Atkinson, R. (2007).  The life story interview as a bridge in narrative inquiry.  In D. J. Clandinin (Ed.),  Handbook of narrative inquiry:  Mapping a methodology (pp. 224-245).  Thousand Oaks, CA:  Sage Publications, Inc.

Two uses of life story include:

1. ideographic, or the use of the life story for “individual or personal” purposes
2. nomothetic, or the use of the life story for “university, collective, or social purposes”

According to Atkinson, there are connections between life story and the following terms, but they are distinctly different:  life narratives, the study of lives, personal documents, personal history, life history, oral history, and narrative study of lives.  He describes the life story interview as

designed to help the storyteller, the listener, the reader, and the scholar to understand better how life stories serve the four functions of bringing us more into accord with ourselves (psychological), others (sociological), the mystery of life (spiritual), and the universe around us (philosophical)” (p. 225)

Atkinson describes how McAdams has used life stories for “understanding better the formation of identity and the role of generativity in individual lives” (p. 226) and claims that first person narratives (not just life stories) are “an effective means for gaining and understanding of how the self evolves over time” (p. 226).

Noting the application of the life story in many fields (education, anthropology, and sociology, to name a few), Atkinson quotes himself from 1998 (p. 8), defining life story as

A life story is the story a person chooses to tell about the life he or she has lived, told as completely and honestly as possible, what is remembered of it, and what the teller wants others to know if it, usually as a result of a guided interview by another….A life story is a fairly complete narrating of one’s entire experience of life as a whole,, highlighting the important aspects

Life stories are atheoretical; but they can become theoretical when a researcher sets out to analyze and interpret through various theoretical frameworks.  As a bridge, the life story:

1. connects two ends of a continuum from unique to universal; both are contained in life stories
2. connects two ends of a continuum from ideographic and nomothetic; (this continuum would have the ideographic, (autobiography and personal documents) on one end and nomothetic (life history, oral history, and biography) on the other end; the life story sits somewhere between the two
3. connects telling and experiencing
4. whole to part (individual stories collected = life story)

Issues arise concerning memory and Atkinson asserts that we must be more concerned with “trustworthiness” than “truth” (p. 239).

Naturally, I bought another book (Narrative Inquiry:  Experience and Story in Qualitative Research by D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly, 2000).

I was glad I did, because reading the book helped me think through my next steps – going back to the oral histories and digging into them; something I hadn’t really done up to that point.  I followed Clandinin and Connelly’s advice to narratively code (p. 131) the oral histories.  Because I knew from Chase (2005, in this weblog) that identity research is most interested in what and how stories are told, I focused on the stories within the narratives (or oral histories).  This was a great start.  Finally, I thought, I can begin writing.  So, I sat down to write and to my dismay, found that I simply didn’t know what to say.  I had numerous false starts – even down to the last ditch effort of what I refer to as “blow-by-blow’” where I describe things chronologically, hoping that at some point I’ll spin off into something that might be worth developing.  No spin-off.  I couldn’t write and I didn’t know what else to do.  I was getting at that point in the process where I can’t breathe and I think my head will blow-up with all these ideas that are stuck in there because I can’t seem to get anything sensible down on paper. 

So, naturally, I bought another book.  This time it was Revision:  Autoethnographic Reflections on Life and Work by Carolyn Ellis (2009).

Again, I was glad I did.  I sat down and began reading and was immediately drawn in to Ellis’ work; aware of her strong voice, intensity, and determination.  This, I thought, is the way I want to write.  This is why I can’t write – I’m trying to write a different way and all I need to do is tell a story.  That’s all – just a story.  I started writing Saturday morning and stopped before mass, satisfied with my progress that day.  On Sunday, I went back to the work and it started getting more complex – but still, I was satisfied with my progress.  It wasn’t until I went to bed on Sunday evening that I saw what the piece was really about.  It was about resistance stories – but about the resistance of my students and what I might learn about that in relation to identity development.  This morning, I re-organized and drafted the final section and sent the draft off to Linda.  What a relief!

Bullough, R.V., & Pinnegar, S. (2001, April).  Guidelines for quality in autobiographical forms of self-study research.  Educational Researcher, 30(3), 13-21.

