualitative studies. We display our signatures. Our signature makes it clear that a person, not a machine, was behind the words. The rhetorical devices that are used in some social science journals in order to mask the fact that a person did the work reported is ironic; the need for objectivity leads to camouflage. “I” becomes “we” or “the researcher”. How such magic occurs is not clear, but what is clear is that such locutions are deceptive. The presence of the voice and the use of expressive language are also important in furthering human understanding. German psychologists call it Einfühlung. In English, it is called “empathy”. Empathy is the ability to don the shoes of another human being. (Eisner, 1997: 36-37)

In presenting my study within this thesis, I have made use of the expressive language lauded by Eisner in an effort to give the reader as close an understanding of all that happened within the classrooms during the study between the teachers and myself. Concerned as my study was with the issue of human relationships, I have heavily utilized Geertz’s concept of ‘thick description’ (1973) in the following chapter, spurred on by Finney’s recent observation that much music education research does not offer close descriptions that are ‘rich enough for the reader to feel they are there, smelling the carpet, sensing the ebb and flow of relationships and interactions.’ (Finney, 2015: blog post 30/04/15). He argues that contextualizing classroom-based research in this way enables ‘meta-analysis and the discerning of principles’ through ‘analytical comment and interpretation’ (ibid.). It is this very approach that I have adopted in the following chapters, thickly describing the study from my own perspective, analyzing the teachers’ ‘stories’ and perspectives of the study as shared in interview and finally, conducting the meta-analysis and interpretation of those co- constructed narratives in order to discern the principles of a model of dialogic partnership for a new approach to teacher led primary music education.