Archival Research as Living Inquiry: An Alternate Approach for Research in Teacher Education

• In Event: Storying Innovative Practices: International Perspectives on Archives and Schools

Abstract

To open a conversation about the role of archives in recovering the histories of teachers’ lives and the potential of archival research as living inquiry, an alternate perspective is offered concerning life writing as a way into an epistemological storying of the past. I document my archival quest into the life of one teacher, Bessie, as an exemplar of how reflective practice contributes to becoming a researcher of history through unorthodox methods. This inquiry is motivated by questions that include: What value do archives hold in teacher education? How might we rethink our methods of inquiry to make meaning of the lives of women teachers?

Archival research as living inquiry is examined as both a methodological approach to theorising practice, and as a method of gathering information in public collections, rendered through life writing. The application of this emergent framework has the potential to generate accounts of educational histories in which we are always in relation to historical events and contemporary experiences, and engaged in a process of continually deconstructing and constructing the past as multiple histories, bringing to the experience of archival research an “anticipatory mode of historical thinking and practice” (Munslow, 2003, p. 7).

I engage in the archives as a participatory practice that radicalises the act of doing history by conflating the distance between binaries of historian-participant and present-past. As living inquiry, archival research is taken up with an imaginative stance, cultivating an awareness of collective memories and the characterisation of people and the past through visual images, narratives and archival documents.

Sources of information include eleven archives in England and first-person accounts to verify details. In this case, I recount contributions from Sheila Maddock, a former student of Bessie’s, and in doing so, venture into the danger of presentism that is always embedded in historical inquiry (Hill, 1993). Yet that is precisely the contentious space I seek to explore, recognizing the rare opportunity for a researcher to interrogate an educational archive from the perspective of an individual who lived the experience as a student and now returns to her previous life more than 70 years later, recorded in the words, images and objects preserved without her knowing.

I demonstrate how living inquiry is an innovative strategy that serves to invigorate archival practices. This approach is an opportunity to interrogate the archive as a forum in which the staging of the event of knowledge is the historical moment, a métissage woven in the synergistic interplay of researcher, material culture, geographic location and perhaps most importantly, in the dialogue surrounding the archive that inscribes the stories within.

The moment of archival research as living inquiry is both an excavation of facts and events and the creation of understandings that inform a story of Bessie’s life as a teacher. In this case, archival research was a metonymic device where becoming-archival was also about the personal relationships we shared across time and place (Munslow, 2010; Irwin, 2004).

Author

• Anita Sinner, Concordia University