The authors discuss the four conditions from which “self-study” emerged.  The importance of this emerging approach lies in the realization that “teacher development is the essence of school reform” (p. 14).  These conditions are:

1. The emergence of naturalistic and qualitative research methods in the field of education and the “redefinition of validity as trustworthiness or accuracy” (p. 13).
2. The reconceptualist movement in curriculm, particularly Pinar’s notion of currere.
3. The diversity of educational researchers who bring with them other standards and experiences with educational research.
4. The emergence of action research. 

I could argue that researcher development is the essence of research reform; thus articulating one justification for the study.  And, if my article is about the development of researchers and research, my subjects represent examples of – exemplars – to support my arguments (I know I should have already figured this out, but it’s starting to be clearer in my mind). 

Bullough and Pinnegar wrote:

self-study’s appeal is grounded int he postmodern university’s preoccupation with identity formation and a Foucault-inspired (see Colin, 1977) recognition of the linkage of person and the play of power in self formation.  Foucault offers a rationale for self-study work:  “if one is interested in doing historical work that has political meaning, utility and effectiveness, then this is possible only if one  has some kind of involvement with the struggles taking place in the area in question” (p. 64).  Self-study is explicitly interested research.  But beyond this, what is it?  What makes a piece of self-writing research?

Self-study is a balancing act between the personal and the historical, a combination which produces research.  At the level of research, self-study “does not focus on the self per se but on the space between self and the practice engaged in” (p. 15).  The purpose, according to the authors, of self-study is to “gain understanding necessary to make that interaction [between self-as-teacher educator and others] increasingly educative” (p. 15).  I suppose part of the interaction equation could include the interaction between self and method.

The authors offer the following guidelines for autobiographical self-study forms.  That is, autobiographical, self-study…

1. …should ring true and enable connection (p. 16).
2. …should promote insight and interpretation (p. 16).
3. …should engage history forthrightly and the author must take an honest stand (p. 16).
4. …be about the problems and issues that make someone an educator (p. 17).
5. …can be scholarly – one requirement being that they are written in an authentic voice (p. 17).
6. …researchers have an ineluctable obligation to seek to improve the learning situation not only for the self but for the other (p. 17).
7. …portray character development and include dramatic action:  Something genuine is at stake int he story (p. 17).^[1]
8. …attend carefully to persons in context or setting (p. 18).
9. …offer fresh perspectives on established truths (p. 18).
10. …that rely on correspondence should provide the reader with an inside look at participants’ thinking and feeling (p. 19).
11. …should have edited conversation or correspondence that is edited to maintain coherence and structure that ultimately provide argumentation and convincing evidence to be considered scholarly work (p. 19).
12. …that rely on correspondence bring with them the necessity to select, frame, arrange, and footnote the correspondence in ways that demonstrate wholeness (p. 20).
13. …and interpretations of self-study data, should not only reveal but also interrogate the relationships, contradictions, and limits of the views presented (p. 20).
14. …as correspondence studies, should contain complication or tension (p. 20).

The notion of story and story forms is prominent in this article and important, I think, for me to consider carefully as I approach this piece I am starting to write.  The authors write that (p. 17):

most self-studies that rely on autobiography embrace the story form rather than the plot lines of fiction.  “A story is a series of events recorded in their chronological order.  A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotion significant” (Burroway, 1987, p. 13)

furthermore, these authors suggest that the use of plot (and plot lines) is “under appreciated” (p. 18) and it has the potential to “enable special insight into learning to teach and teaching” (p. 18).

1. see discussion below

Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, F.M. (2000). From field texts to research texts:  Making meaning of experience. In Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research (pp. 119-137). San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

C and C warn readers that moving to the research text is perhaps the most difficult transition to make, partly because all things previously considered (e.g., justification, phenomena, etc.) need to be reconsidered in light of what the field texts reveal about the experience of the subjects.  Our task is to “ask questions of meaning, social significance, and purpose” (p. 120). 

