Quotes and Notes: Clandinin and Connelly – Chapt. 6 (2000)

Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, F.M. (2000). From field to field texts: Being in a place of stories. In Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research (pp. 80-91). San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

C and C focus on some of the challenges narrative inquirers may encounter once they go into the field – making the point that narrative inquirers are also having an experience while they are in the field. Like other qualitative methods, there are various perspectives to how much involvement the researcher must have. C and C are confident that close relationships with participants are not problematic because of the careful field texts that researchers generate.

Field texts are not experiences – but retellings of experiences; a process that Dewey understood to be profitable in that “Dewey’s reconstruction of experience (for us the retelling and reliving of stories) is good in that it defines growth” (p. 85). One tension in the creation of field texts is the need for us to work “turning inward, watching outward” (p. 86) in which we attend to the existential conditions (outward) and acknowledge the our inner responses to those existential conditions. C and C suggest a form of double entry journal as a way of developing a complete field text that is both inward and outward.

An additional tension relates to the concept of the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space previously described. The nature of that model suggests boundaries that are not real. The model is useful in helping researchers be mindful of the open spaces in which our experiences take place. Specifically, we pay attention to where our participants are temporally, socially, and spatially.