Storytelling as resistance

• In Event: Methodology

Proposal

Last summer, we facilitated a research workshop with teenagers in the UK. We use an iterative, collective, creative storytelling process to support young people and teachers to develop stories about key moments in their lives related to the theme of inclusion/exclusion in education. Most participants completed the process - producing stories with clear and critical messages about inclusion/exclusion. However, one participant dropped out halfway through - it was the summer holidays after public examinations, and he said he would rather be at home playing video games. Another completed the workshop, enthusiastically producing a story in the form of a metaphorical poem, but was vague with the facilitators how these metaphors represented his experience of inclusion/exclusion in education.

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In this proposed paper for CIES 2024 - in light of its central theme of the power of protest - we critically explore the concept and practice of resistance in education research and how participants exercise protest (even through participation). In order to do this in a theoretically-informed way, we draw on our experiences of facilitating storytelling research workshops within our Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK-AHRC) project, which uses storytelling to surface deeper understandings of inclusion/exclusion in education in the UK, Nigeria, and South Africa.

First we critically examine storytelling as an epistemologically driven resistance to predominant research approaches in international education. Second, we present an analysis of examples of participant resistance across our workshops in the three countries. Third, we consider the data around participant resistance alongside wider project data: our findings show that rather than inclusion being something that is ‘done to’ young people, what is often overlooked is how young people agentively exclude themselves from processes and systems they don’t feel comfortable in. We argue that resistance and inclusion are inherently connected - and require careful and critical co-examination.

Hollander and Einwohner (2004) identified two commonalities across diverse conceptualisations of the term: resistance is an act, and resistance is oppositional to power. Calls for challenging or reconfiguring power in research relationships are common, therefore, it seems that being open to identifying acts of resistance is a key step. We argue, as do Baaz et al. (2016), that rather than be associated with a destructive paradigm, resistance has the potential to be productive. This builds on wider sociocultural framings of our storytelling work that sees tensions at boundaries - when different ways of knowing collide - as opportunities for learning (e.g., Wenger-Trayner et al. 2015; Coakley and Bennett 2020). Therefore, in this paper we frame resistance within storytelling research as a process that challenges structural positions of power that can reify and claim ownership of individuals’ stories (LeFrancois 2021) - however well-meaning the intentions of the researchers. As Baaz et al. (2016) note, resistance holds the potential to constructively transform – if we have the tools to identify it. Building on their position, we argue for the importance of noticing, identifying, and understanding resistance within our research practices as a commitment to our epistemological and methodological growth to improve the quality of the research we do and make it more inclusive for participants.

Our storytelling project has two strands: an empirical generation of new discourses around inclusion/exclusion in the UK, Nigeria, and South Africa, and a critical, ethnographic evaluation of the storytelling process to show how it could be better and more ethically used in research. In each country, we facilitated storytelling workshops with young people and teachers. Participants were supported to develop a story about a time when they felt included or excluded in education or, for the teachers,where they witnessed or participated in a young person’s inclusion or exclusion. The results are digital story outputs. Ethnographers critically observed the workshops, documenting how knowledge about inclusion/exclusion was surfaced through the process and how power relations played out within it.

In our epistemological framing of storytelling, people explore and curate - as well as express - their identity through the stories they develop and share (Trees and Kellas, 2009): our data shows that resistance can form a key part of this identity curation. For many storytellers this is expressed through resistance to education structures and systems within the stories. For others this expression of self as resisting can extend (to systems and structures) beyond the story: for the first participant in our introduction, resistance was opting out of an educational activity in spite of heavy-pressure from his parents to continue. For the other participant, our analysis suggests that the choice to engage fully in the workshop but limit access to the meanings of his poem was an attempt to reconfigure power dynamics which were (to him - despite our attempts) reminiscent of school.

As we continue to think about storytelling as resistance to predominant research approaches in international education, we see how the process not only supported deeper empirical understandings of inclusion from those who wanted to share, it also facilitated agency among participants in choosing what to tell, and what not to tell. This has led us to ask questions about who research is for (the second participant was enthusiastic about how much he had learned from the workshop), and how we need to pay attention to processes as well as data (we may not have learned much about his experiences of feeling included/excluded in education, but his participation/resistance led us to a new way of thinking about how we include participants in research).

Ultimately this paper demonstrates the methodological and theoretical potential of storytelling in challenging power imbalances in education research. It gave young people power and confidence to articulate what they valued – or not – and engage with and benefit from the process on their own terms. Through the paper’s development and through discussions at CIES we hope to contribute to a conversation on how and why participants resist, and explore how a richer understanding of resistance in research can make us better, and more inclusive, researchers.

Authors

• Alison Sarah Buckler, The Open University

• Jennifer Jomafuvwe Agbaire, The Open University, UK

• Faith Mkwananzi, Centre for Development Support, UFS