They wrote

it is not so easy to establish a personal sense of justification.  To read the literature, one might imagine that expressing personal interests comes easily as a simple expression of the obvious.  On the contrary, most of us are astonishingly unclear about what our inquiry interests are and how to justify them in personal terms….Because of this difficulty…we frequently ask people to write a series of stories around their phenomena of interest (p. 122)

Using Clandinin’s doctoral dissertation as an example, C and C tell us that “engaging in narrative inquiry with Stephanie allowed Jean to understand how teacher knowledge is narratively composed, embodied in a person, and expressed in practice” (p. 124). 

Phenomena (What?):  The Topic?

1. What is your narrative inquiry about?
2. What is the experience of interest to you as a narrative inquirer?

The phenomena can “shift” depending upon how we position our study of the phenomena.  The example in the book is that C and C “positioned the phenomenon of teacher knowledge within classroom practice” (p. 126).  This will be helpful to me as I think more about my topic.

Method (How?)

This is the section that really spoke to me the loudest in the whole text.

Theoretical

C and C wrote

Beginning narrative inquirers frequently worry their way through definitions and procedures of different methodological theories, trying to define narrative inquiry and to distinguish it from each of the others, trying to find a niche for narrative inquiry amid the array of theoretical qualitative methodological frames presented to them, but we do not encourage this approach….for narrative inquiry, it is more productive to begin with explorations of the phenomena of experience rather than in comparative analysis of various theoretical methodological frames (p. 128)

Practical Field Text-Oriented Considerations

At some point in our research, we have to leave the field and leave our field texts (which C and C say that we love) in order to get to the research text.

Interpretive-Analytic Considerations

In this context, narrative inquirers:

1. create a chronicled or summarized account of what is contained within different sets of field texts (focusing on character, place, scene, plot, tension, end point, narrator, context, and tone)
2. narratively code field texts (characters, places, events, story lines, gaps or silences, tensions, continuities and discontinuities)

The ongoing process is the asking of questions that relate to meaning and significance and it is the answers to these questions that shape the research text ultimately.  The inquirer “looks for the patterns, narrative threads, tensions, and themes either within or across an individual’s experience and in the social setting” (p. 132).  C and C suggest the use of “interim texts” that will help make the transition from field texts to research text.

Epiphany:  One possibility for this article is to look at the characters – maybe a dissertation chair/advisor – and gather the meaning and significance of those relationships to the development of a research identity.  In fact, I could choose any one of the characters, or anyone of the places, or anyone of the scenes (e.g., diss defense), anyone of the tensions.

The essential nature of autobiography and its connection to curriculum then is that our pedagogical practice is informed by four things: voice, community, gender, and place. These are the critical ingredients to the autobiographer (McComas, p. 4).

Grumet describes voices, particularly female voices, as self-affirming (Pinar, et al., 2006). She adds, however, the critical point that woman’s voice can change; depending upon whose gaze is upon the woman (McComas, p. 5).

Autobiographical research is a search for the inner experience (Pinar, et al., 2006). Pinar describes four steps to autobiographical research and these provide insight into how the autobiographical orientation conceives of teaching and learning (as cited in Pinar, et al., 2006). These steps are (McComas, p. 10):

1. Regressive: This step relies upon lived experience as a source of data for the autobiographical research. The purpose of this step is to “…recall the past, and enlarge – and thereby transform 0 one’s memory…” (p. 520). In doing so, one brings the past to bear on the present.
2. Progressive: In contrast to the first step, the progressive step looks forward, not backward. It is Pinar’s belief that the “…future – like the past – inhabits the present…” (p. 520). Here, possible futures are generated in the imagination.
3. Analytical: in this step, distance between the individual and the past and present is created.
4. Synthetical: This final step is the place where the individual puts the parts studied in the analytical step back together to understand the meaning of the present.

^[2] Dewey – Constructivism

p. 4: According to him [Dewey], skills that are acquired without thinking are not useable skills. Likewise, information acquired without thinking is not useable information.

p. 4: Dewey believes that people learn by thinking in very particular ways: they interact with information, manipulate information or knowledge in experientially meaningful ways, and then reflect upon those experiences (Smith, 2001).

