Narrative as a Philosophical Method of Re-Membering and Re-Elevating Cultural Complexities

• In Event: 44.052 - Decolonizing and Indigenous Cross-Cultural Research Methodologies

Abstract

In this paper we insert the art and role of narrative into the complexities of early years settings, to create spaces for the thought and stories of diverse realities and beings within these places. This research has emerged from our investigation of early childhood settings in urban Auckland, in a study with teachers, parents and children of diverse cultural backgrounds. Our research responded to what has been lamented as a contemporary lack of narrative, leading to our argument for a re-emergence and re-imagining of cultural meaning through the re-introduction of historicised and localised knowledges into early years research, to create fresh opportunities for working with narratives.

In emphasising narrative as thoughtful, philosophical, historically grounded and transformative, our research proposes a methodology that elevates indigenous practices of meaning making and knowledge sharing through storying. It reifies those memories that have been seemingly ‘forgotten’, marginalised, downplayed or explicitly excluded, by reinserting them, through stories, into how individuals are who they are, within their common setting. The interweaving of the narrative reconnects multiple cultural/indigenous perspectives, practical applications and ideological thought. It grounds the philosophical within the everyday, forming not only a comprehensive research framework, but a meaningful intersubjective, inter-being, space, as is visible in our data from the research project.

In particular, we draw on ideas arising from indigenous perspectives and storytelling, and on how these stories can become part of the study. We focus on the Pacifika methdodology of talanoa, kaupapa Māori research methodologies, and the Aboriginal notion of yarning, as research methods that can disrupt the established Western way of conducting research.

By theorising our research in two multicultural early childhood centres in urban Auckland, New Zealand, we analyse the narratives of cultures and diversity. We have conducted focus groups with teachers and parents, and talked with children, to learn about their culture and ideas, and to learn how people from diverse cultures enter and engage in research projects. In this paper we analyse how they negotiate their culture and its impacts upon the research that they have been part of, to offer some implications for cross-cultural research in early years settings. The theorisations will allow other scholars and researchers to think about how narratives and indigenous forms of storying, amongst teaching teams, parents, children and researchers, create a methodological grounding for researching in culturally diverse settings. Philosophical and indigenous narrative research, we argue, reinserts cultural multiplicities, to reveal, elevate and revalue the meaning of how those in early years settings enact the who, that becomes grounded and re-membered through their historicised cultural stories.

Authors

• Sonja Arndt, University of Waikato

• Marek Tesar, The University of Auckland