Layered Re-Storying as a Power-Conscious Approach to Narrative Analysis

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Disrupting Power in Qualitative Research: Three Alternative Approaches to Data Collection and Analysis

Abstract

Narratives have become an increasingly common form of qualitative data collection and analysis across the social sciences (Clandinin, 2006). The narrative turn in education has largely centered on the methodological approach of narrative inquiry, which involves “living and telling, reliving and retelling, the stories of the experiences that make up people’s lives, both individual and social” (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p. 20).
While narrative inquiry is a flexible and capacious methodological approach, it encompasses several core components, one of which is restorying. As Ollerenshaw and Creswell (2002) contend, this “process of gathering stories, analyzing them for key elements of the story (e.g. time, place, plot, and scene), and then rewriting the story to place it within a chronological sequence” (p. 332) is a “central feature” (p. 330) of narrative analysis, and thus narrative inquiry as a whole. Features like restorying—which privilege a consideration of relationality, holism, the “three dimensions” of space, time, and social context (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000)—differentiate this methodological approach from others used in the field of education. As Clandinin (2006) argues, narrative inquiry provides “a methodological response to positivist and postpositivist paradigms” in educational research (p. 45).

However, regardless of its departure from other common methodological approaches in the field, narrative inquiry remains firmly rooted in the thought of canonical education scholars like John Dewey (Clandinin, 2006; Clandinin and Connelly, 2000). Its foundation in white, western, settler colonial scholarship—no matter how progressive—suggests that it cannot be easily or entirely separated from systems of power like racism and settler colonialism, which have shaped the United States since its inception. Therefore, it is crucial for researchers who work with marginalized populations to take up narrative inquiry judiciously, questioning the subtle ways in which it may reproduce the very systems of domination we seek to disrupt through our scholarship.
As a Native (Kickapoo and Sac & Fox) scholar who centers Native students in my work, it is imperative that I account for the ways in which my chosen methods reproduce or resist hegemonic power structures. Therefore, in a recent interview study with Native college students, I attempted a judicious engagement with narrative inquiry by employing a technique I call layered restorying. This technique combines Ollerenshaw and Creswell’s (2002) three dimensional space approach to restorying with the insights of Indigenous scholars from across the globe who forward alternative modes of engagement with story and restorying as method (Archibald, 2008; Archibald et al, 2019; Morrill and Sabzalian, 2022; Smith, 2012).

In this paper, I elaborate on the technique of layered restorying by presenting a vignette from the interview study and walking through the ways in which both the three dimensional space approach to restorying and Indigenous approaches to storying and restorying as method influenced its development and interpretation during the data analysis phase of the project. I also consider how layered restorying may serve researchers working with other marginalized populations who hope to take a power-conscious approach to narrative analysis.

Author

• Kemeyawi Wahpepah, Harvard University