• Principles of learning:
  • development
  • dissonance
  • reflection
  • discourse
  • constructions
• Thinking is the method!
  • experience
  • problem
  • ideas
  • solutions
  • evaluation

1. Taken from a paper written in CI 702.
2. Taken from a paper written in CI 703.

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.

1. Saying Good-Bye to the Chipmunks^[1]
2. Interlude^[2]
3. That Girl^[3]
4. Twenty Going on Thirty^[4]
5. Doing School^[5]
6. All I Need is a Few Good Pens 

These are, of course, my initial attempts and inclinations and may be revised numerous times.

1. Chipmunks a reference to leaving our record player and albums behind when we moved from Davison to Lake City
2. the time at Lake City – title taken from ‘musical interludes’
3. as in Marlo Thomas; I finish high school and college.
4. beginning a career and a family
5. Begin my life in higher education

Last weekend, on the patio, I read Clandinin and Connelly’s chapter that compared formalists to narrative inquirers and parts of descriptions of both resonated with me:  How could I be attracted to both – I want to use the word “camps,” but it seems heavy with confrontation – perspectives?  Ever since that reading, however, I’ve wanted to write about my geometry proofs.

My older sister and I shared a bedroom the whole of our growing up – or at least the parts of that growing up that I can remember.  We had twin beds, two nightstands, and a dresser.  All of that furniture was matching maple (little of our household furniture was matching back then) but at some point along the way, my parents purchased a used library table and two chairs (that were, oddly enough, from the library) that went in our room.  In high school, a different town, school, and house, we still had the library table in our room in the basement of our bi-level home.  [something about the lamp]

I adored sitting at that table solving geometry proofs.  I did them in ink and recopied until perfect.  The tedious process was engrossing and calming to me.  I suspect I found that work satisfying because there was certainty possible.  While I loved stories, I always read the end by the time I had finished only a third of the book.

On the other hand, I am drawn to narrative; I believe that experiences and lives cannot be understood or appreciated fully without narrative.  And narrative, by its very nature, eliminates certainty, leaving me to wonder why I am drawn to it. 

Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, F.M. (2000).  Being in the field:  Walking in the midst of stories.  In Narrative inquiry:  Experience and story in qualitative research (pp. 63-79).  San Francisco, CA:  John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The three-dimensional narrative inquiry space described in the previous chapter ensures that narrative inquirers are always located somewhere within that space; a state that C and C refer to as “being in the midst” (p. 63).  Specifically,

we learned to see ourselves as always in the midst-located somewhere along the dimensions of time, place, the personal, and the social.  But we see ourselves in the midst in another sense as well; that is, we see ourselves as in the middle of a nested set of stories—ours and theirs (p. 63)

Clearly, if this is true, then I need to start getting in touch with some of my own stories.  With regard to that, C and C wrote

One of the starting points for narrative inquiry is the researcher’s own narrative of experience, the researcher’s autobiography.  This task of composing our own narratives of experience is central to narrative inquiry.  We refer to this as composing narrative beginnings… (p. 70)

I suppose this means that I need to start my own “narrative of experience.”  What were/are my beginnings in narrative?  What were/are my initial interests in narrative?

Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, F.M. (2000).  What do narrative inquirers do?  In Narrative inquiry:  Experience and story in qualitative research (pp. 48-62).  San Francisco, CA:  John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

C and C’s goal in this chapter is to explore

how these [inquiry] terms define and bound narrative inquiries – how they bound the phenomena, shape what passes for evidence, and determine what makes defensible research texts. (p. 49)

They begin by paying attention to the Deweyan terms of situation, continuity, and interaction; examine the three-dimensional inquiry space; and, the possible movements within that space – inward, outward, forward, backward, and situated within place (p. 49). 

Terms/Three-Dimensional Narrative Inquiry Space

Directions

C and C wrote that “being in this space is complex for the narrative inquirer because all of these matters are under consideration all of the time” (p. 56).

C and C Reflecting

As we worked within our three-dimensional spaces as narrative inquirers, what became clear to us was that as inquirers we meet ourselves in the past, the present, and the future.  What we mean by this is that we tell remembered stories of ourselves from earlier times as well as more current stories.  All of these stories offer possible plotlines for our futures. (p. 60)