Modes of Being: Mobilizing Narrative Inquiry

• In Event: Thoughts Awaiting Narrative Researchers: Narrative Inquiry as "Public Scholarship" in the Age of Postqualitative Research

Abstract

Purpose:
Narrative inquiries reveal the relational complexities and nuances of individuals and settings in varied contexts (Clandinin, 2007; Kim, 2015). In a community middle school setting, the experiential narratives of students, teachers, administrators, parents, and mentors contributing to the documentation of the makings of this community, have not only provided a medium to access these relations, but become an educative catalyst, opening into ongoing deliberations concerning the nature of education, knowledge, and what it means to be a community, by all involved. The participatory practices positioning each community member to bring their narratives of experience into the makings and re-makings of community, give “flesh and blood” to these key considerations (Dewey, 1934). The voices that emerge embody a language that mobilizes narrative inquiry as a vital medium for reframing education within all institutions, communities, and beyond. This paper will follow the paths some of these voices have taken and the implications for further mobilization.
Perspectives:
Narrative inquiry’s primary concern with the study of experience (rooted in Dewey’s, 1938, discussion) assumes inquirers with room to enter into meaning-making, continually revealing and situating sense-making within contexts (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007). And, it is this capacity to concomitantly reveal and situate the inquirers/inquiries that I see forming its mobilizing strength within the community school setting. The idea that “experience can only be meaningfully talked about emptied of its physicality and materiality” is a huge oversight according to O’Loughlin (2006, p, 12). Indeed, the strength manifests as such inquiry assumes modes of being, narrating the physicality and materiality of the telling tales.
Mode of Inquiry & Data Sources:
Narrative modes of being reveal and situate the physicality and materiality of experiences at the community school to be:
• Generative in Nature
• Inherently Human

• In Need of Other(s)

• Assuming Temporal/Spatial Agency

• Interdependent with Imagination, Instilling Embodied Understandings

Particular narratives of students, teachers, parents, and mentors will provide access to the empowering knowledge-making capacities of these operative modes of being, both personally and collectively.
Conclusions:
An evolving form, documenting the makings of the community school is taking shape, primarily concerned with knowledge-making, understood as growth for all involved. Narrative inquiry traverses this moving terrain inviting translating room, fostering what Dewey (1934) terms “roominess,” giving expression to the significances. But it is this moving terrain that is repeatedly betrayed; shortchanged through fear of what it orients toward and orients away from, alongside lack of time to invest within the roominess located.
Significance:
Narrative inquiry’s modes of being suggest just how revolutionary the physicality and materiality of knowledge-making can be, holding the powers and possibilities authorizing inquiry, orienting towards learner/learning growth, greater self-understandings, enhanced well being, and opportunities to continually situate self in the world alongside learning to live in the world well with others.

Author

• Margaret A. Macintyre Latta, The University of British Columbia - Okanagan