What's (Y)our Story? Co-Constructing Narrative Accounts With/of Students With Autism Who Type to Communicate

• In Event: 44.053 - Diverse "How" to Do Qualitative Research: Challenging White Qualitative Research Methods and Methodologies in Disability Studies in Education

Abstract

This paper critically examines a process of co-constructing self-(re)presentational narrative accounts of/with high school students with autism who type to communicate. I recount the methodological complexities and incongruities of research(ing) across communicative and cultural difference, and discuss how such endeavors call for creative, flexible methods that cannot be fully articulated prior to their existence.


Just as DSE scholars defy the pervasive idea that normative ways of being, interacting, and doing research in/with schools exist (Ashby, 2010; Baglieri et al., 2011), so too do narrative inquirers resist prescriptive approaches to understanding experience (Clandinin, 2013). The claim that one can know how to do research with/about particular people before doing it poses a problem for narrative inquirers and DSE scholars alike. It did for me, as a researcher who doesn’t share the cultural, communicative or neurodiverse identities/experiences of the students at the center of this inquiry. This presentation tells a research story marked by tensions, interaction, and (r)evolution in which we (as co-inquirers) shared and (re)presented storied experiences through relational approaches to research and writing.

Part of a larger narrative inquiry, this paper focuses on methods employed to unravel, collage, and (re)present the students’ school stories through performance, dialogue, and art. I share the process of documenting relationships and experiences that did not originate in resist being relegated towords, confronting limitations and assumptions around researching into/across diverse lives.
Narrative inquiry positions experience as storied and storytelling as performance (Clandinin, 2013; Kim, 2016). Yet, for these studentsmarked by visible, social and communicative differences that (threaten to) set them apart and often manifest in surveillanceexperience, too, is performative in ways beyond their control. The co-inquirers engaged in self-(re)presentations, instances of storytelling staged for/to public audiences, as a way to tell their stories on their terms.
These performances contributed to a corpus of information the students wanted me to have, know, about their lives. As “researcher,” and inquiry facilitator, I received these stories as “data” to “analyze” and “write about.” As inquiry group member aiming to disrupt research hierarchies, I saw the students trusting me with their stories more than I trusted myself. Faced with the expectation that our collaboration yield a (written) “product,” we developed a careful plan to transition these self-(re)presentations into “narrative accounts” (Clandinin, 2013) that captured what each student wanted others to know about them (for now, but also by nature of it being printed, forever). I incorporated autoethnographic writing, acknowledging the ways that my story temporally, socially, contextually, and literarily intersected with theirs.
The accounts capture both the co-inquirers’ emerging ownership of their situated identities as individuals with autism who communicate in diverse ways, and my hesitancy to (re)present them. Our creative process yielded stories (and tensions) I/they/we feel compelledby default and/or designto share as counternarrative(s). By highlighting and resisting limitations of dominant storytelling vehiclestext, speech, imageour co-constructive process also aims to counter.

In both content and form, this paper underlines the constraints of methods/methodologies understood solely as practice(s), advocating for a broadened conception of research as co-constructed, relational experience(s).

Author

• Casey Woodfield, Hussman Institute for Autism