One Principal’s Reconstructed Field Text: Three Researchers’ Interpretive Lenses

• In Event: Doing Narrative Inquiry: Unearthing New Understandings

Abstract

How narrative inquirers create research texts from field texts is a topic of great interest inside and outside the narrative research community. Calls for greater transparency have also been issued within the broader educational field. Questions have additionally been raised about tensions between the empirical nature of school-based narrative inquiries and researchers’ creative approaches to representing educators’ experiences. In this paper presentation, three members of a research team will work with a reconstructed field text simultaneously gathered in one school setting in order to demonstrate how the background and prior research experiences of team members produced three different—and equally plausible—interpretations of a field text originating with one participant who is the principal of a school in China.

Authors

• Cheryl J. Craig, University of Houston

• Yali Zou, University of Houston

• Rita Poimbeauf, University of Houston